Tuesday, May 06, 2008

A Quick Theology Lesson

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," coming to you from an unstable planet!

I'm sitting here today thinking about the disaster in Myanmar, mindful that such disasters happen with regularity in almost every part of the globe. Can I get a witness, Kansas?

Natural disasters are often called "Acts of God." As if God happened to be sitting out on his deck, sipping a martini, and he just decided to fling a badass cyclone at a nation in Asia.

The fact is that natural disasters are not "Acts of God." They are, in fact, proof that we live on a random planet where anything can happen to anyone at any moment.

Please follow my logic.

If one particular god happened to be better than any other god or goddess, then the followers of that god or goddess would most certainly be spared the random carnage that dogs the human race.

Illustration of main point: My Mennonite friends back home have never quite been able to rationalize the senseless death of one of their own. He was a young man of 23 who had just been ordained and was on his way to his first job as a pastor to drug abusers. As he was driving there, he was hit head-on by a drunken driver who walked away from the crash unhurt. The newly-minted pastor was killed.

Okay, your atheist would say that this proves God doesn't exist. I say no. It just proves that many deities exist, none of them any better than the others, all of them hoping we'll carry our beliefs in them through natural disasters big and small.

So, random bad shit happens to followers of all religions. What happens when we bump the reward system up to a higher plane? We all die eventually. So, is the afterlife as random as the one here? Or is it after death that the best god sorts out the best souls and leaves the rest in some celestial Gitmo?

We at "The Gods Are Bored" submit that any deity in whom you believe has an equal ability to guide your spirit to the world beyond. We feel that any other theological system would be grossly, unspeakably unfair to the vast majority of humans who have lived and died on this rock. And just as one size does not fit all in shoes, one god does not fit all in souls.

When disaster strikes -- and it will -- ask the deity of your choice for salvation. Despite the propaganda disseminated over the previous 2000 years, there's not a deity out there who can't dole out a decent eternal bliss. They all know how to do it. Every last one. Hooray!

5 comments:

sageweb said...

The evangelicals usually blame these 'acts of god' on us Gays. Hurricane Katrina happened because the gays were getting ready to celebrate...so god punished everyone in New Orleans...That is what they say. I wonder if once they make a statement like this they realize how ridiculous they are?

Big Tex said...

Discordians might argue that the fact that we live on a random planet proves that natural disasters are acts of God (well, acts of Eris, anyway).

Anonymous said...

And then there are those of us who don't believe deity has anything to do with something like that young man's death. but that the young man decided and contracted to live and die that way this time around. It was his decision from start to finish. I? Find that the most comforting of all the possible explanations for bizarre events.

Alex Pendragon said...

It's a crap shoot, plain and simple. The creator set everything in motion Gods know how long ago and has not seen fit to fine tune it or turn purple green since then, thus we have butterflies in Africa causing horrible storms to kill thousands of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, it's all good, because that's just the way physics works, and if He/She/It had decided to furnish us a perfectly safe world covered in Naugahide, life might have ended up so damn boring we would probably off ourselves just to make things interesting.

In the end, I believe the great beyond simply takes me to it's bosum, perhaps telling me it hoped my time spent on this particular planet in this particular plain of existance wasn't too awefully traumatic. There may or may not be a reason behind all this stuff......I'm simply crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

yellowdoggranny said...

gods, goddess's, diety's of all sorts can't control the weather, fate, or random happenings..the goddess said that most of the diety's would have helpd in katrina, myanmar, arkansas,calif,etc. if they weren't so fucking busy answering the prayers of oscar nominees, and players on sports teams..
she said we would already have a cure for cancer if it wasn't for all the people praying to win the lottery..