God Doesn't Prevent Terrible Things
Assembled from a tweet originally by Ricky Gervais, with additional choices by various forwarders and commentary of my own:
God doesn’t prevent terrible things because: (pick one)
- A.) He can’t.
- B.) He doesn’t want to.
- C.) He causes them.
- D.) He doesn’t exist.
- E.) He doesn’t care about you.
- F.) He moves in mysterious ways.
- G.) He’s trying to teach us that we are responsible for creating and reacting to our physical reality, and that faith operates only in the metaphysical arena.
I choose G.
The fact that you believe in an all-powerful Deity doesn’t absolve you from the responsibility of creating a better world for others – even those who don’t believe as you do – to live in.
That Which Is Divine simply is, and we can’t change that, but only our perception of It. On the other hand, we have all sorts of opportunity to change the world in which we live. If terrible things happen to us and other people because some people are shitty, it’s obviously up to us to see to it that opportunities and methods for shittiness (and shitty responses to shittiness) are severely limited.
Participation in a religion is not the cure for the world’s hurts.
Participation in the world’s existence is.
