God must love me. But he hates you guys!!!!!

Great Debates
1

There was a big traffic accident here the other day. Can’t find an article on it though. Anyway, what happened was a big tuck- not a semi, but one of those box looking trucks, a bit bigger than a U-Haul- hit the gaurd rail on an interstate overpass. The front axle broke off immediately and fell into the bed of a pickup traveling on the ground under the overpass. Concrete and debri hit a few other cars as well. The big truck skids along the gaurd rail until it falls over and lands on a transit bus 18 feet below.
Only the driver of the big truck died.
The six passengers on the city bus, the man in the pickup, and the two ladies in the cars hit by debri ALL thanked God for looking out for them. The newspaper had about a dozen quotes like, “God was looking out for me. I am going to mass tonight”; “God was protecting us”; “I thank God that I was not hurt”.

What the hell is this garbage??? First of all, does this mean God wanted the man in the truck to die? Did God kill him, while looking out for the others?
And I would think that whatever God was watching me that day (Since NOTHING even hit me. God made sure I was in the next county, away from all that danger) did a much better job than their God. Why are people so quick to thank God for things like this? But they do not go home on a normal day and just thank God they got home safely from work.
Similarly, there was a lady in Orlando whose car was crushed by a bus that rear-ended her in a toll booth. She was ok, but it took hours to get her out of the car. The whole time, she just held her bible and smiled. Later she told everyone how God was protecting her and she was glad for it. I just don’t get it. IMHO, God was looking out for the cars in the other toll boothes because none of them were crushed by a runaway bus. How many of the religious people in those other cars thanked God for protecting them? Wildest Bill, did you make sure to thank God today for making sure you were not crushed by a bus??

The rest of you, do you thank God only when something really bad happens to you, but you survive. As if, he somehow looked over you, but was too lazy to prevent the accident in the first place? This notion of selective devine intervention is laughable. Is every traffic accident caused by God, since he let it happen? Does God refuse to look over the ones who die in the wrecks? Why do people not thank God for the accidents they DONT get in. I have never been in an accident. Is this because I am an alert driver, or because God keeps an eye on me? Does he favor me over you guys who get in accidents?

The same goes for the people who thank God for saving their family in the tragic house fire. Well, shit, your neighbors house did not even catch fire. Maybe you should pray to whomever your neighbors do. Or do whatever they are doing because God is doing a lot better job of watching them. And do these people thank God on the days when their house did not burn?
Today, my apartment did not burn, my car was not crushed by a bus, and all my family is in good health. Yet, I never pray and I never thank God for this. These other people seem very religious, pray, go to church… and a freaking bus fell on them. WTF?

2

Yes, people are silly, but they don’t want to say to themselves, “Geez, almost died on the road today. I was pretty lucky to not die. I guess the road is a death trap because of all the thousand pound metal machines barreling along at 60 miles per hour. My life is in the hands of random chance.” It makes them feel better to think God is watching out for them, and it hopefully allays their nervousness in getting into a car again.

There is an Onion article in “Finest News Reporting” that is called, “Basketball Player Blames God For Defeat.” Along the same lines.

3

I had this discussion on the LBMB once. Someone had narrowly avoided being in an accident in which a few people died and a few hundred got hurt, and he was talking about how great God was for sparing him.

I said that this was like giving a baseball player a hit when he gets a hit or when he strikes out, and then talking about how great he is for batting 1.000.

I never made any sense of it.

Dr. J

4

What was that comics name?

"Things were going great, until Jesus made me fumble!

He hates our team."

5

I think the natural reaction after surviving a near death experience is to be thankful.

To be thankful implies there is someone or something to thank. Some people will thank their respective gods, others may thank the people who helped, and still others will thank themselves.

Although we can minimize certain occurances from happening, ultimately, we are at the mercy of random chance. This random chance is personified in many gods (such as gods of fertility, and gods of weather), and I think it is a characteristic of the Christian God also.

All in all, I believe it is just a natural reaction. Perhaps by being grateful, some of us believe that such fortune may befall us again. And on the flip side, if we are ungrateful, then perhaps ill-fortune will come to fall later. If someone gives you a gift, you say thank you. If you don’t say thank you and just take the gift, then chances are that person will not give you a gift again.

It’s not logical, it’s merely human.

6

Choice #1: The universe is a heartless place that doesn’t care about me. I could have easily been rendered into greasy component bits on the freeway today. Nothing is to prevent it from happening tomorrow. God, if he exists, isn’t particularly concerned about my fate.

Choice#2: God is watching out for me. He has plans for my life, so I was spared. Even if someday I am not spared, it will all be a part of the Plan, and I’ll go up to heaven.

It’s not hard to see why believers take comfort in #2. Everyone wants to feel safe and important.

