Missed it by that much

I found this rather amusing.

Mecca mosques ‘wrongly aligned’

Some 200 mosques in Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way for prayers, reports from Saudi Arabia say.

All mosques have a niche showing the direction of the most sacred Islamic site, the Kaaba, an ancient cube-like building in Mecca’s Grand Mosque.

But people looking down from recently built high-rises in Mecca found the niches in many older mosques were not pointing directly towards the Kaaba.

Some worshippers are said to be anxious about the validity of their prayers.

Oh, I’m sure their prayers will have exactly the same efficacy as always.

I suppose every religion will find itself somewhere on the literal/metaphorical continuum. But a discovery like this shows why the whole literalism thing is untenable. Suppose your god is a hyper-literalist, and needs to have everything just so before he’ll listen to you. In which case, a simple slip-up like this will invalidate all your prayers for millennia. Plus your god is a jerk.

Unless you figure your god will allow you a ‘gimme’ because your intentions were good. In which case, the need for super-orthodoxy collapses because the big guy will come through for you no matter what you do. Seems the letter-of-the-law people have made an awfully slippery slope for themselves.

UPDATE: I’ve changed my mind. Ultra-orthodoxy is the ultimate rationale for why religious methods don’t seem to work. The religion didn’t fail. You failed for not wearing quite the right shade of yellow or not doing the little dance properly. And if your god decides to honour your request anyway, despite your unworthiness, well, it just shows how cool he is.

It’s perfect, isn’t it?