This, for one:
Gary Humes, a programs manager with the Navy, was entering the building where the shootings took place around 8:20 a.m. when he was met by people fleeing the building and warning of a shooter inside. He and more than 100 others ran to another building across the street, while others ran to the Navy museum nearby.
“I decided to go into work a little late this morning,” he said. “I guess God was with me.”” (from The Navy Times story on today’s mass shooting*).
Should we thus infer that God was not with the dead and wounded?
I’m not going to get into the problem of evil in this space. There are ways religious believers reconcile themselves to the obvious fact that bad things happen to good people — or at least people for whom the evil outcomes are undeserved by any reasonable calculation. There are certainly logically coherent ways to understand the presence of evil in the world as a strong indicator of the absence of deity actively intervening in human affairs. Neither of those true statements is in play here.
Rather: hosannas like the one above are to me the markers of failed religion. I don’t me Mr Humes himself. Dodging the kind of horror he did today would make anyone — me certainly – feel an almost giddy (and guilty) sense of relief. He gets a pass from me on anything he says in the moment. But it’s still possible to read something in the verbal formula that someone in such straits reaches for in such moments of trial. And the “God is with me” trope — that to me is the signal of a religious culture thoroughly getting it wrong.
Or, to put it in another frame, what would Jesus say?
This, for example:
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
…
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ (Matthew 25)
Image: Aelbert Culp, Landscape with Cattle, c. 1639-1649
BGinCHI
God is awesome at not getting blamed for shit.
Spankyslappybottom
While I understand the impulse and the tactical rhetorical advantage, I think quoting “scripture” to refute religious idiocy is playing on their turf.
Don’t legitimize the superstitions of nomadic bronze-age tribes. Those people knew, practically, nothing.
Your best refutation is the first one: So are the dead ones chosen by God as well?
BGinCHI
Awesomenipotent, even.
JPL
IMO, That type of statement devalues god.
Laur
This is of course the perfect time to repost the video of that “uhhhhhh I’m actually an atheist” lady and dumbass Wolf.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LP3Zs_V_BQ
Cacti
That’s probably the part of religion that I find the most obnoxious.
“God” helped me find my car keys this morning…while being content to let thousands of people die of starvation on the same day.
Long Tooth
Jesus, Schmeesus. What would the Spaghetti Monster say?
joes527
@Spankyslappybottom:
As we will be judged by those who follow us.
The Dangerman
Well, here we go … a site where lifestyles different from our own are celebrated (and rightly so, I might add)…
…the hate for those that may Believe differently then we do will be wall to wall. This should be fun.
scav
The usual response concerning the dead is usually “The ways of God are mysterious.” It’s considered bad form (for some reason) to make the same incontestable theological observation to those that made it out alive.
Elizabelle
Why did God hate the Titanic?
What’s his beef with the people of Bhopal, India?
On some level, Mr. Humes is saying “I kept my life, others did not, and who can say why?”, but the “God was with me” bit does grate.
Most grating, though: God using babies, and other loved ones, for decorating heaven.
“God needed such a perfect soul, and He took your child to Heaven.” Should be met with a good left. Doesn’t God have enough going on already?
Seeing cherubs and angels after school shootings disturbs me too.
That is all.
raven
Detectives later spoke with Alexis’ father, who lived in New York at the time, who told police Alexis had anger management problems associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that Alexis had been an active participant in rescue attempts on September 11th, 2001.
Tommy
I had a wonderful experience today. At a new client location, local. Most of my clients are not local and I never met face-to-face. As I this terrible event was unfolding at the Navy Yard her phone rang, as it had many times during the day. This time she reached for it to silence it almost in a panic. I knew the tone/sound of her ring tone and asked if she was a Muslim.
She said yes seeming kind of nervous.
Now I live in a place that isn’t so liberal. I look like a total anglo and maybe even conservative in how I dress (if you stereotype — people do in my experience).
We talked for a few about her faith and she asked:
I said no. She was confused how much I knew about her faith. I told her I read and listen. I think I have a client for life, cause she was so happy (1) I didn’t judge her in the least and (2) I knew something about her faith, even if I was an atheist.
I almost wish we had looked at out phones more or knew this was happening, so we could talk about how the gut reaction is to assume a Muslim is behind this.
