Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
The Reality of God’s Blessings on Humanity
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Acts of God
Simon Hoggart in the Guardian told a story about interviewing a vicar soon after his church had been struck by lightning, sending debris crashing on to the choir just after evensong had finished. “Truly the Lord has blessed us and taken us into His arms tonight,” prattled the elated vicar. “But is the church insured?” asked the reporter. The clergyman’s demeaner changed. “Um! Sadly no. We are not covered for acts of God!”
The joke highlights the curious selective way of thinking Christians have about God. Rather like the businessman for whom everything successful is the product of his own shrewdness, but every setback is bad luck or the fault of others, so it is with God. Any fortune rquires God to be praised, but no misfortune is attributed to Him, unless it is someone else’s when it is God’s wrath vented upon them. Even if we believe in an almighty God, why should anyone think He cares a jot about us? When the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust, then surely it is obvious that God does not care whether enyone is just or unjust. He is categorically declaring He is indifferent to human fate. There is no evidence of God’s love of humanity except the wishful thinking of Christians who cannot bear to face reality.
US Christians have convinced themselves that God saved thousands from the 9/11 outrage by arranging traffic jams! Surely it would have been more efficient for an almighty to have arranged a shortcircuit in the electronics of the aircraft used by the suicidal bombers before they took off. Elated relatives of trapped coalminers in Virginia began praising God and singing hymns when one of their number came running with the news the men had been saved. They had not. The dupes of the professional Christians think God is a fixer, but is not too bright at arranging the fixes. Never do they wonder that they might have been duped. Or hardly ever. One woman in Virginia was heard questioning a God who could allow such a rotten trick, but she, and not the disgusting pastors of her faith will be the one who is given corrective treatment.
Christians always claim they are comforted by God, but when God is so arbitrary in His fixing, there is more comfort in believing in reality—Kismet, blind fate—chance and its distribution laws. Then you know that shit happens and when it does you are better prepared for it. God does not effect justice in the world, human beings do it by having fair laws. God will not punish the pit owners who neglected safety to get rich quicker by putting men’s lives at risk. People do that through the law and justice. The first thing needed, though, is to see justice done to the executive that allows laws to be broken willy-nilly because the mineowners are in the same club of wealthy Republicans as the officers of state.
In relation to the terrible carnage of the Asian tsunami, the archbishop of caterbury, Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican Church, said:
There is something odd about expecting that God will step in if things are getting dangerous. How dangerous do they have to be [to trigger His response]? How many deaths would be acceptable [before He responded]? If some religious genius came up with an explanation of exactly why these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God? Wouldn’t we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties… believers… have learned… that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement.
Other leading clergy were desperately explaining to their flocks how their beliefs could be reconciled with a sometimes harsh reality. The Bishop of Norwich told his sheep that “What gives life also takes it away”. There must be some subtle theological difference between this arbitrary dispensation of life and death and pure chance, no doubt. The Bishop of Shrewsbury tells the little lambs that God does not prevent suffering but redeems it as He did with Christ—Himself, in fact, or so Christians believe. God suffered and was resurrected to help those still burying their dead, or rather not, since He said whilst incarnated in life that the dead should bury their own dead. Anyway, God made His Creation with randomness built into it. The Anglican can accept Kismet as part of God’s own Creation, a part measurable by science and expressable as the distribution laws, as scientists have shown. Why then, bother about God at all? He has left us subject to the peccadillos of Fate.
The Catholic Bishop of Birmingham said in all seriousness God did it so He could show off the light and love He is said by Christians to be! It does not matter how or when we die, “it has no power to rob us of our God-given grace, our destiny to be with God for all eternity”. This clergyman seems to have no worries about broad gates or narrow gates, or how few are chosen! The destiny of all “of us”, presumably all Christians however wicked, is to be with God forever. It is surprising to read this is the Catholic position. It sounds much more like the redneck fundamentalist tribalism of middle America.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, leader of the English and Welsh Catholics comforted the confused little baa-lambs with the thought that even short lives have love put in them by God. Christian prayer, and trust and faith in the Omnipotent will always bring good out of what seems evil and senseless. He means that life will go on. People have to get over such tragedies and function as before despite it. The alternative is suicide. We have evolved to cope with tragedy in such a way that eventually it is forgotten, for life has gone on and passed to a new generation to suffer afresh in its own way. The good is that people do indeed cope, but God has nothing at all to do with it.
The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, thought it was impertinent for us to ask hard questions about God. “God needs our help to help those who suffer”, he volunteered. Any God that needs our help might as well not exist. Perhaps Jews ought to consider that He does not exist. The Anglican Bishop of Durham is somewhat similar in that God to Him is simply groaning with us in our agony. Any God worth all the money and devotion spent on Him ought to be able to offer something better, surely.
It shows that the Judaeo-Christian position can be justified by any old waffle that comes to mind. It is in the same category as the stock-market gurus’ explanations of the ups and downs of stock prices. They have an instant explanation for every circumstance. Christianity has an answer for anything that happens good or bad, but it means nothing at all. It is pseudo-logic. And, if all the waffle and pseudo-explanations fail to convince, then it is a divine mystery. In both cases, only fools accept them, but there are a lot of fools gambling on eternal life and being able to reap what they have not sown.
It is hard to see why any Christian should be fobbed off with all this, but plainly they are. That is the point about them. They are fobbed of with anything their priests and pastors tell them. That is why Christianity cannot help but be a scam, and why scandalous, greedy and lazy men gravitate into it as sheepdogs. It offers them an easy life for doing nothing at all worth doing. Just yelping.
