the problem with thanking god (written ~early 2012)

a post from my 2012 blog: exact publication date unknown

I am thrown off every time I hear someone in America thank God for something like helping them pass a science test in school, or helping their team win on the soccer field that day, or making their car keys magically appear under the couch just when all hope seemed lost forever. In fact, I actually find it offensive when people do this.

I remember when I was a born-again Christian sitting in church as a teenager. My pastor was giving his congregation indisputable, anecdotal evidence of God’s grace and love for mankind, of Christ’s “best friend” status in our lives as believers.

He told us that he had been out in the woods on some sort of hiking trip with some other members of our church. They had been swimming in the river, having a marvelous time splashing each other while slipping beneath the light waves and listening to the nearby waterfall.

But it was getting late. The sun was starting to set. They didn’t have flashlights and they didn’t have food and they were in the middle of nowhere so they needed their car to drive home – and yet the driver’s keys had slipped out of his swimsuit pockets and seemed lost forever in the mud at the bottom of the river. The situation seemed dire. They were hungry and needed to eat... and, boy, just imagine how mad the cook (presumably the pastor’s wife) would be if these rambunctious boys made her drive a whole hour to pick them up way out there in the wilderness.

Have no fear, reader – a solution arrived. After diving and scrambling with their hands in the mud below several times, they stopped and prayed together for God to help them. And, of course, the next time they dove, one of them emerged, car keys in hand. Jesus was with them the whole time. He was their best friend.

Thank God.

I find this view of the world to be incredibly disturbing on too many levels to list. If human events function as this story implies they function, then surely there can be no hope for humanity, can there be? It appears the world is under the watchful gaze of a deranged being with outrageously perverted moral priorities.

That is because if my former pastor is going to thank God for intervening to help him find his keys in the river (as well as for helping him and millions of other people do countless other things on a day-to-day basis), then he must by implication be saying that God can choose, as a real-time actor in human affairs, to intervene or not to intervene at any given time and in order to solve any given problem – if he wants to. If this is not true, then there is no point in praying to God or thanking God for anything.

And yet if it is true, then it means God is an all-powerful actor in the universe who actually chooses to help my former pastor find his keys in the river, but at the same time chooses not to intervene to stop the ongoing civil war in the Congo which has killed over 5 million people, that chose not to stop the mass murdering of 800,000 people in the Rwandan genocide, that chose not to save those planes from being hijacked by Islamic extremists who slammed them into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. You can add many other events to this list yourself, I’m sure.

And yet how many families will sit down this Christmas evening and thank God, with straight faces all around, for blessing them with the meal they are about to eat?

And are they not presumptuously and boastfully implying by thanking God for choosing to bless them that God is for some reason choosing not to bless the thousands of women who will be raped on December 25, 2011 - presumably while God watches?

This all implies to me that, well, there just isn’t a morally perfect being watching over us and protecting us.

And that means the moral imperative for improving this planet rests with us. We as humans must be the catalysts of the progress we wish to see on Earth. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that God, whether he exists or not, will intervene in a morally sensible way to do it for us.

If you want something to get better on our planet, work hard to make it happen. And instead of thanking God for the good that occurs, maybe consider thanking the brave, courageous, innovative women and men who have written peace agreements and invented new medicines and stood up against tyranny for democracy.