The rock in Tim’s backyard

Sunday, November 16, 2025

I saw the following joke in a group called “Maths and Science Humour”:

I pray to a large rock in my back yard, and it works!

When I get what I ask for, I thank the rock.

When I don’t get what I ask for, I trust that the rock knows best.

When I do something wrong, I ask the rock to forgive me, and I feel cleansed.

I share my gratitude for all the good things that happen to me with the rock.

And sometimes it’s not about expressing gratitude or asking for anything from the rock. It’s simply that talking to the rock makes me feel better.

—Tim Sledge @Goodbye_Jesus

Yes, religious rituals have something funny about them; but rituals are as old as humanity. If you try to not follow any rituals, you consciously or unconsciously develop your own. May it be just the coffee cup in the morning or the bath in the evening. To laugh at others because they follow rituals would be arrogant. Yes, religion personalizes reality and calls it “God” and yes, in prayer, we Christians “talk” to God as if we were children and he our daddy; it’s a spiritual method. Take it or leave it. Laughing about a method would just show your ignorance.

What Tim is laughing at isn’t the rituals themselves, it’s rather their deification. Seems that Tim hasn’t been taught that those altars, sacraments and images of saints are merely symbols. Religious symbols help me to look at reality from a different angle. They express our human longing for understanding reality. But in the end they are merely tools. That’s why you can’t seriously upset a Christian by making fun of their rituals or symbols.

As a well-educated Roman-Catholic with scientific education, I laugh along at this joke, which does indeed contain a grain of truth. Humans do tend to worship all sorts of things that aren’t God. We worship states, football teams, brands, a rock in the garden, and some devout people indeed worship the church or its rituals. And that’s indeed ridiculous. Worshipping objects or ideas is obsolete by at least 2000 years. Whoever does this makes a fool of themselves because God alone, whose mere name is “holy” (which means intangible, too complex for all people to pronounce it the same way), is worthy of worship.