There's a tendency in the media to paint those who hold to a religious faith as being rigid and humorless, dour to the point of fanaticism.
And there's a lot about organized religions to give many people pause. As someone tallying the atrocities committed in the name of one God or another once quipped, "The one headline you'll never read is "Atheist Extremists Massacre Agnostic Enclave".
All of us have also been forced to endure those bland and hollow sounding pronouncements before sporting events where lives might well be lost as if invoking blessings takes the negative edge off our anticipation of the mayhem to come.
And then, along comes somebody who seems to understand the over-marketed, over-macho'd world of corporatized sport for what it is and also knows that if we really were made in the image of some Supreme Being, that's where we got our sense of humor.
Pastor Joe Nelms from Last Saturday's Nascar Nationwide Series race in Nashville, Tennessee…