BTW: That music I heard wasn’t a ring tone she later told/showed me. They got an app for that. It was a prayer app calling her to prayer and using GPS of course point them to Mecca. Got to love technology.
Jockey Full of Malbec
@Cacti:
…ergo, “God” must think I’m better than those that starved! Yay me!
That’s the narcissistic little essence of Calvinism (and its spiritual descendants), that right there.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader?
I’m frankly shocked to hear God is encouraging people to be late for work. I’d always thought that was the work of the devil.
SG
I thought real believers would say, “God is with all of us all the time.”
piratedan
I’m sorry, but those aren’t MY heathens…… they must belong to some other deity…..
? Martin
Would have been better if he Tebowed when he said it. But then the greatest act of a benevolent God is a so-so quarterback scoring 6 points in a clutch game, so maybe that would have been overkill.
BGinCHI
Via Brother Benen:
“Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones speculated that the attack on the Washington Navy Yard may have been a false flag operation committed by disguised government agents in pursuit of some obscure goal to restrict liberty.”
You can’t make this shit up faster than they can believe it.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
My second fave just behind the “God must have been with me” is the “Everything happens for a reason”. I hate it all the more because I catch myself saying it sometimes when I can’t wrap my mind around some occurrence. Just the other day my boyfriend was in a very bad car accident (he hit a mustang with his Mustang) and totaled his beloved car. He, thankfully, was okay. He said afterward, “everything happens for a reason” and wanting to comfort him I said, “maybe the delay caused by the accident kept you from being in a worse situation that could have happened later….” since he was supposed to be making a long drive to a good friend’s funeral after a sleepless night.
About two seconds later, I paused and realized that I was parroting utter nonsense. If bad things happen for good reasons, it still sucks. That old white man in the sky is going to have some ‘splainin to do when I shuffle up to the pearly gates. Then again according to my evangelical sis, I won’t be going “up” in the hereafter. Thank goodness!
? Martin
@BGinCHI: Now we know why Obamacare needed to buy all of those bullets.
cmorenc
Another stock evangelical Christian canard is finding “God’s purpose for me in life”. As if some other people “found” their purpose today in being arbitrarily shot to death, or the first-grade schoolchildren in Connecticutt found theirs early in being killed by a mentally ill malevolent madman.
That doesn’t necessarily mean there is no God, or that God is evil, but rather that the current X.01 version of the universe God designed to allow some semblance of free will and lack of complete predictability of physical and human events contains the unfortunate inevitable side effect of permitting bad things to sometimes happen to good people, or for some people to act malevolently toward others. Maybe eons from now, some or all of this will be fixed in the next version, but we’re stuck in the current version of God’s ongoing experiment with creating universes and life.
WereBear
@BGinCHI: “Conspiracy theorist”? That’s a profession, now?
I liked it better when they were “thriller writers.”
I remember a story I heard long ago, about a guy in Japan whose dream vacation was to visit the Rockies. He got out of college, got married, all the time saving for his dream trip.
He was about a day into it when he drove his rental Volkswagen under a boulder which had stayed up for millions of years… until that moment. He was killed. Wife was spared.
We just don’t know, do we?
Tommy
@BGinCHI: Gosh he has a radio show. There is a part of me, and I’ve been thinking this for years, I ought to stop being a liberal and turn totally far right, build a web site, say the most stupid shit in the world, and bank the money. I mean I could write the Alex Jones stuff as snark and pass it off as fact and maybe make a lot more money.
MikeJ
@BGinCHI: I already said in an earlier thread: The shooter was seen eating fried green tomatoes. It was a Fannie Flagg operation.
lamh36
WTH is going on today?
MAN ARRESTED IN FRONT OF WHITE HOUSE
He was throwing firecrackers over the fence…SMDH!
BGinCHI
@Tommy: Get in line, pal.
LanceThruster
If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers. ~ Steve Allen
BGinCHI
@MikeJ: Only in Seattle would that be funny.
Sad_Dem
I’m at work. Can someone link to Wolf Blitzer getting told by the tornado victim?
PopeRatzo
Say what you will, but as a Bears fan who had money on the Vikings covering the spread, God gave me a win-win on Sunday.
But it’s ridiculous to think that God protected one guy at the naval base but let the others go scratch for themselves.
