A Divine Decision (because the words "divine" and "nonsense" are synonyms in my mind)

I felt betrayed; betrayed, heartbroken, depressed, weary, and fatigued, but mostly shocked when Desperate Housewives went religious.

Desperate Housewives, a show about sex, money, gossip, greed, secrets, and everything juicy has no right to dive into the dirty depths of religious propaganda.  In fact, beginning every show is a sexually inclined image of two iconic figures in Western religion: Adam and Eve.  I admired "Desperate Housewives" for consistently making fun of the divine: it portrayed Carlos and Garbiel Solis's comical attempts at becoming better people, and captured a struggle between an extremely religious mother and her son's homosexuality.  

That is why I was caught so off-guard by the decision of Lynette Scavo, the show's most un-religious character, to begin a pursuit of the pulpit, and the unusual manner in which the show treated her self awakening.  Lynette, after fighting off cancer and hardly surviving a catastrophic tornado, decides to enrich her spiritual life and become closer to the "big man."  The scene during which she reveals this decision to her family shows all of Wisteria Lane's residents dressed up in formal Sunday attire and going as families to church.  All of a sudden, Lynette's living room is shown: her husband is in a corner drinking a beer and her kids are being rambunctious.  The television is on full blast.  Her household is successfully made to look morally inferior to the other households on Wisteria Lane.

Lynette Scavo morally inferior?  Then what explains her risking her life to save her neighbor's cat (and ending up saving herself and the neighbor)? What explains her 24/7 indefatigable devotion to her kids and her family?  Lynette is one of the most selfless people on the show.

Lynette suddenly converts from a realist to a believer of the untrue.  She is so overwhelmed by her bout of good luck that she abandons all reason.  She was once my favorite character; now I consider her weak.  

The show takes two different ideas: compassion and religion, and merges them into one.  But religion is not compassion, nor is compassion in the least religious.  Anyone, regardless of their faith or if they have a faith, can be a good human being.  In fact, being a good human being for the sake of being a good human being would appear more compassionate than being a good human being because it is what a faith mandates.