7

Noticed that scrape you got when you were three lately? (C’mon, all three-year-olds get them!) Neither have I. Whether God’s Plan or blind evolution, chance, luck, whatever, healing is a characteristic of organisms. Near-fatal incidents do happen; whether one survives because it’s not in God’s Plan for them to die yet or by sheer chance or luck is a matter of philosophical taste. And I’d suggest that, sparse as many find it, there is more evidence for God’s benevolence than for something called “luck” that permeates the universe. And “chance” is not a measurable quantity; it’s a measurement of our lack of knowledge. There’s also the human tendency to pass the buck: “God spared me from the hurricane.” Well, yeah, but if you’d moved to Fairbanks instead of Miami, you wouldn’t have to worry about hurricanes. If you’d taken Old State Road instead of the interstate, you’d have gotten home a bit later, but wouldn’t have to worry about insane accidents like this, or drivers with road rage because you and that truck are together keeping them from going faster than ten miles over the limit.

As usual, Ptahlis and Beeruser have good insights into the human psyche and why one might attribute such events to Divine Intervention. This does not, however, prove it right or wrong to believe in such. Most children believe that Mommy will take care of them. And generally, they’re right; there is a Mommy who does take care of them. (The exceptions might make a good Pit thread, but I trust you take my point.)

I personally think that there is a God who works through the natural laws of this world to accomplish His Will in His own good time. And sometimes, we do dippy things that are not necessarily in accord with what He has in mind. Daydreaming and drifting off the road are my fault, not an element of His Plan that I would have an accident today. But if I survive it with only minor scratches, that may very well be because He, for his own reasons, had that candidate put up the breakaway sign my car hit instead of the tree. (All this is hypothetical; I didn’t have such an accident in real life.)

Occasionally I am, in fact, touched by the sense of “what could go wrong” – a tree limb moving ominously in a strong wind, a driver who might swerve into my path, and so on. I’ve learned to expect the unexpected, and to live my life as though I’m going to live through it, whatever it is. After all, the alternative is scarcely worth planning for (except in the sense of providing for what may survive me).

Doesn’t mean I’m a fatalist; just means that I live my life focused on the idea that whatever my purpose may be, I’ll be equipped to deal with it as it comes. Plan, but be prepared to zig when the anticipated zag doesn’t happen. (And if there is no purpose, what difference does it make whether I think there is?)

8

Please elaborate. :smiley: Luck is just randomness to me; if you are arguing against a belief that people can possess a mystical thing called “luck” that protects them from harm, I would agree with you. However, given a random distribution of events and lots of time and opportunities, someone’s going to roll twelve sevens in a row–or walk away from five auto accidents.

“Chance” might be a roll of seven on a pair of dice. We do not know what the dice will be before they are rolled, true (though we may be able to estimate probablities with a fair amount of success). However, I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to get at here.

9

After St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner thanked Jesus for his teams Super Bowl win, Rogers Cadenhead (of Cruel.com fame) wrote this terrific satire of this type of thinking:
http://drudge.com/1900/02/020200.shtml
As to the OP, I think this type of statement is a way of dealing with the fact that there are things in life which are beyond an your personal control. I doubt the average person thinks very deeply about what they mean by that type statement (though I’m sure some do, and have developed elaborate explanations of how and why God works this way.)

By the way, the word for this particular belief is Theodicy. I like it because it sounds like the words theo and idiocy combined.:wink:

Ron Rosenbaum often writes about theodicy (ok, he’s admitted to being obsessed with the concept) in his Edgy Enthusiast column for the New York Observer. If you’re interested, here are some recent columns on the subject:

A Tale of Two Satans, or the New Hollywood Theodicy
Pearl Jam and Littleton: The Theodicy of ‘Last Kiss’

10

True enough, and I didn’t mean to leave the impression otherwise, but some of my distaste with such “God saved me” pronouncements leaked out. What bugs me about such statements, other than the notion of God as micromanager, is the inherent egocentrism. It posits that God so orders things solely for the speaker’s benefit, making him more special than everyone else around. Certainly I am more important to myself than some hypothetical stranger, but that’s a different thing than saying I am more important to God than said stranger, especially if I were to suggest that I was so much more important that God took extra effort to spare me from some tragedy while letting other people suffer it.

11

Giving credit to God for KILLING accident victims also rubs me the wrong way . . . I ran into an old high school buddy not too long after the Texas A&M bonfire disaster, and since he’s a student there we got to talking about it. I still remember what he said – “God must have had a plan for those people.” I almost yelled, “What, to live twenty years and then get crushed by logs? That’s a really shitty plan!” but I kept my peace because he was still shaken up. So God gets kudos both for his saves and his choices of deaths. Good racket, if you ask me.

12

Gaudere, you’re right on target. “Luck” as the spontaneous working of “chance” is questionable but seems likely in the absence of a deterministic universe; “luck” as this mysterious quality which one “has,” as you suggested, is even less plausible than Falungonguian stomach-wheels.

Ptahlis, I couldn’t agree more. Such attitudes smack of pride (hybris, not self-acceptance), the maximal sin according to traditional Christianity (never mind “blaspheming the Holy Ghost” – at minimum, whatever it might mean, it must involve pride to think one can do so).

