Football is an interesting phenomenon. Before it was something through history, the role of something ‘bigger than everything else’ is a really interesting thing to think about.  What you deal with is a very interesting thing to think about.  Something that most humans find as really important is a sense of unity.  When things go really well in a football game, it is a bunch of humans gathering up to be together in a sense of organism, a sense of organization, and a sense of unity.  That is what makes football so interesting.  In many, many ways, it has replaced religion.  Five hundred years ago, if you watch people, they would group up and worship together.  That sense of worship got them together when nothing else would.  That made things really interesting.  That was the interesting thing thing about community and religion at the time.

Now, religion is often something forced down people’s throats back and forth through various communities.  It is something that is supposed to ‘regulate’ ‘save’ and ‘make people moral’.  Five hundred years ago, it really wan’t something that regulated people–community did.  It wasn’t really something that ‘saved’ people–community did.  It wasn’t really something that made someone ‘moral’–society did.  Five hundred years ago, a lot of things had religion interacting with you and making all kinds of things happen with you.  When people interacted with them, there were a lot of things that happened with what you looked at . When you understand what you’re looking at with people and community, you can extrapolate a bunch of things.  that is the interesting thing about community and religion.  Five hundred years ago, morality and culture ran on different rules than they do now.  Things were immoral then that aren’t now, and vise versa.

People often forget about the ‘vise versa’ part.  We assume that modern society is completely hedonistic and that ancient history was completely religiously moral.  What we hold as moral and what they held as moral are two different things.  What has really replaced religion is this:  the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Green Bay Packers, and just about any other football team you can think of.  That is because unlike most sports, football requires a lot of emotion.  When you watch the Steelers super bowl, you’re watching the modern Crusadres and other things like that.  When you watch football, you’re watching the same amount of aggression and purpose and value that ancient societies put into warriors and priests.  People back then fought battles.  We ‘play games’, but the emotional drive is still as big.  That’s the weird thing about emotions:  to one person, a certain emotion at a certain intensity happens at one event, to another, the same emotions happen somewhere else.