Tell me all your thoughts on God

In keeping with my religious ponderings of late, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the recent mining accident/tragedy in West Virginia. For those of you living under a rock for the past week or so, a group of miners got trapped in a mineshaft and only one survived.

To make matters worse, in what appears to be an unintentionally (but nonetheless shockingly) cruel miscommunication, word got out that all but one had survived.

Being the old-fashioned, blue collar, God-fearing community they were, many of the citizens immediately began to thank/praise God, sing hymns and dance. This is probably the most tragic aspect of the story, as they were allowed to celebrate like this for some three hours before being told the truth — the exact opposite of what they’d been told was true. All but one had died.

I simply cannot comprehend going through such a broad range of emotion in a time so short. To go from uncertainty to ecstatic elation to pure despair so quickly, I would imagine, would be more than most people could handle.

There was one news interview shortly after the unbelievably terrible news was delivered that really got me thinking. An older lady, noticeably and understandably upset, was essentially shouting into the microphone something to the effect of: “A lot of us have started questioning whether or not there even is a Lord, because we had a miracle, but it got taken from us.”

This notion rubbed me the wrong way. First of all, her entire premise was wrong. Believe me, my heart aches for these people. What happened to them was indeed tragic and the miscommunication that gave so many so much false hope is incomprehensible. But the harsh reality is that there never was a miracle in the first place — in as much as the one survivor isn’t a miracle in and of itself. It wasn’t, however, taken away by God, but rather it was a correction of a mistake by man.

This would likely come as little comfort to the friends and families of the victims, but it is what it is.

This got me thinking of a question that has been in the back of our collective mind since we gained the ability to reason. Namely: why do bad things happen to good people?

I don’t claim to have answers to this question by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have what makes sense to me.

Of course, there are dealings with this issue in the Bible, both Jewish and Christian. For the former, there is Job. For the latter, there’s the question that Jesus was asked about the blind man.

Truth be told, I’m not particularly sold on either one of these answers. With Jesus, he was asked ‘Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he may be born blind?’ And Jesus said ‘Neither. He was born blind so that the works of God may be seen through him.’ Really? That’s it? People suffer so that God has a medium through which to work? I guess. Just doesn’t seem like something God would do.

As far as Job goes, I’m not really into the whole ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’ thing. Especially when it seems all willy-nilly-like. Job hadn’t done anything to deserve what happened to him, yet it happened anyway and he still praised God for it. Pretty admirable, I suppose.

It’s been explained to me that the story of Job is supposed to show that what is important in life is that God is present in a person’s life, not whether or not God is just. I have a hard time accepting this notion as well.

In my mortal opinion, if God is not just, what’s the point of His presence in people’s lives? If God’s presence is a person’s life only leads to suffering, is it not better to be separated from God? Again, I don’t claim to have answers to these questions. I’m just asking them.

As far as I’m concerned, God doesn’t micromanage. He created a system, and it does what it does. We all know the rules. Granted, there are some times, I believe, that God intervenes, but those are few and far between — hence the term miracle. But for the most part, things just happen. Sometimes mines collapse — it’s gravity. Sometimes people are born blind — it’s genetics. And some people just happen to have those kinds of things happen to them more than others.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. That’s my opinion. I welcome yours.