My understanding of “chance” and “randomness” is that when an event is subject to them, one cannot know beforehand what the result of that event will be, although one may create probabilistic analyses. Rolling seven dice and summing their pips is much more likely to produce a particular number in the low 20s than a 7 or a 42. But you cannot know, before rolling, whether what comes up on one particular roll will be a 22 or a 42. To attribute something to “chance,” therefore, is to state that we have only statistical reasons to believe it happened as it did, and there are no causally mandated sequences to predict the results ahead of time. If you knew that driver was drunk or that truck axle was due for catastrophic failure, sure, the accident was “predictable” based on hindsight, but these are not things one ordinarily will note ahead of time.

Nice columns, tourbot. Like everything else, it’s an attempt to make sense of a sometimes irrational world. And explanations seem to be diced with Occam’s Razor: the simpler the better. The world, of course, is more complex than that. On my presumption of a God with a Plan for the world and all of us in it, it’s complex beyond our grasp. (Gaudere’s whispering "Poly and his ‘mysterious ways’ again right now. :)) Maybe I have myself a new .sig here: “Chief Theodicist of the SDMB”!! :smiley:

13

Awww, Poly, don’t you know that the problem of evil has been definatively solved? Why does God let bad things happen to good people? Well, the answer to the conumdrum is that no entity that fits the definition of God exists.

Carry on…

14

*Originally posted by Bear_Nenno *

[quote]
Wildest Bill, did you make sure to thank God today for making sure you were not crushed by a bus??]/quote]

No, not yet. I usually do thank God everyday for keeping me and my family safe I just don’t get that specific. It would take a while trying to list every possible way of perishing from this earth you know. That is why it it so important not to wait to get right with God. Afterall there is no lease on life, you can go anytime in many ways.

It was their time. And in there belief look where they are now.

15

Where they are right now is a graveyard. Any ideas of an afterlife are pure speculation. So, Bill, why does God cause, or allow, bad things to happen to believers? I can see why He would want to kill atheists, Jews, Muslims, and so on, but He doesn’t spare Christians from suffering either: why?

16

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by goboy *

Is this a trick question?

17

No, it’s not. I just wanted to know your solution to the problem of evil; that is, why does God allow evil things to happen to the wicked and righteous alike?The only answer I find in the Bible is in the book of Job, where the voice in the whirlwind says, “I’m God, you’re not, so shut up!” OK, that was a paraphrase, but I think I conveyed the basic gist.

18

LEMUR says:

And since God is by definition supernatural (and supranatural) you can prove this how? I think it’s pretty well admitted that while God cannot be proven to exist, He can’t be proven not to exist, either.

I admit I thank God when I avoid disaster, or when good things happen. I don’t think thanking Him for sparing me means I am thankful that the bad thing happened to someone else. It is nothing more than what it appears to be – gratitude that it didn’t happen to me. This is essentially selfish, I admit; something like: “I don’t know why you allowed this awful thing to happen and I’m truly sorry anyone had to suffer because of it, but thank you for sparing me that suffering.” The truly selfless thing to do, of course, is to say “If something awful has to happen, let it happen to me! Spare the rest of Your children!” But I don’t know anybody that selfless, frankly; even Jesus asked that the cup pass from Him if possible.

That said, I do not say “God must have been protecting me,” as if God can only impose Himself between us and bad things, deflecting them onto others. I believe He can stop bad things from happening altogether. Why He doesn’t, of course, is an oldie but a goodie in theology, and I don’t pretend to know the answer. But I think He has His hand on all of us – those who live and those who die – but that we just don’t understand why some are chosen for suffering and death (especially those who don’t deserve it) and some are spared (even when they don’t deserve to be spared). Is it an article of faith that while we now “see through the glass darkly” and “understand in part,” we will one day “see face to face” and “understand in full”? Sure. But the bottom line is we are never going to understand why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people (self-help best-sellers notwithstanding), and for people who reject true universal randomness, “maybe I’ll understand this later” is often the best they can do."

I guess I believe that God has the ability to interfere in the realities He created in this world, but I’m not pursuaded He often chooses to do so. I think He probably lets life spin out naturally, even when trucks are crashing and houses are burning and people are dying. Therefore, it might be that I was “spared” from disaster not because of God’s affirmative action of sparing me, but just because of a roll of the dice (and I personally think that most likely), but I don’t think it hurts to say a prayer of thanksgiving anyway.

As for whether I thank God for all the things that DIDN’T happen to me, I think I do that too, on occasion, by thanking Him for my good health, and my family’s, and the blessings of my life. But the bottom line for me is that I see nothing inconsistent in saying “thank God for sparing my life in that bus crash” and then, when asked why He didn’t spare the lives of people killed in it, frankly admitting that I don’t know. For this reason, I also would never say “God must have a plan for me” since, if He does, it might for all I know involve being hit by a truck tomorrow.

19

Bill, take my advice and just say “I don’t know, but I trust that God has his reasons.” There is no satisfactory solution to the problem of evil other than two parts “faith” and one part “mysterious ways.”

20

I like that, Jodi! That would be sig line material if I weren’t an atheist. :slight_smile: