5 King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them. 2 While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. 3 So they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from them. 4 As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone.
5 Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. 6 His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his knees knocked together and his legs gave way.
God seemed to look away at mere looting of His temple, but when you started praising non-existing deities while using His table service, He gets POed. Not only had Nebby's son been weighed in the balance, he hopped on the scales with this dinner party.
This gives me some pause for...ahem... certain irreverent folks in the news and in recent history. I haven't heard of any liberal critics physically trashing a Catholic church over the current reproductive health care flap, but the queer mafia did do a number of church property over the years over sexual morality issues. The news out of Russia remind us of folks who care little for God other than as a prop to she-dog about the powers that be.
Mocking God is safer today than it was in biblical times, but it's rarely a good career move in the long haul. Belshazzar found that out the hard way.
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