Here’s another problem I have with religion.
To many of its practitioners, God’s actions are incomprehensible when they seem arbitrary, but transparent as a window pane when it’s something they would like done.
For instance:
A bus filled with church ladies goes off the side of the road. No survivors.
God’s ways are mysterious! We cannot possibly know the subtleties involved in his eternal plan!
A sexually-based disease comes out of Africa and devastates a generation of homosexual men (along with among other things, people like Isaac Asimov who just happened to receive a blood transfusion at the wrong time): clear as day! It was obviously God’s wrath!
A young couple loses their child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: God’s ways are mysterious! There’s no telling what He was up to, there!
A famous Hollywood libertine dies in a car crash: God didn’t like that R-rated movie he once made!
A flood wipes out a small town where all social activity is based around the church. Mysterious ways!
An earthquake hits Los Angeles. His punishment for Sodom and Gomorrah!
The religionists in question never really stop to ponder that if God’s ways are so obvious in one case, they might be in another. For instance, it might be “God’s will” that Isaac Asimov got AIDS, but it could equally be God’s will that his parents took the infant Isaac to America, that he was a genius, that he got book contracts, that he spoke rationality and, indeed, atheism, to all of us. It might well be that God took John Lennon when He did not because He was irritated at the man’s pronouncements on Jesus, but because taking him decades earlier would have deprived us of his music. It may be that the death of that poor infant was one element of an impossibly complex and incomprehensible plan that will ultimately rebound to Mankind’s benefit, but the same thing may be true of the death of that famous Hollywood libertine, who, for all we know, God sacrificed with a tear in his eye, because he otherwise would have liked to keep that guy alive. Maybe Philip Seymour Hoffman had that heroin overdose because it was the only way to save some civilization of crab people thriving in the next spiral arm. You don’t know.
Positing that Fred Phelps was right and that God brought us AIDS because he really hates gay people for some reason makes no more sense, based on the available evidence, than positing that the supreme being really, really hated that bus-full of church ladies.
The common denominator here is that the religionists who advance this sort of thing assume that they can shout, “Mysterious Ways!” when it’s convenient to them, and “Nothing could be clearer!” when it’s clearer to them, and do so in the defense in a hypothetical being who, if you believe the stories, used to do things like point at one particular city and say, “There. Read my lips. Those are the ones I hate. Those are the ones I’m going to wipe out now.” You can quibble with the morality of such a deity but you cannot argue with his clarity. He always picked some bearded guy out there in the desert and said, “This is what I’m going to do, and this is why.” And that bearded guy would always say, “Thanks, big guy. It’s always nice to know what you’re thinking.”
The point is this, folks. If he exists, his ways cannot be “mysterious” only when it’s bloody convenient to you, nor can they be “obvious” only when it’s bloody convenient to you.
Maybe his plans have nothing to do with you.
Maybe you’re an ant, trying to rationalize the destruction of your colony and attributing it to the Almighty’s wrath at the one guy who didn’t carry his share of sand, when the fact of the matter is that the Almighty is just some suburban guy whose SUV drifted onto the soft shoulder when he was on the way to town to pick up some frozen yogurt.
Your crime is not that you don’t know, but that you’re so confident that you can use “his mysterious ways” as a cudgel, when you assume you do know.
Comment By: Karl J Martin
April 17th, 2017 at 9:17 am
Hey, the it-means-exactly-what-we-want-it-to when convenient and hey-who-knows-mysteries-of-God-amirite when suitable game has been paying rich dividends for millennia.
The cowards and cattle-managers riding that gravy train aren’t going to abandon it just because you have caught them in a -contradiction-.
Comment By: Barb Padgett
April 17th, 2017 at 9:17 am
Comment By: Michael Brown
April 17th, 2017 at 11:17 am
I went right to “deflowering virgins” but of course that made no sense. And now I want cherries too, but they’re strictly seasonal around here.
Comment By: Barb Padgett
April 17th, 2017 at 11:17 am
This also applies to Republicans and the Constitution, by the way.
Comment By: Jay Ramsperger
April 17th, 2017 at 11:17 am
Innat the truth.
Comment By: Stacy Spangler
April 17th, 2017 at 5:17 pm
Oh geez, that’s brilliant.
Comment By: Evelyn Gingersnap Stice
April 17th, 2017 at 10:17 am
Excellent point.
Comment By: Ken Fitzer
April 17th, 2017 at 11:17 am
I always enjoy a good laugh whenever presented with “the Bible clearly says..”. The Bible isn’t clear on pretty much anything. Even solid, church-going, bible-beleiving Christians will disagree on content. And not just church laypersons, I’m talking learned scholars with Divinity degrees.
Comment By: Eric Gubelman
April 17th, 2017 at 12:18 pm
Interesting post… They hypocrisies and blind spots of those who claim to know God’s will are one of the many reasons that many people who live in the rational world are turned off by organized religion. Most of us at one time or another have been wounded by religion. I keep coming back to Christianity because of grace, but sadly, much of the church practices un-grace. I heard a wonderful sermon on Sunday about the God of second, third, and fourth chances–about a God who loves us and wants us to dispense grace. That is the Jesus I am familiar with–not the Republican Jesus.
Comment By: Josh English
April 17th, 2017 at 2:12 pm
This is in line with one of the best criticisms of my faith I have ever heard: You know you’ve remade God in your image when He hates all the same people you do.
I had a neighbor who had a very rough 2016, and 2017 isn’t looking better. She lost a son. She is losing a grandson. She spent 3 days in her apartment between New Years and the day she moved out in early March. Yet she always said “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” and I breaks my heart to hear people talk like that. I’d hate to think she believed God wanted all this death in her family in a tight bundle.
Comment By: Joshua Berlow
April 17th, 2017 at 9:18 pm
The Book of Job says that the reasons God does things is beyond our comprehension.
Comment By: Karl J Martin
April 17th, 2017 at 9:18 pm
Yeah, at some point you knew somebody was going to have to retcon in something like that.
Comment By: Eric Cline
April 17th, 2017 at 10:17 pm
“One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.” — Robert A. Heinlein.
Comment By: Whitt Pond
April 17th, 2017 at 10:17 pm
Well, it’s better to tell people “God moves in mysterious ways” than “God is a sadistic prat who sometimes fucks us over for a giggle.”
Comment By: Ben
April 20th, 2017 at 8:38 am
Eh, that’s why the issue is one of the most discussed topics when it comes to Christian theology: it even got it’s own “theological genre”, theodicy. Loads of theories about those things. Maybe evil is necessary, maybe God needs to be incomprehensible, maybe evil is a matter of human perception, maybe what looks evil now will have positive consequences further down the line, maybe evil is a consequence of free will, maybe …
People abusing religion for their political agendas is really not much of an argument against religion. They just as easily use supposed “biological / natural” argument against homosexuality, or some supposed economic / statistical ones against migrants, or whatever their current fear is.
The issue is basically that there’s no point in arguing rationally when people base their arguments solely on emotional prejudices. No pointing out a thousand logical flaws will change anything once they’re riled up enough.