Cold Comfort
Chuck Doswell - 13 May 2011
In the wake of the 27 April tornado outbreak this spring, mostly in
Alabama and Mississippi, many folks have been quoted as expressing
gratitude to god for sparing their lives. I certainly understand
why a believer who survived the horrors of being caught in a violent
tornado might feel inclined to be grateful to their skydaddy. And
it seemingly does no harm to express that in public interviews.
One question that occurs to me, though: what about the friends and family of people killed by those very same tornadoes? Are they
also obligated to be grateful? “Thank you, oh lord above, for
taking our loved ones from us for your own reasons, which we mere
humans couldn’t possibly understand!” Somehow, in their grief and
loss, I doubt that gratitude to their skydaddy is in the forefront of
their thoughts. What cold comfort might they be able to derive
from their tragic losses? Is it reasonable to expect them to be grateful
for their pain? Just what should they think about the deaths and
debilitating injuries dealt out to their loved ones on the whim of
their deity?
Believers always seem to find ways to rationalize
the simultaneous benevolence and death sentences carried out by their
chosen deity. After all, god was responsible for the tornado and
knew in advance who was going to live and who would end up mangled and
lifeless in the debris. Believers have to rationalize, after all. Dictionary.com defines rationalization as follows:
to ascribe (one's acts, opinions, etc.)
to causes that superficially seem reasonable and valid but that
actually are unrelated to the true, possibly unconscious and often less
creditable or agreeable causes.
In other words, rationalization is a process of denying the truth in favor of a more agreeable cause.
If people accepted the evidence in front of their own eyes, they’d have
to conclude that their deity is apparently dealing out pardons and
executions for no obvious reason. Good people are killed.
Bad people are spared. Where’s the logic in that? Oh yeah –
god works in mysterious ways. That convenient and always-ready
excuse: god needs provide no explanation, no excuse for having
killed your loved ones. Believers must accept the absence of a
logical explanation because there will be none forthcoming, save that
it was god’s will. Rather than allowing us the comfort that there
was some good reason for all the pain we’re feeling over the loss of
friends and/or family, this deity simply thumbs his nose at our
problems and leaves it up to us to figure it out. The skydaddy
sits on his heavenly throne, silent and aloof, without even the
slightest demonstration of his existence, let alone offering the
grieving survivors any understanding of the reason for the loss of
their loved ones in the process of carrying out his mysterious plan.
However, the very same deity is said to have created us in the first
place! God evidently did so without giving us sufficient wisdom
to fathom his divine purpose in killing some and sparing others.
Given his infinite powers, there certainly is no obvious reason for him
to cast us in this seemingly inadequate mold. If we’re incapable
of understanding his reasons, then god is responsible
for that deficiency! It was done deliberately. We simply
have to take it on faith that he loves us, even though he’s responsible
for that anguish over lost loved ones that would cause any one of us in
that situation to ask “Why?” Are these apparent facts evidence of an infinite love for us?
What really bothers me are those clerics and other self-appointed
spokesmen for the skydaddy, who see such tragedies as an expression of
god’s displeasure with us. “Our evil ways are responsible for
this punishment!” I challenge these fundamentalist bullshit
artists to tell the parents of a child killed in the tornadoes that
this was the just punishment of a loving god inflicted on their
child. At best, those parents might accept it as punishment for
their sins, but not for those of their beloved child!
Another good one is that these tragedies caused by tornadoes are just a
test of our faith. I suppose on one level, that’s not a
completely unreasonable way to interpret the event. The problem
is that if we fail the test and repudiate this deity in our grief, then
the deaths and hurt seem utterly without meaning. It’s natural to
want to believe that such pain could only happen if there was some
higher purpose being served. To rationalize the event, in other
words. If such pain is inflicted by a coldly indifferent natural
phenomenon, then to some it could seem much worse than taking it on
faith that there had to be a reason for this agony.
As I see it, the evidence is pretty clear: we live in a world
that is not a benign paradise created for us. We are late
arrivals on a planet full of dangers and hazards. If we’re
killed, it’s our bad luck to have been in the wrong place at the wrong
time. If our world isn’t benevolent, neither is it
malevolent. Only indifferent
to us as a species or as individuals. There is no good reason to
explain why one is taken and another is spared by the tornado. If
you accept that, then you also have to accept the responsibility for
your own safety and that of those around you about whom you may
care. We’re not being saved or killed according to some
skydaddy’s unfathomable plan. We have to look out for ourselves
and those we love. To put it all on the whim of a skydaddy is to
shirk our personal responsibilities.