Day 289
-5, 73,497 (+3,416)
I've always been a believer...in something. My beliefs have changed and grown over the years, and my understanding of the mysteries of the universe and Life itself have too, but if there's one life practice I've understood more and more with each passing year, it's prayer.
Prayer is one of those things many atheists and agnostics scoff at, pointing out the methodology itself is flawed, either because there is no God, or that clearly, he doesn't do anything differently whether or not you ask nicely.
And therein lies the issue I as a Christian have found, one which I've learned to understand with a totally different mindset over the years. We don't see any results at all when countless children die senselessly in all manner of tragedies, nor are their any angels on the scene to rescue babies and toddlers alike from the ravages of disease and famine. Did God send angels down, and they just got lost along the way, or are we just not smart enough to see how their blessings arrived? Self-appointed defenders of this claim truly believe that when a child is born into this world with AIDS, or is stricken with cancer, that somewhere in the mysterious workings of God, a blessing is there.
With all due respect, I find this to be horribly foul, and completely inconsistent with all I know to be true. I simply refuse to believe in a God who would save one child from a plane crash but let hundreds more drown in a ferry disaster. I refuse to believe in this warped philosophy, no matter how many times I've heard it spread around over the years.
Yet as I said, I am a believer, and I am, for the most part, a Christian. So how do I understand this all? How do I reconcile my faith with our reality?
I believe Heaven has a mostly hands-off approach in this world, just as a parent does when they let them go off to school or the playground without their particular guidance. Bad things just happen. Horrible, awful, terrible things just happen. No prayer could have saved children shot dead in their classrooms, no deed set about differently by the child's parents or so-called sin got in the way of a blessing that would have otherwise arrived. Bad things just happen.
If we are to pray, and I do believe we still should, our prayers should be wishes of gratitude and pleas for strength. They should be wishes for the courage and sanity to face this world and all its tragedies with a firm faith in God, and a fierce love for all souls everywhere. Prayer has never been a support line. You can't call up God or your guardian angel with a sign of the cross and ask for a flat tire to be fixed, or good results on your Pap smear. Asking God or any other heavenly force to affect the results of this world is an admission that those same powers are turning a blind eye and a cold shoulder to the rest of the disasters we see every day. Believing God recuses some is a brainless belief that he also turns away from many more, and I refuse to believe in a God or a system like that.
Bad things just happen while we're here on Earth. We can pray for strength and we can pray for peace. We can even pray for the abilities to affect change ourselves. But we cannot put our trust in a system that just doesn't exist. It's unfair to God to expect more than what this world has ever received, and it's mean and foolish to think some people are getting all the blessings while the rest are just unblessed or ungodly. How dare we make such cruel and crass assumptions? Things just happen, good and bad, and God isn't to thank or blame for any of it.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know.
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