I went to the church around the corner to sing at their Evensong service. The congregation was asked to pray for Haiti -- terrible things are happening there, people are suffering beyond imagination -- but God cares for each and every one of those people personally.
Now how can it be that he cares so much about each person in Haiti but he's allowed about 200,000 of them to suffer horrible deaths?
I know this is a typical question of a non-believer -- I've asked before and heard that God didn't create the disaster and he feels terrible about it, or something to that effect.
What do you think?
Got to go now as the New Orleans Saints are about to play a big game that decides whether they'll go to the Superbowl or not. The Saints are having a great year -- I remember when they were a national joke -- the worst football team in the US. When my husband and I went to one of their games in 1985, fans made paper airplanes and flew them around the stadium to combat the tedium of seeing their team lose by a wide margin.
7 comments:
Depends on whether one views God as a jolly loving Santa Claus, or simply as the *primum mobile*, I suppose.
There were several letters to the editor in a recent issue of the *New Yorker* magazine, that had nothing to do with theism or its opposite (responses to an article about vegetarianism), but some of the points made might be applicable here Death is a fact of life, whether you are animal or human, and to expect that anyone born should/has a right to/must live forever under the guardianship of a benevolent (Santa Claus) God is...simply silly.
What if NOBODY ever died until they were 120, or whatever the outer limit of longevity is? You think health care's a mess now, well, try supporting THAT population until flights of angels gently waft 'em us all to our timely graves.
A "senseless" natural disaster (Haiti, all those tsunamis) is different from a "senseless" war. The former is not preventable, the latter is. But bottom line: people die in both, in droves. I don't think there's a religion in the world that promises we will not die---sometimes too soon, sometimes "unfairly." I think that maybe religion, for those whom it comforts, is more about how to view the life we have here and now---it's not a bargaining process whereby we promise "good" behavior if only Big Sweet Daddy God will "reward" us by letting us drag on into a second century, with drool cascading down our chins.
Yes, atheists do enjoy crowing "See? God not only doesn't EXIST, He doesn't give a shit either, about all these poor dying suffering people!" Talk about your conundrums...
Don't you think we who take Communion every week wrestle with these same questions? Of course we do, unless we are perfect idiots (and hey, nobody's perfect:):)
I seem to be on a poetry kick lately. Google "Hap" by Thomas Hardy. He pretty much addresses this question, and comes down on the nonbeliever side.
Geaux Saints!
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HUH??? Quite a comic writer, you are, Anonymous! Wish I'd written that. Brilliant parody of English as a second language, fella!
But now it is nearby nine of the watch and soon I'm with bed.
How often, amused, do you meet an investment banker who admits his product reminds him of a ponzy scheme? Refreshing, isn't it?
It strikes me that religious people who have commented on this question in the press & elsewhere don't actually wrestle with these questions at all, what they actually do is try to fit reality into their narrow dogma's, that seems to be the only "wrestling" and that's tough because the dogma is so detached from reality.
Every now and again the evidence overwhelms the dogma (like Galileo and evolution) and the Church reluctantly has to accept it; resorting to "God works in mysterious ways", which of course is a complete intellectual abdication of intellectual "wrestling" all together.
We already understand perfectly well why these things happen, we live on a planet with a cooling and unstable crust, we simply don't need an invisible man in the sky or sin or redemption in order to rationalise this.
Hey Brenda - Elizabeth's story about the Saints-49ers game in '85 reminds me of when she and I came to your house and told you we'd been to the game.
LE topped us by saying he'd been too...but he'd flown down by helicopter!
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