Narcissus
If you ever played Populous you know how hard it is to pay attention to a half-dozen things at once. Cut god some slack. Today he was watching this dude.
West of the Cascades
Why does God hate unarmed people?
Felonius Monk
This issue is dealt with very nicely in the book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Harold Kushner.
Emma
Most people say things like “God must have been with me” just as a way to answer the famous question: “why did I survive?” They don’t mean any harm. They don’t think about what they’re saying, really. They are alive and people they work with are dead and they feel obscurely guilty about it. Unfortunately there’s a small minority that seems to want to gloat about it; the “special snowflake” syndrome.
And when someone tells me “God has a plan for me”, unless it’s followed by “I’m going to set fire to the Everglades” my usual answer is “go to it.” Who am I to tell someone who feels called to be save the whales or practice medicine in Africa or whatever that it’s not God they’re hearing?
The ones that set me off are the “why me.types Every freaking little broken nail is met with a wail of “why me?” My standard answer is “why not you?” as I walk away.
Churchlady
I so agree with you – the declaration that your survival was “God looking out for me” or “a miracle” or something of that order totally abandons those harmed or killed. Did God not love them enough? Were they less worthy? What? I cannot do anything other than ache for those who have lost someone in this horrid way and hope they never EVER hear those sentiments from the survivors. It’s so cruel and thoughtless to those already in horrific pain.
Felonius Monk
@Long Tooth:
Pass the sauce, please? Oh, and can I have another meatball?
Churchlady
@Emma: But it’s cruel and implies the dead and wounded are less worthy. We really need to understand how awful that comment is.
Ash Can
@Sad_Dem: See Laur @ #5. Always a classic.
patrick II
@Sad_Dem:
Laur got it up at #5.
Mnemosyne
I tend to be more of a believer in the Moirai — once Atropos snips your thread, it’s your time to go, no matter what. But, yeah, people who say things like, “God was with me that day” haven’t really thought through how that sounds to, say, the surviving families of the victims.
? Martin
@Emma: Standing in line at Ace about a year ago, the woman in front of me struck up a conversation with the checker that concluded with common agreement that they really wanted the rapture to happen soon – one because she had some medical problems and no healthcare because she work’s at Ace, and the other because she had a lot of bills. Both presumed that they would be among the chosen few.
I think there are a lot more people who see religion as the way to kick the rest of us into the brimstone than you realize.
Heliopause
Rather, the opposite. Getting billions people to mouth irrational platitudes is the mark of a fabulously successful religion. Religion isn’t concerned with meeting your personal standards of internal consistency.
?
The primary lesson of the Gospels is that you can find a handy Jesus quote to back up any position. Easy one off the top of my head: “…Thy will be done…deliver us from evil…” One could interpret that, if one wanted, to mean, “please, God, don’t let me be shot by a psychopath, but if that is your will, so be it.”
Emma
@Churchlady: I know. I wince when I hear it (or sometimes scream when it’s one of the special snowflakes). I think that it’s just they’re finding an acceptable way to say “I just got lucky.”
Sly
During World War I, the body count climbed so high that only about fifty civil parishes out the thousands in England and Wales had all of their soldiers come home alive (no such communities exist in Scotland or Ireland). You know what they called those places?
The Blessed Villages.
And those civil parishes that lost no one in WWII? Why, they’re Doubly Blessed.
IowaOldLady
@Tommy: That’s a great story. Enjoy the glow.
Ash Can
@Emma: My high school geometry teacher plaintively asked that question one afternoon. He had just begun to write out a proof on the blackboard after having managed to quiet our rambunctious class down. Someone let out a loud hiccup in the newly-quiet room, prompting a resumption of laughter. Best use of the “why me” question EVAR.
The Other Bob
@The Dangerman: Yup. Which is why I come here. It’s warm and comfy.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
Though the opposite school of thought is “your baby ain’t baptized, he’s going straight to hell.”
Gex
Maybe God should have focused his efforts on dealing with and disarming the shooters rather than one random potential victim. As it is, it is humans who were left to deal with those guys. Not sure how God could have built this Earth, his ability to engineer a solution to a problem is horrible.
Patricia Kayden
@Tommy: And even if a Muslim was behind this shooting, it wouldn’t mean that all Muslims are terrorists. Wish certain people would get that.
