This has been on the radio the whole morning. Yesterday there was a massive accident on one of our roads. A runaway truck hit 25 cars and one specific car got stuck under the truck and got smashed but the driver escaped unscathed. The big story is he cancelled his life insurance policy a few days earlier because he was feeling bad that he wasn’t tithing. He cancelled his policy to pay the money to the church. According to him God saved his life and he is eternally grateful for having done his Christian duty to tithe.
My mom forwarded an email to me the other day about people that died after saying something disrespectful about religion (one was John Lennon). At the end, it had the usual “forward to however many people and your wish will come true”.
I think that guy would have really dug it.
I found it deeply confusing and disturbing, myself. No matter how I interpret it, it seems quite mean-spirited (and okay, crazy). Mom will not discuss it with me.
Sounds to me more like God is saying, "Reinstate your life insurance, you stupid fuck!"
It’s bewildering to me how people can believe in a God who does malicious and capricious things like that, just because he’s God and can fuck with people at will. If that type of God really existed, I would reject Him on plain principle.
I once encountered a LiveJournal discussion group where the topic turned to various people’s illnesses. One was a lady who had started experiencing migraine headaches; her response to this was “Why me??? I’m a good Christian, this shouldn’t be happening!!” :rolleyes:
I give money to various wildlife/animal groups rather than to a church. Is this why birds always #2 on my vehicle’s windows rather than the paint?
I’ve mentioned this before. I participate in some adoption related groups. Adoption is an expensive thing. We had one woman who told this story (or something like it).
“I didn’t know how I’d pay for our adoption. So I prayed to Jesus. And I remembered that my husband had a motorcycle in the garage. So I made him sell it. And I prayed some more. And I had mentioned to a neighbor we were adopting and how expensive it was, and she offered me $200 a week to watch her kids. And I prayed some more. And I put some old stuff up on eBay and it sold. Every time I prayed, I figured out a new way to pay for our adoption.”
I responded something to the effect of “I’m a deist married to an atheist. We weren’t sure how we were going to pay for our adoption. Then a relative my husband had met twice died and left us a lot of money in her will - more than enough to pay for the adoption.” (True, by the way).
Seems like if her God was answering her prayers, he took a detour to drop money from the sky into my lap and was making her work darn hard for hers.