Religions > Atheism > "God Owes Us an Apology": Fantastic article by Barbara Ehrenreich
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Marc Satterwhite" |
| Date: |
03 Mar 2005 09:21:43 PM |
| Object: |
"God Owes Us an Apology": Fantastic article by Barbara Ehrenreich |
"God Owes Us an Apology" by Barbara Ehrenreich
The tsunami of sea water was followed instantly by a tsunami of
spittle as the religious sputtered to rationalize God's latest
felony. Here we'd been placidly killing each other a few dozen at
a time in Iraq, Darfur, Congo, Israel, and Palestine, when along
comes the deity and whacks a quarter million in a couple of hours
between breakfast and lunch. On CNN, NPR, Fox News, and in
newspaper articles too numerous for Nexis to count, men and women
of the cloth weighed in solemnly on His existence, His motives,
and even His competence to continue as Ruler of Everything.
Theodicy, in other words--the attempt to reconcile God's perfect
goodness with the manifest evils of His world--has arisen from
the waves. On the retro, fundamentalist, side, various men of the
cloth announced that the tsunami was the rational act of a deity
enraged by (take your pick): the suppression of Christianity in
South Asia, pornography and child-trafficking in that same
locale, or, in the view of some Muslim commentators, the
bikini-clad tourists at Phuket.
On the more liberal end of the theological spectrum, God's
spokespeople hastened to stuff their fingers in the ***** even as
the floodwaters of doubt washed over it. Of course, God exists,
seems to be the general consensus. And, of course, He is
perfectly good. It's just that his jurisdiction doesn't extend to
tectonic plates. Or maybe it does and He tosses us an occasional
grenade like this just to see how quickly we can mobilize to
clean up the damage. Besides, as the Catholic priests like to
remind us, "He's a 'mystery' "--though that's never stopped them
from pronouncing His views on abortion with absolute certainty.
The clerics who are struggling to make sense of the tsunami must
not have noticed that this is hardly the first display of God's
penchant for wanton, homicidal mischief. Leaving out man-made
genocide, war, and even those "natural" disasters, like drought
and famine, to which "man" invariably contributes through his
inept social arrangements, God has a lot to account for in the
way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has
He ever shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A
tsunami hit Lisbon in 1755, on All Saints Day, when the good
Christians were all in church. The faithful perished, while the
denizens of the red light district, which was built on strong
stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last fall's
hurricanes flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida
while sparing sin-soaked Key West and South Beach.
Read the rest at:
http://www.progressive.org/march05/ehren0305.php
Best, Marc
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| User: "johac" |
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| Title: Re: "God Owes Us an Apology": Fantastic article by Barbara Ehrenreich |
04 Mar 2005 01:16:33 AM |
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In article <4227D28F.4746D4F1@athena.louisville.edu>,
Marc Satterwhite <mtsatt01@athena.louisville.edu> wrote:
"God Owes Us an Apology" by Barbara Ehrenreich
The tsunami of sea water was followed instantly by a tsunami of
spittle as the religious sputtered to rationalize God's latest
felony. Here we'd been placidly killing each other a few dozen at
a time in Iraq, Darfur, Congo, Israel, and Palestine, when along
comes the deity and whacks a quarter million in a couple of hours
between breakfast and lunch. On CNN, NPR, Fox News, and in
newspaper articles too numerous for Nexis to count, men and women
of the cloth weighed in solemnly on His existence, His motives,
and even His competence to continue as Ruler of Everything.
Theodicy, in other words--the attempt to reconcile God's perfect
goodness with the manifest evils of His world--has arisen from
the waves. On the retro, fundamentalist, side, various men of the
cloth announced that the tsunami was the rational act of a deity
enraged by (take your pick): the suppression of Christianity in
South Asia, pornography and child-trafficking in that same
locale, or, in the view of some Muslim commentators, the
bikini-clad tourists at Phuket.
On the more liberal end of the theological spectrum, God's
spokespeople hastened to stuff their fingers in the ***** even as
the floodwaters of doubt washed over it. Of course, God exists,
seems to be the general consensus. And, of course, He is
perfectly good. It's just that his jurisdiction doesn't extend to
tectonic plates. Or maybe it does and He tosses us an occasional
grenade like this just to see how quickly we can mobilize to
clean up the damage. Besides, as the Catholic priests like to
remind us, "He's a 'mystery' "--though that's never stopped them
from pronouncing His views on abortion with absolute certainty.
The clerics who are struggling to make sense of the tsunami must
not have noticed that this is hardly the first display of God's
penchant for wanton, homicidal mischief. Leaving out man-made
genocide, war, and even those "natural" disasters, like drought
and famine, to which "man" invariably contributes through his
inept social arrangements, God has a lot to account for in the
way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has
He ever shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A
tsunami hit Lisbon in 1755, on All Saints Day, when the good
Christians were all in church. The faithful perished, while the
denizens of the red light district, which was built on strong
stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last fall's
hurricanes flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida
while sparing sin-soaked Key West and South Beach.
Read the rest at:
http://www.progressive.org/march05/ehren0305.php
Best, Marc
I read that. I subscribe to The Progressive. It's an excellent article.
