In Genesis chapter 22, God commands Abraham, who had no small difficulty having a child at all, to take his son Isaac to the top of a mountain and slit his throat. Abraham doesn’t ask why and no doubt it wouldn’t have done him any good to have asked anyway. God always has his –reasons-. Luckily for Isaac, God sent an angel at the last minute to stop the sacrifice but it still begs the question of WHY you would put someone through such an ordeal. Especially someone who has been as faithful as Abraham.
A few short millennia later I’m watching the morning news and who should grace my vision but a poor child in a wheelchair. She’s the victim of a debilitating condition that will probably take her life before she reaches adulthood. As the reporter is talking to her she pipes up that she’s not sad that she’s this way. God made her this way –for a reason-. Again, here’s the Christian God with his undisclosed –reasons-. What POSSSIBLE justification could there be for purposefully allowing a child to suffer in this way? What chain of causal events could be so beneficial to the world that it would justify a human soul trapped for an entire lifetime in a fragile and decaying body this way? I’m sure that God has his –reasons-.
It endlessly amazes me that we hold the character of God up to such different standards than we apply to ourselves. If a mad scientist came to us and said that he could improve the world in some unspecified way if he were just allowed to inject 10 children with drugs that would cripple them for life, would we let him? Perhaps we would if those were children from some other country since we seem to put a much lower value on those but 10 random American children? Would we? Of course we wouldn’t. There would be rioting in the streets. Would there be any reason that could be given? Would we cripple 10 children to save 100? To save 1000? To feed every starving person in Africa? To educate every ignorant yokel in Appalachia to the point that they could actually spell Appalachia? I doubt it. There is no reason, no objective, that would be good enough to satisfy our combined moral outrage. Yet when God, in his –infinite- wisdom, strikes down a child for no discernable reason we all just nod and say, -he has his reasons-.
No, what it really boils down to is that we don’t understand it and, like every other facet of religion, we rely on the perceived –wisdom- of God as a comfort for our outrage. Truth is, there’s no excuse for it. If God really pulls this shit for some reason then he’s a jerk. Plain and simple. It’s much easier for us to simply shrug it off and say that we can’t –possibly- understand God ‘cuz we’re just too frickin’ stoopid but that if we did then we’d all nod and make the same sad decision ourselves.
Is the alternative hypothesis to this really so horrible? Say for a moment that God exists but that he doesn’t bother himself with every meaningless triviality in the cosmos. Sure, he’s helping NFL receivers catch touchdown passes but he’s not intimately involved in the exact reproductive configuration of every pair of Kentucky cousins who choose to settle down and bring up some yungins. As a consequence, mistakes happen. Chromosomes get lost or shuffled around and defects in the system crop up from time to time but on the whole the human species manages to procreate just fine. Under this system God is not a jerk so much as he is merely careless. Perhaps he just hadn’t yet had his morning coffee. I don’t know about you but I’d much prefer to live with someone who’s a bit of a grump and a smidge careless before he (or she) has had their morning coffee than with someone who clearly has it out for me and has omnipotence to back it up.
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