Sunday, January 18, 2009

An Interesting Read -- God's Little Problem...

Click Here! (Found via Andrew Sullivan's blog: "The Daily Dish")

Highlight from the article...
The vast majority of Christians, guided by their priests and pastors, assume a loving God who intervenes regularly in human affairs. Christians pray to God to cure them from cancer or protect them from a plane crash. (Intermediaries are also useful: A soon-to-be closed Catholic school in Brooklyn is called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, presumably because She does provide perpetual help, but not in this case.) A politician and Baptist minister in Kentucky is promoting a law requiring the state’s office of homeland security to display a plaque that reads: “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.” Apparently God is not just a co-founder of the United States but also a federalist, honoring state boundaries in his on again, off again solicitude for the country.
However, the article points out, this assumption leads to the following conundrum...
Since believers give credit to God for answering their prayers when they are saved from catastrophe or illness, they have to explain why he answered their prayers and not those other people’s prayers, why he saved these children from a tsunami and not those other children. Any believer who today thanks God for making sure that his coronary bypass operation was successful has to explain why God allowed at least 37 peasants to be buried in a Guatemalan landslide on Sunday. Such an explanation requires either extraordinary narcissism on the believer’s part or positing capricious injustice on the part of God.

And this is why I've always been incredibly annoyed by those who've told me, "We were blessed..." (fill in the blank with whatever). Don't they realize what they're really saying?