If you ask nicely
It’s maybe inappropriate to complain about public godbothering at this time, but there’s such a fundamental absurdity at the heart of the whole thing that I can’t not raise an objection. I’ll just leave names and handles out of it.
A guy on Twitter, a guy who writes for the Atlantic and wrote a book called Learning to Speak God From Scratch (so you can find his name obviously, I’m just not naming him here), tweeted:
I don’t often ask for prayer on here, but my friend Laura from NYC has COVID-19. She has double pneumonia and is in ICU on a ventilator fighting for her life right now. She is only 30. Please pray for her.
I hope she survives. Best of luck to her. But that tweet…he doesn’t often ask for prayer on Twitter but this time he will – because what? It will work but it should be used sparingly? Why? If it works why not use it non-stop? Why not get lists of critically ill people and request prayers for all of them? Or is it because he knows it doesn’t work, or suspects it doesn’t, or knows most of us know it doesn’t, and so he would feel silly requesting it often? Or because he doesn’t like to be a nuisance so he doesn’t request miraculous intervention except when it’s for a friend who’s only 30?
In other words it doesn’t make sense. If you believe in prayer and believe it works, then why would you ration your use of it? If you don’t believe it works, why would you request it at all?
But also…the perpetual issue with these things…if you believe in a god who rescues people from fatal illness if you ask nicely, why do you believe in a god like that? The god must have caused the epidemic, right? Or at least looked fixedly in the opposite direction rather than stopping it. Why ask god to spare one particular person instead of everyone?
I know people have rationalizations to make it all seem coherent, I just don’t think they make much sense.
He got lots of replies that have the same problems. “Please, daddy god, fix this one person, no hard feelings about creating the pandemic in the first place.”
Praying for Laura and all the other victims of this horrible virus. Praying for the doctors, nurses and first responders. In addition praying for all the workers who are working in essential business today. I’m just on my knees praying.
To the monster who made it all happen. Why would that work, exactly?
Praying for Laura…knowing that God hears, cares, and is able!
Oh yes? Then why did God make her so ill in the first place?
Spirit of Life, be as you were at Laura’s first breath, life-giving, then again and again until her lungs are strong and clear. Sustain and protect all medical helpers, both at her bedside and everywhere across this planet. Have mercy on us all, O God, amen
It’s as if parents never fed their children unless they got down on their knees and begged.
Praying probably makes people feel better, and things that make people feel better are nothing to sneer at. But. But. It’s a very Stockholm syndrome kind of feeling better, this crawling at the feet of a monster who unleashed a novel virus on defenseless humans.
Seriously, god should have plenty of time to work on this, with all the sports cancelled. We even gave him that – hey, God, no sports, so get off your duff and do something. The basketball game isn’t on, so why are you staring at that television set when people are dying?
I think it’s very easy for people to hold two opposing views at once when they abandon the secular world of reason and deal instead with the spiritual realm of faith. The normal rules of coherency, consistency, and testability go out the window, because this form of reality is different. So on the one hand, God’s created everything, every event, and is in complete control. God is not like us. Don’t think of God as being like us.
But on the other hand, God is like us, but more powerful and magic. He’s surprised, concerned, and pulled in many directions. He weeps when we weep. If we plead, He’ll notice us and do what He can. It’s proper and respectful to think of God as being like a king, or a father. They help in dire circumstances, but didn’t create the circumstances.
Theists want both versions of God, needing one interpretation to understand the world in general, and the other one for practical purposes which are more specific and personal. Christians notice the conflict and are thrilled and relieved to point out that Jesus is simultaneously fully God and fully human. That’s supposed to address the absurdity of asking a God who gave the plague to cure the plague. There’s God — and there’s also God. And so with all the theodicies. As solutions to the Problem of Evil, they sound good on the surface (“it’s a soul-building experience!”) but fall apart with critical analysis.
Critical analysis is therefore arrogant. Don’t think of God as being like us.
I can sort of understand the — not logic, really, but emotional reasoning, behind it.
