Back in DC

Hi everyone. Obviously, back in DC now. It turns out that driving four hours with nothing but a radio kind of sucks. In fact, it really sucks when one of those hours is through a no-man's-land in southern Virginia... In Virginia, it appears that one station out of four is a Christian talk channel. Not being a Christian, I tend to regard these channels as something like a zoo -- I listen for a few minutes, find it exotic and somewhat offensive, then switch to something new.

One station I found was discussing Buddhist monks in Burma. This could have actually been quite interesting, but instead the conversation snippet I heard went something like this.

"... The monks were sitting down, chanting and counting beads. Yes, you heard me, they were counting beads. It turns out that, like the Roman catholic rosary, Buddhists use beads to keep count of their chants. ..." [It's around here that I decided this was a Christian channel]

"... I asked the monks why they were doing what they were doing. After all, chanting to get closer to god is not holy but satanism. " The hell????? ".. If you believe me to be wrong, tell me where, exactly, it says otherwise in the scripture."

And today is the day that I learned that repetition is, apparently, evil. Go figure.

This is the thing that frustrates me so much about very devout religious figures. These monks were presumably minding their own business, meditating and chanting mantra. What gives this radio personality the right to comment on the correctness of their religious practices? The whole passage disgusted me enough that pop songs and advertisements didn't seem so bad afterwards.