A 49 year old woman has lost her job to corporate downsizing, and feels that God has abandoned her because her prayers for help have remained unanswered. The Squad offers its usual, useless spin:
You may have been abandoned by your employer, but you have not been abandoned by God. God does not find us jobs. God gives us courage to face unemployment with a positive plan to find work again.
This seems to be the common thread in the militant atheist posts. They build the straw man that believers think their God is some sort of magic genie who will grant their wishes (prayers) whenever they ask. When God doesn't respond in the way they want, they are supposed to believe He is one of the following:
Malignant.
Not listening.
Not there.
Of course, these militant atheists are all endowed with supernatural knowledge and wisdom to be able to discern with no error the mind of the Creator of the universe. And of course, the Creator has all the motivations that the militant atheists ascribe to Him.
And of course, the Creator is subject to all the physical laws that He designed.
Bad things happen to us because of sin. The militant atheists figure that means that if you sin, bad things will happen to you, and if you don't sin, bad things will not happen to you and good things will happen to you.
This is ridiculed in one of the Raving Atheist's more dispicable pieces called Miraculous where he writes:
TRA took solace in the fact that one dead body was found, but said it wasn't enough to save the parody. "Maybe if five or six of them had died, I could have done a bit about how the survivors' families were gloating about the selective 'miracle' that spared only the rigtheous," he said. "But it wasn't to be."
So he is using the deaths of the miners in West Virginia as fodder to poke fun at believers.
I don't get the attraction. I can see getting in a huff when Jehovah's Witnesses come to your door uninvited, but when a bunch of people are on their knees praying to God to spare their loved ones, I guess I just don't get it.
The best part of this was that he claims his computer froze, and by the time he posted it, all but one of the miners were confirmed dead. So rather than waste an hour of his time, he decided to post the horrid piece. And the only reason I'm mentioning it is that the thing is still up. Even after an outcry from believers and atheists alike (except those who laugh at train wrecks) it's still there.
God sometimes allows the righteous to suffer. God sometimes allows the blameless to suffer a particularly long, drawn out, agonizing death. If you don't think so, go to your local video store and rent The Passion of the Christ. (This might be a comedy piece for some of Raving Atheist's commenters).
The big sticking point for the militant atheists is:
Despite hypnosis, brainwashing, and drugs of immense potency, it is impossible to impose an idea on a human mind beyond all possibility of rejection. Why this should be so is a subject for a later screed. For the moment, it’s the most important of all postulates.
Not only is the mind free, but the sensory conduits that feed it data are free as well. That is, they are not strictly bound by the objective universe—the things and effects that are independent of our opinions. Things happen privately in the brain. This is borne out by such phenomena as hallucination and mirage, both of which are irreproducible in detail in objective observers, but which have occurred too frequently, and to too many persons, to be sniffed aside.
This opens the door to the consideration of private experiences as elements in the formation of religious belief. The agnostic will argue that private experiences cannot be used as evidence for anything, and he’s absolutely correct. But the person having the experience is not bound by the rules of evidence and inference. He is free to interpret it in whatever manner best pleases him.
Though many accept a religion because of successful indoctrination or social pressure, many others accept one because they’ve had one or more private experiences that persuaded them of the reality of God.
Much distress and social friction arise when believers attempt to persuade others to their convictions on the strength of such private experiences. The most important revelation in the history of Christianity, the “road to Damascus” vision of Paul of Tarsus, the doctrinal founder of the Church, was made to a single person. Saint Paul spoke of that private experience to many other people, and persuaded a great number of them...but not all. Of those he did not persuade, many called him a liar, and became his mortal enemies.
Still, who shall say that Saint Paul did not have the vision of which he spoke so movingly? Who shall say that any of the saints of legend did not have their particular visions—or that those visions, being irreproducible, could not possibly have been veridical?
One may dispute accounts of miracles, which occur in the “public” world where such things can be dispassionately witnessed and quantified. One may not dispute something as private as a vision of revelation. There are no metrics for them.
He who has elected to interpret a private event of that kind as a testament to a religious proposition is a “true believer.” That is, he hasn’t absorbed his religion through some process of indoctrination, or chosen it for utilitarian reasons such as to promote social health or to fit in better with others whose good will he values. He’s decided that his vision was the truth, and has formed his conscious convictions around that truth as he sees it.
That such events must necessarily be private and non-transferable is simply in the nature of religious belief. That not all persons who experience them choose to interpret them as messages from God is merely the operation of human mental freedom, without which we would be indistinguishable from the beasts.
I have met many atheists (I like to call them "agnostics"). But they aren't the true faith-filled believers like the militant atheists. I mean "faith-filled" because since you cannot prove a negative (there is no God), you have to accept it as an article of faith. And some fundamentalist atheists need to "set believers straight" at any opportunity, to the extent of maintaining weblogs to ridicule them.
Agnostics are happy to leave believers alone and peacefully coexist with them. When confronted with prostlytizers, they gracefully explain to them that they are not interested.
I believe agnostics have a real chance at heaven. Militant atheists had better pack SPF 5000 in their caskets when their time comes.