When I was an adolescent, I was sort of a believer, in the sense that I didn’t know much if anything about atheism and wasn’t really aware of it as an option so to speak. I assumed that some sort of god must exist, though I was aware of the world enough to realize that there were wildly differing beliefs about what this god should be called and what he, she, or it wanted or liked and didn’t like.
I hardly ever prayed, because it was pretty apparent to me even then that prayer didn’t work like Santa Claus. You couldn’t just ask for something and then realistically expect to get it. So I came up with various theories as to how to go about it. One of which was that you should only ask for stuff sparingly, and balance that out with prayers that were just saying “thanks, God!” Because, you know, God would get annoyed with you if you were always asking for stuff and never being nice to Him.
Obviously that conflicts with the claims that God is all-powerful and all-loving: an all-powerful god can’t be “overwhelmed” by too many prayers, nor would an all-loving god only be willing to intercede for people who praise him frequently enough. But I’m not entirely sure how many believers really take the “tri-omni” stuff literally. I think for a lot of believers, that’s just a sort of hyperbole. What they really believe in is a very anthropomorphic god. Much more like the stereotypical “primitive” god beliefs, where you have to negotiate and butter them up and be careful not to annoy the deity in order to once in a while maybe get something really important.
This comes up a lot in the context of Christian athletes. Lots of Christians get just as annoyed as many atheists do when some athlete starts thanking Jesus for them winning the big game. “God doesn’t care who wins a silly sporting contest,” say these reasonable, moderate Christians. “God’s got more important things to do!” Again treating a supposedly all-knowing, all-powerful entity as if it has finite resources of time and attention and ability.
Anyway, I’m not criticizing your point or claiming that there’s any rigorous logic behind this sort of reasoning, just making my shot at explaining the mindset.
Or… what Sastra said while I was typing all that.
Don’t think of God as being like us, but do go right ahead and put in requests anyway. Oh and don’t blame God if the requests are ignored.
…she said in reply to Sastra while Screechy was typing all that.
For me, that was a key point. God actually did work like Santa Claus. Because I came from a poor family, it didn’t matter what I asked Santa for, I wasn’t going to get it. (I suppose if I ever asked for a broken leg or a black eye, maybe I could have gotten what I asked for). When I asked God for something, it was exactly like asking Santa Claus for something. At the end of the day, my hands would be empty.
My mother had an answer for that, though, and it is familiar to a lot of Christians (though probably not the nice moderate Christians mentioned by Screechy): God only answers prayers if you are good.
By the way, in case you wondered, I was not only the best behaved (i.e. good) child in my family, but also in my school. I observed the rules set out for moral behavior, did the things I was supposed to do, and was nice to kittens and puppies. I didn’t give my mother, or my teachers, even a fraction of the trouble my siblings or classmates did. So the lesson I learned is that there is no such thing as being good enough to satisfy God.
I saw the post’s title and figured it would be about Trump, not God.
Okay, still could be about Trump…
Prehaps some of this annoyance from “reasonable, moderate Christians” is the thought that the “NFL Christians” really think that their God would in fact tip the game while ignoring famine, pestilence, war and amputees. Somehow, “NASCAR God” finds the prayers for sports teams more worthy. These prayers are certainly much easier to fulfill: barring a draw, somebody actually wins, and somebody’s prayers are answered. Low level miracles are better than none at all, I guess. But to accept and worship a God who operates in this manner is horrifying. The conspicuos extravegance of “Prosperity Gospel” televangelists explicitly promotes and celebrates exactly this sort of God. These oleaginous hucksters are another manifestation of the belief in a diety who is willing to reward publicly the obedient, fawning few in their smallest endeavours, while ignoring the untold misery of innocent millions who struggle to even live. Just like how the God-thanking survivors of air crashes, earthquakes or mass shootings that happened to kill dozens or hundreds of others think they’re somehow more worthy than those whom their God just killed, let die, or “called home”. I certainly don’t blame reasonable, moderate Christians for distancing themselves from believers in a God as monstrous as that.