What am I Missing?

From the believers' point of view, didn't God create everything?

So God created the coronvirus.  If it appeared on its own due to some science we are yet to understand then clearly God does not create everything or anything for that matter.

If God created the coronavirus then it must be in his plan for people to get sick and die.  Not the plan of a loving God, if you ask me.

If God created the coronavirus and in his plan someone you know and love is sick and dying, there would be no point in praying to God for succor as it is his plan.

If God created the coronavirus, people are going to die, God will not change his mind, God will not perform some miracle to stop the virus, so God is a mass murderer.

So God is either unable to stop the virus, or he created the virus, or the virus evolved, or it is God's plan.

In any case, why would anyone in their right mind worship such a being?

Sunday Morning

Ah, Sunday.  More Americans will demonstrate that they suffer from delusional thinking today than any other day of the week.  More Americans will demonstrate their hypocrisy today than any other day of the week.  More Americans will practice the brainwashing of their children today than any other day of the week.  Churchgoers abound and the mythology continues.

I am pretty much unaware of what happens during ceremonies at Mosques and Temples and Synagogues.  But I do know Christianity.

Some folks will go to a church that proclaims the Bible is a holy book, virtually dictated by God and that the words therein must be taken literally.  They are, of course, lying to themselves and others.  The Bible is full of flaws of historical and scientific nature.  Nope, the earth is not flat.  Nope, the sun does not orbit the earth.  Nope, not a good idea to stone adulterers to death.  Nope, the planet is not 10,000 years old, and on and on.  Worse, there is evidence of other great lies:  the Jews were never slaves in Egypt; Herod died 6 years before Jesus was born, the Romans did not conduct a census anytime around the supposed birth of Jesus, etc.  But, these same believers will say that abortion and homosexuality are bad because they interpret some scriptures to say so.  The hypocrisy of these folks is overwhelming to me.  It seems to me if they claim a literal interpretation of a flawless Bible they should not cherry-pick the verses they like and ignore others. 

Sadly, there was no flood and no ark.  There was no parting of the Red Sea.  There was no city where the inhabitants were turned to salt.  No one was ever swallowed by a whale and lived to tell the tale.  It is as though these believers go to church and turn off their brains so that they can believe the impossible.  One wonders why the Bible never mentions the pyramids as they were built before the Old Testament was written.  One wonders why if the Bible is God’s word he did not preserve the original scriptures and only left his followers with copies of copies of the text, each iteration different from the one before.  Shepherds do not tend sheep in December.  And no star can hover over a specific city.

Some folks will go to a church that supports celibacy in the clergy, does not approve of married clergy or homosexual clergy and yet those same churches have huge issues with clergy acting as sexual predators.  Some folks will go to a church that worships rich clergy who claim God wants everyone to be rich despite the clear injunctions against wealth in the Bible.  Some folks will go to church where infants are sprinkled and others will go to a church where young adults and older get dunked in the hot tub in the sanctuary.  Some folks will go to church where they are told how to think politically and the message is always “be conservative”, despite the fact that the message of the New Testament is about as liberal as one can get.  Some folks will go to a church where a bell is rung and crackers turn into human flesh and wine turns into blood and people eat and drink it anyway.  So bizarre.  Cannibalism is against the law but no one ever gets arrested.

And some folks will go to church where people believe they are vested with the presence of a spirit and they begin to talk in gibberish and dance and roll on the floor.  Some folks will go to church where they believe vaccinations are evil and harmful.  Some folks will go to church where handling rattlesnakes is a test of trust in the mythical being.  Some folks will go to church and believe that clergy can heal them from all sorts of ailments, but they never see those same clergy in a hospital.  

And every single one of them will go to a church supposedly established by their omnipotent and all-powerful god and their god needs money.  More money.  Really?  Why doesn’t God just whisper insider trading secrets to the clergy?

