I saw a commercial the other day that pretty much sums up life in America today.

It's the one for the Hardee's Monster Burger.

It shows a monk getting ready to eat a Monster Burger and a beam of light falling from the sky onto the burger.

Then a voice from above asks the monk to give up the burger and the burger slowly rises.

The burger then comes back down half eaten because "the big guy" can't finish it.

The inference, of course, is that their burger is too much even for God to eat.

Now, is it just me, or does that premise beg an obvious question. If the stupid burger is so big God can't eat it, why would anyone in their right mind order it?

You almost certainly wouldn't be able to finish it.

It seems as if Hardee's is trying to convince you to buy this thing and then throw away the unused portion.

The burger deserves its Monster moniker. It contains two quarter-pound beef patties (with the ever-present asterisk of "pre-cooked weight"), eight (that's right, eight) strips of bacon and two slices of cheese.

I chatted briefly with a local dietician.

She told me that, generally, a quarter pound of beef has 225 calories and somewhere around 22 grams of fat.

A strip of bacon contains 45 calories and 5 grams of fat. A slice of cheese has 60 calories and 8 grams of fat.

A bun has around 160 calories and not enough fat to mention.

After cooking, those ingredients will produce a total of 86 grams of fat and 934 calories.

If you put those ingredients in a casserole dish with a couple cups of macaroni, some water and seasoning and bake it at 350 degrees for an hour, you could feed a family of four.

The dietician noted that consuming a Monster Burger is akin to consuming about 17 teaspoons of margarine - about a third of a cup.

And that's just the burger. Nobody just gets the burger.

I can envision myself pulling up to the drive-thru window. "Gimme a Monster Burger, large fries, apple turnover and a diet Coke. Nah, on second thought, just gimme a half cup of margarine and a diet Coke."

So how, you ask, does this sum up life in America for me?

Well, first of all, it shows how we have managed to completely trivialize religion.

Any public display of religion you see these days will be trivial.

People who believe in any type of spirituality are unenlightened at best and just plain stupid at worst. Everybody knows that.

So a good role for God in today's world is to help hawk huge, fat-laden, fast-food hamburgers.Ê

The ad also makes a good case for just how extreme and excessive we have become. And what hypocrites we are.

At a time when we are all supposed to be more health conscious, what does it take to sell us fast food?

Lots of bacon and cheese.

All the hot new sandwiches from the fast food joints have greasy bacon and gooey cheese slathered (I love that word, slathered) all over them.

That's what we want. That's what sells.

At the same time, we buy exercise equipment, treadmills, cross country skiing machines, rowing machines and stair-climbing machines.

We run on these things like gerbils on exercise wheels. Only difference is, we watch TV or read while we do it. Gerbils just run.

Then, after that, it's off to the fast-food joint.

And it's not bad enough that we crave stuff that is bad for us. We crave huge quantities of it.

Remember what large fries used to be? Remember what a large Coke used to be? Order those today and you are taking your life into your hands. You could fill a wading pool with a couple large drinks these days.

They brag about it. They name their drinks "Big Gulp." They tell you that the largest size is the "best value."

Sure, it's a great value if you don't mind sloshing around for a couple days after ingesting one of those soft drink tubs.

As if that's not bad enough, the fast food guys are engaged in burger wars.

The two biggies, Burger King and McDonald's, are marketing knockoffs of each other's products.

Burger King is selling Big Mac-like sandwiches and McDonald's is selling Whopper clones.

It's like a nationwide contest to see who can clog our arteries and expand our waistlines fastest.

And what do we do? We get in line and wait to buy those giant burgers. By the millions. Every day.

It makes me wonder where it will all end. After all, sooner or later the leviathan burger will become passe.

Then, the fast-food joints will have to come up with something even more extreme to convince us to stop in.

I can hardly wait.

We may see burgers the size of pie plates, Frisbees¨, manhole covers! Maybe they'll just start selling them by the pound, like raw meat.

So the next time we visit one of these places, we must pause to reflect upon the exercise equipment gathering dust in our garages.

Then, when it's time to order, we must remember two very important little words:

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