{"id":5962,"date":"2011-05-30T23:20:44","date_gmt":"2011-05-30T23:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5962"},"modified":"2011-05-30T23:20:44","modified_gmt":"2011-05-30T23:20:44","slug":"the-solipsism-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-solipsism-of-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"The solipsism of faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

Human engineering prowess has long sought to protect people from the sorts of natural disasters that have struck the nation\u2019s midsection over the last several weeks.\u00a0 Some survivors of these recent storms, however, see God\u2019s hand–rather than successful building design or random luck–in their exemption from the devastation that struck down their neighbors.\u00a0 In Alabama, where almost 200 people were killed by tornadoes at the end of April, a Birmingham minister<\/a><\/p>\n

spoke of the miracles of the disaster \u2014 the people who cheated death; the buildings, like his church, that somehow remained. He talked about trusting in God in times of trouble.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Joplin, Missouri, hit by the deadliest twister of the season last week, some congregants at the Blendville Christian Church<\/a><\/p>\n

spoke of their own miracles that kept them alive.
\n\u201cHow many of you have prayed this week?\u201d asked Virgil Eubanks, 60, the pastor.
\nA chorus of hands shot up. \u201cOh yeah,\u201d he continued. \u201cIf this didn\u2019t catch you up on your prayer life there\u2019s something wrong with you.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One doesn\u2019t want to deny survivors of cataclysm whatever emotional succor they can find during a period of undeserved loss.\u00a0 Still, it is always puzzling to me how believers can attribute their escape from calamity to God\u2019s protection without feeling compelled to explain why God did not extend that protection to other people not clearly less deserving than themselves.\u00a0 If God was capable of working a \u201cmiracle\u201d to prevent you from death by tornado in Missouri or Alabama, why didn\u2019t he work that same miracle to save your neighbors?\u00a0 (We will leave aside the added puzzle of why God would allow the natural cataclysm to proceed in the first place and confine himself to piecemeal, after-the-fact efforts to mitigate its effects for a select number of survivors.)\u00a0 The implication of attributing one\u2019s own good fortune amid a wave of misfortune to God is inescapable: God cared for me more than for the deceased victims.\u00a0 Yet only rarely does this implication seem to break through into a believer\u2019s consciousness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When it does cast a faint shadow of cognitive discomfort, there are two main strategies for responding.\u00a0 The first: \u201cGod works in mysterious ways.\u00a0 We cannot begin to fathom his judgments.\u201d\u00a0 Oh, but you just claimed that you recognize his hand in your escape from natural disaster, so his ways are in fact not mysterious to you.\u00a0 These days, Catholic apologists in particular stress the rationality of religious faith.\u00a0 If faith is so consistent with rationality, it should be able to offer a cogent explanation for why God worked a \u201cmiracle\u201d on this person\u2019s behalf, but not on the next person\u2019s behalf.\u00a0 I have yet to see such an explanation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second strategy for responding to the inconsistent application of \u201cmiracles\u201d is less frequently essayed today:\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cGod was showing his infinite love to the casualties of a disaster, because now they have entered heaven ahead of the queue and are enjoying his love face to face.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps when death mowed down children and young mothers on a routine basis, this \u201cnow they are in heaven\u201d justification for premature and random death may have seemed more palatable, since so many innocents were enjoying this windfall.\u00a0 But now that medical science has fulfilled its promise of long delaying this allegedly gratifying early entry into heaven, and has made manifest how desperately we want to put off that heavenly entry, it becomes a bit harder to portray premature death as a boon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The solipsism of faith truly knows no bounds.\u00a0 As the devastation from the March Japanese tsunami\u00a0 was grimly mounting, an Iowa pastor claimed <\/a>that God helped unseat three Iowa state justices who had voted to allow same sex-marriage:<\/p>\n

\u201cGod used David Lane [a born-again Christian organizer] and his sphere of influence to bring together all the elements\u201d of the campaign to oust the justices, [pastor Jeffrey] Mullen said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However important an Iowa judicial recall regarding gay marriage may be to God, you would think that saving over 10,000 Japanese innocents from death and hundreds of thousands of Japanese residents from total upheaval would also be worth a certain amount of attention.\u00a0 But if Pastor Mullen has ever considered why God stopped by in Iowa City but not in Fukushima, he doesn\u2019t let on.\u00a0 And as the world was still taking in the magnitude of the Japanese destruction, a member of my family told me that she prays to God whenever a wild bird flies through an open door into her house and that God guides it back out.\u00a0 She also asks God to send his angels to hold up the back of her property against landslides.\u00a0 If we are made in God\u2019s image, we obviously come by our inability to think outside of ourselves in a consistent, neutral fashion from a good source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Human engineering prowess has long sought to protect people from the sorts of natural disasters that have struck the nation\u2019s midsection over the last several weeks.\u00a0 Some survivors of these recent storms, however, see God\u2019s hand–rather than successful building design … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[169,182,686],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5962"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5962"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5966,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5962\/revisions\/5966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}