Like all the crazy people upset that an American of East Indian descent won the Miss America pageant and accuse her of being Muslim and Arab. So what if she were Muslim and Arab?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2013/09/16/miss-america-nina-davuluri-brushes-off-racist-remarks/2819533/
Emma
@? Martin: Most Rapture types are like that. Small minded and filled with self-satisfaction about their own holiness. Which actually goes against everything they are supposed to believe. I think, though, that a lot of them are terrified. The world has gotten too big and too uncertain. They need reassurance. At the same time, they’re getting fleeced by their “pastors.”
Emma
@Ash Can: OK. I’ll pass on that one. Sometimes it fits perfectly.
? Martin
Hopefully nothing. If he had come back at the Navy Yard during this he probably would have been shot. Homeless looking brown guy who can’t speak english or respond to police instructions?
Gex
@Churchlady: This. Just because people may say it unthinkingly and without intending to make the implication they do, doesn’t mean that we should not call them out on what they are saying.
That he is alive because God was with him NECESSARILY implies that the others are dead because God was not with them. He is the one contrasting his situation with those that were killed, not us. We are just making explicit what he is saying about them.
? Martin
@Emma: But there are enough of them to serendipitously find each other and discover this common thread. And it’s not like I live in Kansas – this is a liberalish corner of the OC.
Sly
@Chris:
My grandfather left the Church as a young man (and he was studying for the seminary) because his mother had a late term miscarriage and the local priest refused to bury it in the family’s parish plot. Consecrated ground, and all that nonsense. He never looked back. Instead, he hopped a steamer from Las Palmas to Ellis Island, started a family in New York City, and refused to have any of his eight children baptized. Cursed Catholicism to his dying breath.
Hatred for stupid dogma is why I’m alive. It’s literally in the blood.
Mnemosyne
@Emma:
It’s hard for people to accept that they were the beneficiaries of blind luck, so they have to come up with some reason why they deserved it. Hence, “God was with me that day,” without thinking about what that says about the people who died.
The Dangerman
@The Other Bob:
I have to stand corrected; this thread had far fewer haters then I expected for a “God” thread There is hope for this blog yet!
At the end of the day, there are just some things that are best accepted and left alone; someone might love in a way different than you and someone may Believe in a different way than you. I’m sure there are other examples, but those are two of the biggees….
The Moar You Know
Inverse: God decided to cripple my dog, cripple her some more and then finally force me to kill her because he was going to do it again otherwise. God decided to give my mother a long, slow, agonizing death from ovarian cancer. God decided to give my grandfather a stroke and let him rot slowly to death for four years. God decided to steer my neighbors SUV into a lightpole and kill a bright 18-year old kid. And his pet puppy. God decided to bless my former best friend with an addiction to heroin. But for some reason, God decides to spare this guy’s life from a deranged shooter.
Inevitable conclusion: God is a capricious sadistic psychopath who revels in pain and murder.
The people who worship him are into that shit too, I’ve noticed.
Villago Delenda Est
FSM needs to get busy and start slapping these dipshits around with her noodlely appendages.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
@? Martin:
Okay, you won my vote for quip of the day. Kudos
Mnemosyne
@Patricia Kayden:
As far as I’ve seen, she hasn’t even dignified the “Are you a Muslim?” questions with an answer and is basically doing her best to ignore them. Good for her.
Emma
@Mnemosyne: Yes, that’s what I was trying to say. “Luck” is sometimes an unacceptable answer to people.
Poopyman
I tell people that maybe they need to come to terms with the fact that the chosen ones really are Muslim. That doesn’t really go over very well.
Hungry Joe
When my wife got hit by a car a few months ago (this was the car-came-through-the-wall incident — I wrote about it several times), SO many people told us how, because she wasn’t killed and will eventually make a full recovery, God was looking out for her. They were trying to be nice, so I didn’t say “If some supernatural entity was really looking out for her a goddam car wouldn’t have come through the wall, now, would it?”
“Things happen for a reason” I find all but intolerable, as well, because no, they don’t — they just happen. Looking for patterns is a very human and very valuable trait, but overlaying all of existence with a supposed plan is a glorified, glory-besotted straitjacket. Not to mention infuriating when a car has come out of nowhere, through a wall, and sent your wife to the hospital for a week. Random shit happens. Deal.
Felonius Monk
So I guess when I say Goddammit, I shouldn’t have any expectations of anything happening. Well, God damn.
