There was a post on a Facebook group called Conservative Christians Unfiltered lamenting the flood deaths and wondering how God could allow such a thing to happen.
In response, someone posted that Americans were praying as never before, and that a result of the tragedy, so many more people would come to Jesus.
A doubter posting this exchange on Twitter noted that God had apparently been on a membership drive.
I’m sure the families appreciate the tote bags full of thoughts and prayers.
From having to deal with Fundamentalists, EVERYTHING is God’s doing. If something good happens to you, it’s God blessing you. If something bad happens, it’s God testing you. If something truly horrific happens like babies dying, well it’s that we mere mortals cannot understand God’s plan.
I’m guessing this particular event is number 3 so don’t question it, just accept it. 
So what’s the conclusion to be drawn there? That either God is a shithead, or God doesn’t exist and we just live in a shitty universe? Sounds like a kind of depressing worldview. I advise trying to accept the joy and wonder of life, and the inevitability of death, rather than declaring one of them to constitute the fundamental nature of existence and the other to be an illusion.
“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
–Voltaire
It’s not as if people have been thinking about this kind of thing for several millennia, right?
I sometimes think of ancient religions where even the best people went on to an afterlife that sucked. Gilgamesh was headed to an afterlife where the dead drank and ate nothing but dust, envied the living, and if the barrier between them and the living were ever removed they’d devour the living. And poor Achilles! When Odysseus meets him in the underworld, Achilles tells him “I’d rather be a slave to the poorest famer” than remain in the underworld.
A lot of people seem to view Jesus as some sort of genie in a bottle. He’s going to grant all your wishes and make you happy.
I agree that this argument won’t go anywhere, but not because the arguments that there is a God and it is a good thing that he did this to people are correct. Just because thousands or maybe even millions of people have earnestly studied the problem in depth doesn’t mean that they’re right. It just means that they’re really stubborn. It doesn’t take years of study of the depths and intricacies of the argument that a just and loving God would do this to figure out that it’s nonsense.
This event only became ‘part of God’s plan’ when the people in charge decided to ignore the calls to move the cabins to higher, safer ground.
I wasn’t trying to gotcha, I was just providing my own view.
And that is exactly God’s plan: love. Simple and yet impossible to achieve. We are so willing to let our emotions, our rationalizations, our selfishness to justify not showing love to this person or those people. We cling to our excuses, through ignorance and with knowledge alike. It is who we are, and yet we can still strive to be better. Please strive to be better.
After having previously gotten the area they were in removed from flood maps so they wouldn’t have to either not have occupied buildings there or else spend extra money to make them floodproof; and after having gotten a flash flood warning an hour before and not started evacuations immediately.
Yeah they may have been thinking “shit shit shit I shouldn’t have done that!” at the last minute; but at that point it was too late.
I have no idea what any of the families involved believe/d, other than presumably some form of Christianity or else that their kid wanted to go to the camp their friends were going to. I’m very sorry for the families. Some of them may have a crisis of faith but if so it’s not going to be because somebody was sarcastic about it on a message board. Others may double down because they need to think their kid’s in heaven in order to keep going.
Quite a lot of those drownings were indeed caused by immediate human inactions, in combination with relatively recent human actions. And I’m not even talking about climate change.
That strikes me as a remarkably un-useful belief likely to cause a very great deal of damage, whether turned internally or externally.
They’re part of each other. As LeGuin says, “like the front and back of your hand.” You don’t get a functional hand unless you’ve got the back as well as the front.
That said: many specific deaths at specific times in specific fashions aren’t necessary in that fashion. You’ve got to die sometime. You don’t have to die as a child in a flood. That was the fault of the adults.
I don’t get it – why not just magic all the souls that have been and will ever be directly to Heaven, where they can experience all of God’s love all the time?
As far as I can tell, that’s not how this universe works.
you’re using an indescribable tragedy as a pretext to jeer at people. Why?
Jeering at people that believe that the god they worship wanted children to die, you mean?
except that I’ve seen no statement from the camp or anyone else associated with this event say anything remotely like that…so, nah
Having grown up as a Catholic, and having spent my adult life as a member of several different Protestant denominations, this is pretty spot-on.
If one, as a non-Christian, assumes that being a Christian means believing that “God’s will” will prevent anything bad from ever happening to you, or your loved ones, then you have a flawed, strawman understanding of Christian belief.
And, if one, as a Christian, assumes this, then again, you have a flawed understanding of your God – and, as in the example which @CairoCarol shared, it’ll lead to a crisis of faith when something bad does happen, as one questions why a loving God would let something terrible occur, especially to one who has put their faith and trust in him.
There’s a Christian aphorism which says, “God always answers prayers…but sometimes the answer is ‘no.’”
Ultimately, the idea of “God’s will” is, as @Roderick_Femm notes, that “we, as mortals, can’t and don’t have a full understanding of God, and the world.” And, the idea of Christian faith is that, yes, the world is flawed, and there is pain, suffering, and death, but one’s faith means that one will have an afterlife which is not flawed.
But, OTOH, if one is an atheist, it’s easy and cool to make fun of stupid people for believing in sky cake and stuff.
But why bother with adding the incredible complication of adding an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving deity to the mix if it doesn’t change what already is one iota? Know what is really cool?
Going on with our lives without having to waste time thinking about which of the untold varieties of god to worship, then waste even more time trying to figure out what the rules are.
Know what isn’t funny?
People passing the buck by saying this tragedy, and so many other tragedies, are in someway desired by the god they worship.
The afterlife. But, if you don’t believe that such a thing exists, such a promise is meaningless to you.
The afterlife?
Let me know when there is an agreement as to what it actually consists of, which deity actually created it, and what the actual rules are to get in.