So I think all those people putting on their Sunday best and heading out the door, checkbooks in hand, are delusional.  They cannot prove the existence of a god, of a heaven or a hell, of some sort of secret god plan for everyone, the ability of some being to personally hear the requests of 7 billion people, or of a resurrected human being.  How can they possibly believe all that?

But they do.  Worse, they teach their kids to think in every domain but the religious domain.  In that domain the kids are simply taught to believe hogwash and poppycock.

Even worse for me are the people who claim to believe but in no way act as though they have any understanding of what such a belief would mean.  They play golf every Sunday and do not even go to church.  If one is going to be a delusional, hypocritical believer in the supernatural then one should at least act in ways that demonstrate such a belief.

And no, I will be sitting at home today reading about the latest evidence that we are killing our planet and are likely to become extinct.  Wonder how the believers will justify such a plan by their god?

Into What is the Universe Expanding? (Religion version)

Bobby Jack Schlueter was 39 now.  He still wore his hair long, like a dark shawl hanging on his shoulders.  That was his trademark.  In high school Bobby Jack had been the best tight end his school had ever seen.  He was 6 foot 3 inches big and 220 pounds strong with great hands and surprising speed and most amazing, he was nimble of foot and graceful.  Slow-motion replays of his catch and runs were works of art.  Some defenders he bowled over, some he simply waltzed around, and some he changed direction on so smoothly they tripped on their own feet trying to keep apace.  He carried the team to state for 2 consecutive years.  Those whose horizons stretched beyond the city limits watching him play football knew he could probably go pro someday.  Or, become a celebrity leading man in Hollywood.  Or become a great ballet dancer like Nureyev or Baryshnikov.  He had the looks, the charisma, and the presence to do it all.

But Bobby Jack was 39 now.  He still had the rugged good looks and he still stood 6’3’.  But his frame now carried closer to 260 pounds.  He was sitting on the front porch swing, straining the chains that held it above ground and creaking with the metronome beat of the swing.  One day a link would give way and down would tumble Bobby Jack, swing and all.  But that would not happen today.  Today his hair floated gently behind him on the upswing and slowly embraced him on the downswing.  Back and forth.  Creaking and moaning.  Bobby Jack, a cold beer and a front porch swing.  He both liked and hated these moments alone on the front porch as the sun set, as Sue cooked supper and though his kids had been herded inside still ran around with energy from unknown sources. 

Bobby Jack liked these moments because he could reflect on how good his life was.  He inherited the land his great grandfather had staked out and 3 generations before him had cultivated.  He was on the same front porch his dad and grand and great granddads had all occupied.  He was swinging in the swing his grandfather had built by hand, shaving each of the slats in the swing so that they would be curved to best fit human butts, backs and thighs.  Bobby Jack thought how lucky he was to have married Sue even if he had not realized it at the time.  They had been sweethearts in high school.  She was beautiful and stirred his manhood every time he saw her.  Just after graduation Sue had come to him in tears.  She was pregnant, what would they do?  Bobby Jack was a man of principle if nothing else and he proposed to her on the spot.  He walked away from college coaches waving money, girls and cars, and settled in with Sue.  His father welcomed them back in the old homestead where they lived until this very day and raised their 3 kids, two boys and a girl. 

Bobby Jack hated these moments because he could reflect on all that he had missed in his life.  He was not the college or pro football start.  He was not a Hollywood celebrity.  Hell, he wasn’t even a ballet dancer.  He was still sitting on the same porch of the same house in the same swing as had his dad and grand and great-grand.  He was a fourth-generation Schlueter in a small town in Texas.  He knew he would never escape.  He knew his "all things possible" days were gone.  He knew that all he had left was the same routine his dad had, his grandfather had and his great-grandfather had.  He was a farmer in a small German town and that is what he would always be.  Knowing that, made Bobby Jack, now 39, feel very sad, very lost, and very worthless.  He saw no good future despite the fact that Sue still looked good and his kids were good and he loved them more than life itself.  But he was sad.  Sorry for himself.  So he got another beer, settled back to swinging on the swing and feeling his hair rise and fall.  He was stuck in stasis.

