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The Church of Snooze It's not unheard of for people forced to get up early in the morning to describe it as ‘ungodly’ when grumbling about it, as in ‘*yawn* why do I have to get up at this ungodly hour?’. It occurred to me, in a silly moment a few months ago, to idly wonder if that phrase has only ever been used as hyperbole, or if there might ever have been a real religion which considered the early morning to be genuinely and literally ungodly. Some sort of breakaway Christian subsect, perhaps, who hold that not only did God have a bit of a rest on the seventh day but he also didn't get out of bed until nearly noon on the previous six. The keystone of your worship as a member of that sect, naturally, would be what you did on a Sunday morning – you'd stay in bed, with great reverence and solemnity, and cry sacrilege and blasphemy at any miserable heretic who dared try to make you get up. In an unrelated conversation with atreic recently, she made the lighthearted suggestion that perhaps the main benefit of humanity having achieved sentience was that it conferred the ability to properly appreciate the pleasurable nature of sleep, as a contrast to all that thinking. Suddenly I realised that my fictional sleep-obsessed religion had met its nemesis: atreic's line of thinking there would clearly be its evolutionist counterpart, its personal sleep-obsessed Richard Dawkins! In a world containing both, there'd be huge philosophical debates all over the national media about whether sleep was great because it was God's grand plan or because it was the pinnacle of human evolution. But it would be noticeable, to anyone paying attention, that no cut or thrust in the ongoing public debate on the subject ever took place before two in the afternoon at the earliest. :-) |