Roger Moore
@Churchlady:
It also devalues human agency. If everything that happens is because of God’s will, what does that mean about our own decisions and actions?
Villago Delenda Est
If there were a God, the rich would be served up to the poor for dinner.
kc
I’ve been told that God has personally helped certain of my family members run PRs in half marathons and juggle their kids’ soccer schedules. So I hope you all can understand why He was just too busy to stop 12 people from getting gunned down today.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
You don’t have to read far into The Book of The People of the Book to figure out God likes to smite people and how. He’s also notorious for sparing the occasional SOB after putting the screws to him or otherwise playing favorites and/or setting up hoops to jump through for salvation. (the little s kind.)
kc
@Elizabelle:
Those people in the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 must have really pissed Him off.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Gary Humes, self declared coward.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Given your nick, is it any surprise you’d go with the Greek version?
Tom Levenson
@Spankyslappybottom: If I actually get off my ass to do it, you’re going to hate this onproject I’m contemplating.
? Martin
@kc: Yes, well, like the folks who drowned in Katrina, they were all too tolerant of the gheys around them.
joes527
@Roger Moore:
Maybe, in this case, and some like it, it means that the person _can’t_ take credit for what happened and is totally at a loss for how to respond.
It doesn’t really work either, does it?
Bobby Thomson
Shit, everyone knows God was busy covering the spread for MNF.
Chris
@Sly:
I don’t blame him one bit.
@Roger Moore:
I agree with this too, more generally when applied to the entire “thank God for X” syndrome.
I remember going to a fundiegelical service as a young and naive undergrad where the pastor started out by mentioning that his surgery had gone successfully and it was surely a sign of God’s goodness that it had. I was like “really? Not a word of thanks for the doctors and nurses who actually performed the operation? Not even a comment that we should pray for God to look out for them and help them keep doing their invaluable work? Not even a “thank God for people like that” sidenote? What a dick.”
Anne Laurie
Added / highlighted what I assume was a missed preposition, because c’mon Mr. Levenson: You’re talking about the religious problems of monotheists. Which is, of course, technically the dominant paradigm in modern America, but when people like Mr. Hume say “God was with me”, what they really mean is “My small personal deity was having a good day, lucky for me”.
Animism has been the dominant mindset of most human cultures for the vast majority of human history. It was messy and sometimes ugly, yes. But most of the really big ugliness of our “modern” history — certainly those of the last century and this one — trace back to committed monotheists trying to impose their One True Faith logic on a messy universe….
raven
@Chris: There’s plenty of MD’s that are just as bad with their bullshit.
Bobby Thomson
@WereBear: That’s almost like raaaaaaaaaaaainnn on your wedding day.
danielx
Had an incident recently at a local megachurch in which a guy was acting as grill master for a “men’s gathering” and his customized gas grill malfunctioned, blew up and…decapitated the guy. From what I gather they’re still trying to decipher how it could have been “God’s will” that this fellow (who was a nice guy from all I’ve heard, regardless of his religious persuasion/delusion) lose his head while performing volunteer duties for his fellow parishioners.
When something bad happens to someone they don’t like, it’s “God’s will” because the person deserved it. When it happens to one of them, it’s a mystery. (Here’s a clue, numbnuts – if God exists, he or she really doesn’t give a shit about what happens to you as an individual; he’s got bigger issues to deal with.)
Baud
I am God’s will.
Long Tooth
The NRA has congress convinced there will never again be a single repercussion from voters about a [particular] mass shooting because they say so.
Attn: Harry Reid
Majority Leader
U.S. Senate
You opposed reasonable gun control legislation, Harry. At least a splatter of the blood shed today at the U.S. Naval Yard will remain on your hands through eternity.
KS in MA
@SG:
They do.
Roger Moore
@Anne Laurie:
I think this is a big reason why so many fundamentalist Christians pay at least as much attention to Satan as they do to God. The existence of a supernatural agent of evil opposed to and your agent of good is a great way of explaining away all kinds of bad things that otherwise don’t fit into your worldview.
Elizabelle
@Chris:
Isn’t that extraordinarily cruel?
I don’t believe in Original Sin. That was just Paul (or Augustine?) wallowing in self-disgust.
Elizabelle
@danielx:
Stories like yours always make me feel like Hannibal Lechter.