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
Intelligent Design has as much to do with science as reality
television has to do with reality. - Barry Lynn on CNN 12/25/04
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: "God Owes Us an Apology": Fantastic article by Barbara Ehrenreich |
07 Mar 2005 08:15:13 PM |
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On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 22:21:43 -0500, Marc Satterwhite
<mtsatt01@athena.louisville.edu> wrote:
"God Owes Us an Apology" by Barbara Ehrenreich
The tsunami of sea water was followed instantly by a tsunami of
spittle as the religious sputtered to rationalize God's latest
felony. Here we'd been placidly killing each other a few dozen at
a time in Iraq, Darfur, Congo, Israel, and Palestine, when along
comes the deity and whacks a quarter million in a couple of hours
between breakfast and lunch. On CNN, NPR, Fox News, and in
newspaper articles too numerous for Nexis to count, men and women
of the cloth weighed in solemnly on His existence, His motives,
and even His competence to continue as Ruler of Everything.
Theodicy, in other words--the attempt to reconcile God's perfect
goodness with the manifest evils of His world--has arisen from
the waves. On the retro, fundamentalist, side, various men of the
cloth announced that the tsunami was the rational act of a deity
enraged by (take your pick): the suppression of Christianity in
South Asia, pornography and child-trafficking in that same
locale, or, in the view of some Muslim commentators, the
bikini-clad tourists at Phuket.
On the more liberal end of the theological spectrum, God's
spokespeople hastened to stuff their fingers in the ***** even as
the floodwaters of doubt washed over it. Of course, God exists,
seems to be the general consensus. And, of course, He is
perfectly good. It's just that his jurisdiction doesn't extend to
tectonic plates. Or maybe it does and He tosses us an occasional
grenade like this just to see how quickly we can mobilize to
clean up the damage. Besides, as the Catholic priests like to
remind us, "He's a 'mystery' "--though that's never stopped them
from pronouncing His views on abortion with absolute certainty.
The clerics who are struggling to make sense of the tsunami must
not have noticed that this is hardly the first display of God's
penchant for wanton, homicidal mischief. Leaving out man-made
genocide, war, and even those "natural" disasters, like drought
and famine, to which "man" invariably contributes through his
inept social arrangements, God has a lot to account for in the
way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has
He ever shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A
tsunami hit Lisbon in 1755, on All Saints Day, when the good
Christians were all in church. The faithful perished, while the
denizens of the red light district, which was built on strong
stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last fall's
hurricanes flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida
while sparing sin-soaked Key West and South Beach.
The Christian-style "God of love" should be particularly vulnerable to
post-tsunami doubts. What kind of "love" inspired Him to wrest babies
from their parents' arms, the better to drown them in a hurry? If He
so loves us that He gave his only son etc., why couldn't he have held
those tectonic plates in place at least until the kids were off the
beach? So much, too, for the current pop-Christian God, who can be
found, at least on the Internet, micro-managing people's careers,
resolving marital spats, and taking excess pounds off the
faithful--this last being Pat Robertson's latest fixation.
If we are responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then
God should be, too, and I would propose, post-tsunami, an immediate
withdrawal of prayer and other forms of flattery directed at a
supposedly moral deity--at least until an apology is issued, such as,
for example: "I was so busy with Cindy-in-Omaha's weight-loss program
that I wasn't paying attention to the Earth's crust."
It's not just Christianity. Any religion centered on a God who is both
all-powerful and all-good, including Islam and the more
monotheistically inclined versions of Hinduism, should be subject to a
thorough post-tsunami evaluation. As many have noted before me: If God
cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not
all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give
a damn.
In fact, the best way for the religious to fend off the atheist threat
might be to revive the old bad--or at least amoral and
indifferent--gods. The tortured notion of a God who is both good and
powerful is fairly recent, dating to roughly 1200 BC, after which
Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam emerged. Before that, you
had the feckless Greco-Roman pantheon, whose members interfered in
human events only when their considerable egos were at stake. Or you
had monstrous, human-sacrifice-consuming, psycho-gods like Ba'al and
his Central American counterparts. Even earlier, as I pointed out in
my book Blood Rites, there were prehistoric god(desses) modeled on
man-eating animals like lions, and requiring a steady diet of human or
animal sacrificial flesh.
The faithful will protest that they don't want to worship a bad--or
amoral or indifferent--God, but obviously they already do. Why not
acknowledge what our prehistoric ancestors knew? If the Big Guy or Gal
operates in any kind of moral framework, it has nothing to do with the
rules we've come up with over the eons as primates attempting to live
in groups-- rules like, for example, "no hitting."
Yes, 12/26 was a warning, though not about the hazards of wearing
bikinis. What it comes down to is that we're up ***** creek here on the
planet Earth. We're wide open to asteroid hits, with the latest
near-miss coming in October, when a city-sized one passed within a
mere million miles of Earth, which is just four times the distance
between the Earth and the moon. Then, too, it's only a matter of time
before the constant shuffling of viral DNA results in a global
pandemic. And 12/26 was a reminder that the planet itself is a
jerry-rigged affair, likely to keep belching and lurching. Even
leaving out global warming and the possibility of nuclear war, this is
not a good situation, in case you hadn't noticed so far.
If there is a God, and He, She, or It had a message for us on 12/26,
that message is: Get your act together, folks--your seismic detection
systems, your first responders and global mobilization
capacity--because no one, and I do mean no One, is coming to medi-vac
us out of here.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. She is the
author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" and
"Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War."
http://www.progressive.org/march05/ehren0305.php
Best, Marc
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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