Or so he thought.  Even as he could smell the hay freshly cut and the corn just now crowning he was not in stasis.  Even as he had not moved from this spot for over an hour or for over 28 years since his dad died.  It seemed peaceful.  It seemed still.  It seemed safe.

But he was not still.  He was not safe.  The sun was roughly 93 million miles from earth.  That was a radius.  The circumference of the orbit was 584,336,233.56 miles.  For each of Bobby Jack’s years he had traveled over 584 million miles through space.  In his 39 years he had traveled almost 23 billion miles.  That is not the attribute of someone who has achieved stasis.  So while he was swinging on his safe little front porch he was actually moving on his home planet at about 1,000 miles per hour, looping 584 million miles around his star every year.

And that is just for earth.  His solar system is moving.  His galaxy is moving.  Galaxies are moving further and further away from each other leaving space we do not understand.  Is it dark matter held in place by dark energy, or is that as likely as trolls bowling every time it thunders?  We do not know.  We guess.  But Bobby Jack, now 39, is not sitting still.  And he will soon come to know that.

Sue stepped out on the porch.  “Bobby Jack, supper’s ready.”

“OK.  What are we having?”

Sue said, “Cutlets and brown gravy and mashed potatoes and fresh spinach.” 

“Sounds great, I’ll be right in.”

“OK,” Sue said.  Then she paused.  Then she looked up.  The early twilight was changing.  It was growing brighter.

“What’s that?” Sue asked, pointing at a very bright spot on the horizon.

Bobby Jack turned to look.  It looked like a fireball and it looked like it was heading right for them.  They both yelled at the same time and ran inside and grabbed the kids and headed for the cellar.  They made it.  They called out to God to save them.  But it didn’t matter.  There was no stasis.  Not anymore.

The comet was unknown to us.  It was as big as all of Texas and it had just circled our sun so we did not see it coming.  The sun accelerated the comet’s speed to almost 100,000 miles per hour.  It hit in the Gulf of Mexico and the fireball from the impact spread at supersonic speed around the planet, burning off our oceans and our atmosphere.  No one survived.  No living thing survived. 

Earth would eventually have several rings formed from the debris thrown into space by the impact.  The moon would jostle around in these debris rings and grow larger.  The sun and other planets were barely affected at all.

But, Bobby Jack would only ever be 39.  The universe is expanding from some sense of stasis to total chaos.  Humans in a flash learned that we are not so smart and that there is no such place as safe and sound, no such place as the same old swing on the porch.  We learned that yearning for some mythical good ole days was pure fantasy.  We learned that somehow we were the chosen creation of some mythical deity was false.  The universe was going to expand or contract based on physical laws not all of which we understand, but not because there is some god in some magical heaven keeping watch over us.  

We learned that differences regarding gender identity and sexual preferences did not matter.  We learned that differences regarding wealth did not matter.  We learned that differences regarding skin pigment did not matter.  We learned that any belief that had separated one of us from another of us was inherently wrong when none of us would survive.  We learned all that and knew there was no ark for this flood.  We learned all that, and then we were extinct.

The universe continued to expand.  Earth’s fate was not even noticed by other sentient beings as galaxies collided and black holes ate light and the night sky shown less bright as all the stars retreated from view.  There is no stasis.  There is no status quo.  There is only progression from where we are and what we perceive to the eventual ripping of the fabric of time and space by an ever-expanding universe.  There is no why.  There is no how.  There is only expansion from where we are to chaos.

Had Bobby Jack survived he likely would have reached the following conclusions.  Make the most of each minute.  Bond with other humans as best you can.  Build bridges, not walls.  Solve the problems we can solve and accept that there are quantum forces at work over which we have no control and no understanding. 

All that would be good to do in honor of Bobby Jack and Sue and their kids and every other human on the planet as we expand into chaos.