I took a bit of time this evening to think about "The New Seven Wonders", what they are, and what they mean to the world at large.

I have to say I'm completely flummoxed.

I mean, these are supposed to be the Seven Wonders, right?

Why the hell did Brazil's Christ the Redeemer statue make the cut?

Come to think of it, why were Christ the Redeemer and Eiffel's Statue of Liberty (yes, it's French) and Tower included as candidates at all?

Don't get me wrong, they're great statues and they stand for great things, but they're not really all that wonderous. They're just structures someone made which are beautiful even if they weren't powerful symbols, but nothing more. I don't wonder about where they came from. They don't make me wonder about the world at large.

As a matter of fact, the statue of Christ the Redeemer actually makes me feel a little oppressed. I mean, there once was this man who gave his life for an ideal, but what's that ideal worth today? Where in the current Church is the egalitarian ideal of the Jesus I read about in the Bible, the man who saved prostitutes and treated his women friends much more equally than did his contemporaries?

No, I don't see that Jesus anywhere in the Church today. That's one of the main reasons I remain lapsed.

Back to the point, what's there to wonder about concerning the statue? How it got up where it was in the first place? Other than that, it's just a supersized version of every other Jesus statue I've ever seen. Again, beautiful, but not wonderous.

Why didn't Easter Island make the cut, or Stonehenge, Angkor, or the Acropolis? Those are monuments I wonder about. How did the Easter Island statues get there? If Stonehenge is such a wonder, why is the British government letting Badgers nest (den?) there? If Angkor is the world's largest archaeological site, shouldn't it automatically get a position in the Seven Wonders? Don't these people know that the temple to Athena at the Acropolis weathered centuries before some idiot used it as an arms stockpile during some war and blew its top off?

Note to self: look up which war. It was in the 1800s.

I just don't get it.