And he would RELISH your story. The blackest of humor.
mapaghimagsik
@danielx:
Duh.
It’s the rapture, one gas grill at a time.
fka AWS
@Roger Moore:
They sure do need to wriggle around that Job story then.
Liberty60
Actually, the official position is that God wants you to die. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but someday.
Nope, your prayers don’t do squat to change that fact.
fka AWS
@Elizabelle:
Yes, which is why so much soteriology tries to handwave it away.
danielx
@mapaghimagsik:
I knew there was a reason I prefer to use charcoal.
Belafon
@Ms. D. Ranged in AZ: And this is why the man in the article said what he did. For a lot of people, it’s far easier dealing with the world if an act happens for a reason, and for it to happen for a reason, it must be a choice, and therefore there is something making that choice. It’s the type of statement someone makes who doesn’t want to think too hard about the world.
As for your statement, I still find myself at times wishing there was some sky deity watching me buy a lotter ticket so she could help me win just once, just enough to pay off a few bills.
Citizen_X
Dread Cthulhu has a more horrific fate in store for you, worm.
…And that goes for you people, too!
Citizen_X
@danielx: A freakish accident taking out someone grilling meat? Oh great, now you’ve doomed Cole! DOOMED him, I tell you!
Mnemosyne
@danielx:
I used this clip as an illustration on my new blog (ahem) but it may be apropos here as well.
Elizabelle
@kc:
Yup. And who knows what the Sudanese or Rwandans did? Pikers!
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
I’ve heard of other religions doing it as well. In some Jewish communities, if you died before you were bar mitzvahed, you were basically an unperson and couldn’t have a Jewish funeral. I don’t think it was very common, but it did happen.
fuckwit
This isn’t hard. Avram lived in the Bronze Age. The Jewish religion (and the other religions like Christianity and Islam that just up and stole from it!) is deeply rooted in the Bronze Age culture, and the bible is filled with the kind of common brutality of the early days of civilization. The god of Avram is an asshole dictator like the rulers of the day. Actually what I find remarkable about that religion is that it was actually quite enlightened and advanced compared to the other religions of the day (and the bible brags about that exceptionalism over and over again). Perhaps that’s why it survived. But it’s still rooted in that lifestyle.
So the god of Avram smites people, is a screaming douchbag, slaughters wantonly, is jealous and petty and vindictive, and is generally an abusive, fearsome tyrant in the manner of the Sumerian, Hittite, Persian, Egyptian, and other contempoary emperors.
Religions seem to me very much rooted in their day. Judaism seems ancient and deeply a part of the Bronze Age: all that chariots and swords and cities made of stone and ancient times. Hinduism too, seems like a step back into the earliest days of civilization, Rama and such. Islam and Catholicism seem deeply rooted in Medieval times, jousting, crusades, monks, cathetrals, the Plague, death, starvation, feudalism. American fundamentalism seems deeply rooted in the unforgiving frontier, primitive, dangerous, terrifying, with mortal threats at every turn and nature itself just as willing to kill you as to look at you. Scientology seems like an artifact from the space-age, UFO-obsessed American 1950s (probably because it quite obviously is). Etc etc.
Religions to me are period peices. Unfortunately, none of those periods are ones in which I’d want to live.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
You just summarized 90% of my beef with Christianity.
weaselone
@Anne Laurie:
While monotheistic religions can be implicate in a lot of ugliness over the current and last centuries, I think you’re overstating your case unless your stretch “trace” to the breaking point. The Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, the genocide in Rwanda, the deaths of millions of Chinese as a consequence of Mao’s policies, Stalin’s purges, etc. aren’t really the work of devoted monotheists imposing their faith.
Chris
@danielx:
Here’s the appeal – no responsibility. Which is to say, the fact that it all “denies human agency” is a good thing. If you assume that God is micromanaging every human life for a higher purpose, then you don’t have to take care of your neighbor, you don’t have to take care of your own life, you don’t have to do anything in this world – God’s got it covered and everything’s his will. (You can see why it appeals to right wingers – don’t have to help that poor person! Obviously, God wanted him that way).
So whenever anything happens, good or bad, they try to figure out why “God” made it happen so they don’t need to take any responsibility for it themselves. Never reasoning that maybe God, if he exists, is simply treating them like grown-ass people and expecting them to start figuring shit out by themselves.
