OK, so who was shocked that now-former Congressman Anthony Weiner, after getting caught with his pants down, announced he was going in for therapy and treatment?
Therapy is the new religion. It used to be that whenever a politician or some famous person was caught doing something the general population used to consider inappropriate or illegal, that person would find God.
Now, they find out that whatever they did is not their fault because they have an illness.
And you know what? They're right.
Whenever things like this happen, I find myself thinking back to Art Schlicter. Maybe you remember him: golden boy quarterback at The Ohio State University; top six in the Heisman Trophy as a sophomore, junior and senior; led the Buckeyes to a national championship; fourth-pick overall in the NFL draft.
He had everything - including a gambling problem. Midway through his NFL rookie year, he'd blown his entire signing bonus. Gambling consumed him, and eventually cost him everything he once valued. He spent the equivalent of 10 years in 44 different prisons and jails around the Midwest.
After years of ruining his life with his gambling, someone finally diagnosed Schlichter as a pathological gambler, recognized as an illness by the American Psychological Association.
When Schlicter heard that, he had tears in his eyes as he said, "Thank God I'm sick. I thought I was just a loser!"
Of course, the truth is, Schlicter was a loser. Just like Anthony Weiner. And me. And, I dare say, you.
We're losers, because we're all sick; we're all addicts - to ourselves.
Your parents or maybe grandparents or preacher or priest would have called it "sin,'' but that's not a very popular word these days.
Nobody likes to talk about sin. If they do, they talk about it in terms of lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, murder - this list of "things" that we do that we call sin. See, we like lists, because we can rank lists, and then we can compare ourselves to others. Lying is not as bad as cheating, which is not as bad as stealing, which is not as bad as adultery, which is not as bad as murder, and so on.
The only problem is, those things are not really "sin." Those are just the outward expressions of "sin."
Oh, I know - God put together this list of sins that we refer to all the time. But go back and read the story: God gave people what they called "the law" because they couldn't handle the freedom of living not by rules but by relationship.
If you know your Bible, you know that in the New Testament, when asked about the law, Jesus said it's not the act, it's the attitude. It's not adultery, it's lusting; it's not murder, it's hating someone.
See, "sin'' is really deciding that nothing in the world is more important than what I want in a given moment.
Not to get all religious, but Adam and Eve's first sin wasn't taking a bite of a piece of forbidden fruit; the first sin was deciding that what God said was "right'' was not, and that Adam and Eve could decide what was ''right" for themselves.
And that holds true across the board of all religions: there is a God, and I'm not it.
(If you're an atheist, it doesn't make any difference what you do because you don't believe in any ultimate justice or afterlife anyway; you're on your own. Seriously.)
If there is God, there is Truth. And that truth is bigger than me, and not determined by me. It's universal, eternal, and non-negotiable.
If I go against that Truth, then I'm setting myself up as equal to God.
That's pretty presumptuous.
But then, so is gambling away the gifts God gives you.
Or sending obscene pictures of yourself and embarrassing your family and your country.
Sure it's sick. Yes, it's an addiction.
And I'm all for therapy and psychology and admitting you have a problem and need help.
We all do.
And we have two choices: we can decide there are standards and they are important and we believe in them and we hold each other - and ourselves - accountable.
Or we don't.
Quite frankly, I'm afraid of the world where every man is god.
It just doesn't work that way.
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