Amen to that!

On the most recent episode of "The Amazing Race," one of the contestants said something that all contestants on every reality/competition show ought to remember.

"We are religious people, but we are under no illusion that God cares whether or not we win 'The Amazing Race,"' said Kate, who's an Episcopal priest.

Amen!

No matter what your religious persuasion (or lack thereof), there's nothing more annoying than watching some bozos avow that God is on their side.

It's a TV show! It's a game! Sure, they're competing for big bucks on shows like "The Amazing Race" (Sundays, 7 p.m., Ch. 2), but it's really all about advertising dollars.

Unless you're convinced that there's a big interest in heaven in TV ratings, it doesn't follow that there's any interest in whether you win money on a TV show.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not against anyone practicing his faith. But there's a big difference between praying and telling millions of viewers that you're going to win because God wants you to.

The irony, of course, is that almost without exception, the contestants who are under the impression they're destined to win because they're soooooo religious don't.

Their attitude often backfires. Just a couple of years ago, on the family edition of "The Amazing Race," the Weavers made themselves some of the least popular contestants in TV history. Here's what I wrote at the time:

You'd think the Weavers would be fan favorites, what with the sympathy factor they have going for them. Linda and her kids — Rebecca, 19; Rachel, 16; and Rolly, 14 — are still dealing with the recent death of their husband and father in a raceway accident. And they profess to be good Christians.

They profess it over and over and over again. But their actions belie their words, making them utterly insufferable.

They're as nasty and cutthroat as any of the others. They scheme, plot, ridicule ... and even throw stuff at other people, all the while complaining they're persecuted. Which, not surprisingly, has made them pariahs among the competitors.

As they finished the most recent leg of the race, Rachel Weaver called her opponents, "classless" and cried to the camera, "It's hard to deal with people like that and then have them gang up on you when you're the only family that's trying to live a Christian life."

And that was before the episode in which they disparaged Utah in general and Mormons more specifically.