I think my favorite line on the subject is from H. G. Wells in War Of The Worlds, where the protagonist ends up with a priest who’s doing his “how could this happen?” “woe unto us!” “why is God angry?” routine and ends up slapping some sense into him with “Did you think God had exempted [the town the Martians just barbecued]? He is not an insurance agent!”
Comrade Dread
According to the author of Luke, He said this:
Bad things can happen to anyone. That we avoid them sometimes doesn’t make us any better than the people to whom tragedy strikes.
One of the reasons why I dislike conservative evangelicalism is the equation of wealth, prosperity, health, and a less painful life with righteousness and poverty, sickness, and pain with unrighteousness. They may not say that out loud, but it’s often felt and thought.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
See, the obsession with Satan continues to fascinate me, because even if you look at the world from a Christian perspective, isn’t he irrelevant? All he can do is tempt people. But since the human race is capable of great evil as well as great good (as the Bible loves to remind us), what can he tempt humans with that humans aren’t perfectly capable of coming up with on their own? Even if you say “well, he could be putting ideas into people’s heads that they didn’t have before,” isn’t there a world full of other humans ready to do the same already? If his only role is to tempt people, Satan just seems decidedly redundant.
Anne Laurie
@weaselone:
No I phrased it that way because I consider Hitler’s faith in National Socialism, the Khmer Rouge’s faith in Year One, the Maoists’ faith in the Little Red Book and the Stalinists’ faith in a dominionist philosophy that “could not fail, but only be failed” as forms of monotheism…. quasi-modernised “logical” developments of the One Philosopher-King for All mindset. YMMV.
EthylEster
@? Martin: It’s all the thanking god by football players that pisses me off.
Do they really think the man upstairs watches football? All the games at once?
Felixmoronia
@EthylEster:
He can if He has NFL Red Zone!
mericafukyea
Has Greenwald blamed Obama yet? Followed closely by wr0ng way (I was for using made up WMD’s as a justification for war under Bush but against limited action due to ACTUAL WMD USAGE, under hitler Obama) Cole?
Felixmoronia
@EthylEster:
He can if He has NFL Red Zone!
jake the snake
@Elizabelle:
Augustine of Hippo. It might be nice to meet a few Christians occasionally, all I meet are Saulists (followers of Saul of Tarsus) or Augustinians (followers of Augustine of Hippo), or a combination of both. The man whose name was probably Yeshua (unlikely that a Judean during the Roman occupation would give his son a Latinized name) was a great moral philosopher, until Saul of Tarsus made a mystical cult around his teachings.
jake the snake
@Felonius Monk:
He overlooked my pet peeve, why do good things happen to bad people.
Or as the Ferengi Rules of acquisition say, “No good deed goes unpunished.” (Rule #285)
To which I add, “No bad deed goes unrewarded.
Ajabu
Just saw this the other day – seems apropos:
EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON. – SOMETIMES THE REASON IS
THAT YOU’RE STUPID AND MAKE BAD DECISIONS.
David in NY
Always back to the Lisbon earthquake.
Anyway, I loved the interview with Sully Sullenberger after he successfully landed his passenger plane in the Hudson, saving all aboard:
Reporter: Before you started the landing did you say a little prayer?
Sullenberger: No.
David in NY
Also, the belief of Texas High School football teams, saying prayers before their games, that god has the time or the interest to decide which of two teams, from every goddam high school in the state, deserves to win is ludicrous.
hitchhiker
True story:
Husband in 7th week of hospitalization post freak spinal cord injury accident. 4 weeks to go. He’s paralyzed. Sucks so bad.
Hospital room overflowing with cards, photos, stuff from well-wishers, including a photo of something like 30 guys from a church someplace we’d never heard of, claiming to be praying for him.
Me: (holding card over his face because he can’t sit up) Who the f*ck are these people?
Him: No clue.
Me: They seem to think your case is special.
Him: That’s stupid.
Me: No use for a God that only helps out if enough people beg in just the right words.
Him: Check. Can you move my leg to the left a little?
Me: Sure.
dww44
Since this thread seems mostly about religion and how it is inevitably, sometimes illogically , the sole backstop for days such as this, I got this in a an email update today from Newsmax (there’s a whole other story here):
Though I’m not a Catholic, this Pope was already inching to the top of my lifetime of Pope lists and this one just moved him there. J
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
If it’s only blind luck then their beliefs can’t be real. God has to save them otherwise it’s just random chance.
