Today while I was driving home from work and I noticed a new church sign put up on the roadside in front of a country church. The sign was one of those, change it weekly, amaze your worshippers, and make drivers think the type of sign. This week it only said, “Remember, Thou Shalt Not Covet”. Now to preface this I consider myself a liberal Christian who doesn’t believe in organized religion. I’d go more into that, but that’s a discussion for another day. You may consider me a heathen, but I don’t consider myself one.

Thinking about the sign though just shows me how hypocritical we are when it comes to religion. We consider ourselves a Christian nation but don’t follow it. I think religion needs to be separated from the government down to removing in god we trust from the money. More fitting for the American economy is “In Money We Trust”. If we didn’t covet things we wouldn’t be in the housing crisis we are in now. Gas prices would not be rising. You wouldn’t worry about sending your kid to a better private school than your neighbors do.

Coveting advances civilization.

I said it. Coveting does advance civilization. If we didn’t see things and wanted something better we would still be living in caves and eating random plants that hopefully grew outside. We wouldn’t see an animal and try to kill it. We wouldn’t build a house. We wouldn’t drive cars. We want these things, we covet them. You can deny you covet things all you want, but with a very small percentage of people, you covet something. I do.

This brings out the fact of a church having this on the sign. A church really really wishes to grow (part of the reason I think religion is personal and shouldn’t be a group effort). They want to grow so much they now advertise for members. If this isn’t coveting I don’t know what is. Because of this, a church has a sign that an advertisement designed to entice people into the church stating – though shalt not covet – it’s in the extreme of hypocriticalness. Maybe churches aren’t the sin-free places some people think they are.