re: #109 Obdicut

That article seems to be saying that people like Dobson who are uselessly blaming the Newtown massacre on “God’s judgement” over abortion, gays etc. are sputtering because they are too proud to admit that the massacre made it clear to them that the murder of children is not the same thing as, is much worse than abortion.

But he’s missing a few things. While it’s true that they are reacting more strongly to this than they would to the weeks abortion statistics, and that implicitly proves that point, what they’re really doing is maintaining an assertion that bad things happen only when God is angry at the victim - ie. that providence prevents all real evil.

That this involves blaming innocent people like gay newlyweds for the slaughter of children - indeed involves even blaming the children for being part of the same nation as those gays - is not a coincidence.

For one thing there’s Exodus “… I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me”

The inhumanity, the horror, the monsterousness of believing in providence was always there. If you believe in providence, then you have to believe that 6 million Jews, families and all, were so hated by God that he inflicted the Holocaust on them. If you believe in providence, then you have to believe that AIDS victims are being justly punished for their sins. If you believe in providence, then you have to believe that the plagues that swept the New World when the Europeans arrived were a judgement on the heathens who already lived here. You have to believe that God hated Africans so much that he allowed slavery in the US. etc. etc. etc.

Belief in providence is not just childish wishful thinking, but it’s childishness necessarily married to inhumanity. And what we see in these inhuman statements by religious nutcase after religious nutcase is how many of them are deeply embedded in wishful thinking AND inhumanity.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. If you’ve been paying attention to the right, then you know, for instance, that opposition to environmental legislation has long been rooted in a belief in providence. Rush Limbaugh said “God would not make a world that man could harm”

Opposition to health care insurance was predicated on something similar.

Opposition to AIDS funding was predicated on providence.

Etc.

The problem is that these people are deeply immature, unable to face neither the nature of evil nor the fact that mankind, that society has responsibilities to prevent tragedy. The can face the fact that people have to, sometimes, oppose evil, but they can’t face the fact that God doesn’t protect from massive tragedy. That’s too big for them.

Perhaps their belief in God and in an afterlife are also based in the unwillingness to face the possibility of horror. Perhaps, if they were emotionally capable of facing the reality of being unprotected they wouldn’t be believers in the first place.