The “how could [fill in deity name here] let bad things happen to good people?” debate has been raging ever since the first time the Spirit in the Funny Shaped Dead Tree Over There failed to protect Og from a serious woolly-mammoth goring. It’s not a debate likely to be settled in my lifetime, and my little read-by-nobody blog isn’t likely to add anything significant to the conversation.
Still, I feel compelled to share some details of an exchange I had this weekend because it illustrates why I often am dumbfounded at the way people use their belief systems to rationalize anything.
I was at a party this weekend where someone opined, “Boy, God sure was watching over those people on that bridge in Minnesota.”
Excuse me? “Watching over which ones, the five or more who died, or the dozens who were injured?”
“No,” she said, “those kids on that school bus – they all survived. God protected them.”
“If he’d really been watching over them,” I said, “That bridge wouldn’t have collapsed.”
This is where it became disturbing:
“But it’s a good thing that bridge collapsed! Now we’ll fix all the other ones.”
Okay, first of all: No, we won’t. We’ll make a lot of noise about it for a while, but in the end, nobody will want to pay for it.
Secondly. and more relevant to my current tirade: You’re telling me that this all-seeing, all-knowing, wise, omnipotent God of yours needed to think of a way to say “fix your bridges” and the best he could come up with is, “Hmm, maybe I should let some people die. Yeah, that’ll work! Especially if I put a busload of kids in harm’s way!”
He works in mysterious ways, indeed. If all such tragedy can be ascribed to him, then the real mystery is whether he’s one cruel, twisted bastard or just hopelessly inept.