Keep calm and die: Hurricane Sandy is god's plan to kill people

Hurricane Sandy is bound to bring a lot of misery. (Yes, I am intentionally channeling this!)  Along with it, within hours, we will read about, and watch, stories of survivors who will refer to how god saved them, or their homes, or their dogs, or all of the above.

Even as we commiserate with them and take in all the destruction of life and property, the rationalists and atheists amongst us will wonder at the contradiction: if they were saved by god, couldn't that god not have caused all the tragedy in the first place?  And what about the dead and injured who were not saved by god?  Were they not in god's plans?  Were they the infidels?  Satan worshippers?

The religious conveniently backtrack from these troubling questions.  "It is all in god's plans" will be their bottom-line.  A hurricane or a rape is god's way of testing the strength of those who believe in him.  Or, as I remember the line from one of the English essays we read in the early high school years, "god's will hath no why."

To which I have only one response: bullshit.

It is bullshit that we saw in the recent controversial remark about rape and pregnancy.  The Indiana Senate candidate said “if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” (I use the uppercase G because that is how the politician would have used it.)

To true believers, this consistent with their beliefs.  If good things happen courtesy of god, then bad things also happen courtesy of god.  A rape is, therefore, in god's plans.  A pregnancy that results is also in god's plans.

As Heather Mac Donald wrote in noting the politician's consistent theology, it is all thanks to god because:

I mean, if he can perform such Iron Age miracles as ventriloquizing through a burning bush , he can sure as heck prevent a rape if he chose to do so.  His will has no option but to be done

The Indiana politician (the name matters to me less--they are all the same!) was being brutally frank about his hardcore religious faith, unlike most of the rest who are a lot more capable at hiding their true beliefs while mouthing some bromide in the public.

This latest thorny religious issue is not new; it has been one hell of a long theological struggle defending and explaining god amidst all the misery and injustice that envelops us.

Sure enough, this kind of thing has made theologians and annotators very anxious: we have two thousand years of awkward and justifying commentary, in both the Judaic and Christian traditions. The Protestant and Catholic churches struggled for centuries with the implications of God’s foreknowledge of sin and suffering. You can try to wriggle out of these implications by arguing that we humans must have freedom to do good and evil or we would just be automata, remotely controlled by God. But this returns us to Mourdock’s dilemma. Because if God knows in advance what we will do, he knows that we will misuse our freedom, as he surely knew that Adam and Eve would. As Pierre Bayle, the seventeenth-century skeptic, sardonically puts it in his “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” divine foreknowledge of this kind is a bit like a mother who lets her daughter go to a ball, knowing in advance that she will be violated. What mother would do that? Why would God, Bayle says, bestow a gift that he knows in advance will be abused?

The Judaic and Christian traditions are not alone--it was pretty much the story in the Hindu tradition in which I was raised. 

[Religiously] speaking, there are only three possible responses: you can continue to believe in a God who knows in advance the number of our days; you can sharply limit your conception of God’s power, by positing a deity who does not know in advance what we will do, or who cannot control what we will do; or you can scrap the whole idea of divinity. The problem with the first position is that most believers, as Richard Mourdock did not do, run away from the dread implications of their own beliefs; and the problem with the second position is that it is not clear why such a limited deity would be worth worshipping. So cut Richard Mourdock some slack. He’s more honest than most of his evangelical peers; and his naïve honesty at least helpfully illuminates a horrid abyss.

I like that usage: "naïve honesty."

I would rather that more and more people scrapped the whole idea of divinity. 

Oh, how I miss Christopher Hitchens in this context!  I suppose killing Hitchens with cancer was god's plan too, eh!