{"id":6292,"date":"2011-09-04T20:38:20","date_gmt":"2011-09-04T20:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=6292"},"modified":"2011-09-04T20:38:20","modified_gmt":"2011-09-04T20:38:20","slug":"bachmann-interprets-hurricane-irene-and-perry-prays-for-rain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/bachmann-interprets-hurricane-irene-and-perry-prays-for-rain\/","title":{"rendered":"Bachmann interprets Hurricane Irene and Perry prays for rain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle Bachman recently suggested<\/a> that the summer’s catastrophic weather reflects God\u2019s displeasure with the course of American politics:<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians . . . We\u2019ve had an earthquake; we\u2019ve had a hurricane. He said: \u2018Are you going to start listening to me here?\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Predictably, she has now retracted her theological claims and says she was just joking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the earthquake and hurricane did not represent God’s will, what did<\/em> they represent in a world governed by an omnipotent, omniscient God?\u00a0 Screw-ups?\u00a0 Things that just slipped by his attention?\u00a0 Any believer who dares articulate the unavoidable implications of religious practice these days, however, \u00a0will be forced into just such a recantation as Bachmann’s, for religious faith conflicts with what, for contemporary society, is the far more important secular ethic of tolerance and inclusion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This spring, Texas Governor Rick Perry issued a proclamation <\/a>declaring April 22 to April 24 as \u201cDays of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Now what is logically entailed by such a proclamation?\u00a0 The same implications regarding divine will as were behind Bachmann\u2019s unacceptable gloss:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 That God has omnipotent power over earthly events.
\n2.\u00a0 That such power exists whether the power-holder decides to change or to maintain a status quo: both action and inaction represent deliberate Godly intentions towards reality.\u00a0
\n3.\u00a0 That if God wants to end the Texan drought, he can.
\n4.\u00a0 That God is aware of our prayers.\u00a0
\n5.\u00a0 That God has the capacity to act upon our prayers.
\nSpecifically to Perry\u2019s proclamation (and to every other such \u201cgroup day of prayer\u201d):
\n6.\u00a0 That God employs democratic pollsters who tabulate public opinion: the more people praying to him to take a particular course of action, the more likely it is he will rouse himself to that action (this corollary of all such calls to collective prayer conflicts of course with the equally prevalent meme that all it takes is one voice crying out for help to move God to action).<\/p>\n

Since Perry and his fellow Texan prayer-senders believe that God should be moved by their collective appeal, they assume that he will clearly understand their worth and their need for relief and that such worth and need for relief constitute a persuasive ground for action.\u00a0 Therefore, and necessarily, they must feel that they are more worthy in God\u2019s eyes than the victims of the Japanese tsunami, of the Joplin, Mo., tornado, and of every other victim of the daily slaughter of the innocents whom God has allowed to perish in natural disasters which he had the power to cancel.\u00a0 After witnessing such mass devastation in Japan and in the U.S., why else would Perry and his fellow Christians now come to God with their request for some rain?\u00a0 Clearly, they must present more persuasive cases for aid than did the thousands of tsunami victims.\u00a0 Otherwise, God would have spared these latter their sorry fates, which none of them or their relatives and friends would have wished upon them and which every victim would have prayed to avoid if, like Perry, they believed in the power of prayer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

To suddenly invoke the obscurantism defense\u2014\u201cOh, God\u2019s grand, majestic will is inscrutable to us, how dare you, you measly, ignorant worm, draw any implications about God\u2019s attitudes towards his victims from the daily massacre of the innocents\u201c\u2014simply will not do, given the confidence with which believers attribute \u201cmiracles\u201d\u2014such as the survival of a single child in a village devastated by an earthquake\u2014to God\u2019s love.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is no middle ground between a view that every thing that happens is the consequences of God\u2019s action or deliberate non-action, and a view of the universe as proceeding randomly without divine guidance.\u00a0\u00a0 The latter view is far easier to square with the daily massacre of the innocents; only the human need for, as Michael Novak puts it, a special \u201cFriend\u201d in the sky that can be called on to get us out of fixes leads humans to posit a loving God, whose existence requires the utter torture of logic and reason to reconcile with the randomness of human tragedy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bachmann\u2019s attribution of divine pique to Hurricane Irene and other natural disasters is perfectly consistent with Christian faith.\u00a0 It is the retraction of that claim that is inconsistent.
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Bachman recently suggested that the summer’s catastrophic weather reflects God\u2019s displeasure with the course of American politics: \u201cI don\u2019t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians . . . We\u2019ve had an … 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":[169,38,147,833],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6292"}],"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=6292"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6297,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6292\/revisions\/6297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}