Who wants to go through life if it’s only a crap shoot? Because then being human has no more meaning than being a dog, a cat, a fly, a bacteria, a whatever. We can’t possibly have the ability to think and communicate original ideas unless we are special. Which of course we are not.
Ruckus
@fuckwit:
This.
Think about who could ever read and write when most religions were written. Think about what knowledge was available at that time. People were mostly scared of the unknown. Look at most religions today. Many of the people involved are scared about things they don’t really know or understand. And they don’t seem to actually want to know or understand just what life is. It’s easier to just give up and follow a set of instructions. It takes the responsibility out of their hands.
dww44
@fuckwit: What an interesting yet brief tour of the world’s religions. Thanks.
Mike G
@David in NY:
There was a great cartoon in the New Yorker of a football player being interviewed after a game, saying, “First of all, I’d like to blame Jesus Christ for our loss today.”
MeDrewNotYou
@Felixmoronia: It’s really late and you probably won’t see this, but that was the funniest damn thing I’ve seen all day. The Internets, they are yours.
PIGL
@joes527: They knew about as much as most of us; most of them knew how to survive in a world much more challenging than our own. The very learned at the time of Christ new more mathematics and philosophy than perhaps one modern in 1,000, and that’d being generous. We have made enormous material and intellectual progress in the last 2,000 years, but it depends on the accomplishments of a miniscule minority of us. Look around at your fellow citizens if you doubt me. I am not standing up for their idiotic religions, but almost everyone alive today is no less idiotic. You need to elsewhere.
PIGL
@fuckwit: NSFW, but this may amuse: http://oglaf.com/sithrak/
evodevo
@weaselone: The Holocaust had a religious basis … German Catholics AND Lutherans were taught to despise Jews from the cradle for hundreds of years. That made it much easier to use them as scapegoats in Hitler’s scheme to enrich his party and state. Very few “Good Germans” objected or resisted when the hated Jews were disenfranchised, deported, or disappeared.
Paul in KY
@Emma: They should just say it was a fortunate coincidence (for them).
handsmile
@ Tom Levenson:
Trivial correction: The painter of the image you’ve chosen is Aelbert Cu[y]p (pronounced KIPE). (17th-c. Dutch landscape painting is a particular area of my professional competence.)
Paul in KY
@The Moar You Know: Sound logic!
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne: I think that for Indians, it’s generally a really stupid question.
They can just hear/read someone’s name & tell whether or not they are Muslim or Hindi (or come from a Muslim or Hindi family). Beyond that, the way a woman dresses (or not) is usually a giveaway. My thinking is that she is not Muslim.
Paul in KY
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: That’s generally in the Old Testament
Paul in KY
@dww44: What if you have no concience or your concience is a little expansive on what acts you can do ‘with good concience’?
opiejeanne
@David in NY:The church we attended in the 90s had a moment during worship where people could ask for prayers for a personal concern. There was an obnoxious parent who stood up and asked us to pray for his boy’s football team, that they would triumph or some such nonsense. This was in a United Methodist church, almost every family’s kids went to the public HS, which was playing his kid’s Catholic HS in the next town over for that upcoming game.
The pastor blinked at him as if to say, “Really?” Then told him that was an inappropriate prayer request and moved on. Several of us snickered.
He really was an obnoxious person. Told us all about how God had sent him a warning that his wife should stay off of Crow Canyon Road one evening (has a really dangerous curve), should stay at home but she had laughed at him and went out to meet with some girlfriends. He just KNEW something was going to happen because he could FEEL God warning him, etc.
The terrible thing that happened to her? She got a flat tire. But he didn’t see how ridiculous his comments were after that punchline. Some of us thought she’d been in a terrible accident or something.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
@Belafon:
I hear ya! That’s my wish too.
carbon dated
Saying “God saved my ass” might be a away of mitigating survivor’s guilt. Hey it was out of my hands, God did it.
Also: There’s something a wee bit narcissistic about thinking that the Author of the Universe gives a fiddler’s fuck about you.
George Carlin said it best...
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gPOfurmrjxo&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DgPOfurmrjxo