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“So we must ask of the NFL what we must ask of any entity with the ability to touch our souls and shape our lives: Does it have our best — and our children’s best — interests at heart? Is there good evidence that it even knows our best interests? More particularly, to what lengths will it go to create a wholly faithful, devoted congregation, er … ‘fan base’?”
Pascal’s famous wager, Hitchens writes, “reminds me of the hypocrites and frauds who abound in Talmudic Jewish rationalization. Don’t do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it. You obeyed the letter of the law: who’s counting? The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her. Shia Muslims offer ‘temporary marriage,’ selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable. . .
