June 30, 2014
"I've
been a deep believer my whole life. 18 years as a Southern Baptist. More than
40 years as a mainline Protestant. I'm an ordained pastor. But it's just
stopped making sense to me. You see people doing terrible things in the name of
religion, and you think: 'Those people believe just as strongly as I do.
They're just as convinced as I am.' And it just doesn't make sense anymore. It
doesn't make sense to believe in a God that dabbles in people's lives. If a
plane crashes, and one person survives, everyone thanks God. They say: 'God had
a purpose for that person. God saved her for a reason!' Do we not realize how
cruel that is? Do we not realize how cruel it is to say that if God had a
purpose for that person, he also had a purpose in killing everyone else on that
plane? And a purpose in starving millions of children? A purpose in slavery and
genocide? For every time you say that there's a purpose behind one person's
success, you invalidate billions of people. You say there is a purpose to their
suffering. And that's just cruel."
Wei
Hong: Typical question
of theodicy. If this story is true, perhaps he missed the subject back in
pastor school.
VI: It's just a short quote from
what I assume is a much longer and substantial rationale. I don't think the
idea that a class at school can inoculate you against a life time's worth of
experience is reasonable.
Wei
Hong: Abridged as the
account may be (I was unable to substantiate the quotation online and the only
source does not cite a name), this does not affect the underlying issue, which
remains on the single question of theodicy. While some people may need "more
than 40 years" to learn that suffering exists in the world, others may
find that this lesson is immediately very obvious, such that "a lifetime's
worth of experience" is unnecessary.
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