[Dialogue] The God Lecture reprised

[KroegerD@aol.com]

Published in the March, 2005 issue of The Progressive 
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 dike 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 shit 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." 
© 2005 The Progressive
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