Rant on.

I logged into Facebook this morning and saw an interesting link from one of the people on my friends list. It said: If God has ever answered a prayer for you, press like!!!!!!! on ♥. I have seen these ♥ links before, and I rarely like them, but this one stood out. How, exactly, does one know if God has answered a prayer? How can one distinguish favorable events which happened naturally from those which had supernatural intervention.

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe in the supernatural. But I don’t believe this question has an answer. If I get sick and I go to the hospital and then get well, should I thank some supernatural being who may or may not have intervened, or do I thank the doctors who I know intervened?

The concept of God is an unnatural one to begin with.  One of my other Facebook friends linked a wonderful commentary which essentially says we are all born atheists.  Think about that for a moment.  If our parents or those we associate with did not introduce us to one religious concept or another, would we have come to it on our own?  Sure, some folks born to atheist parents become religious, but only after immersing themselves into a religious culture.  I believe there is possibly a genetic predisposition towards religious beliefs, but the beliefs themselves are learned things.

This leads to the question of where religious beliefs came from to begin with.  The commentary I mentioned above describes the process as “blind traditions” passed from generation to the next.  These traditions, I believe, would originate one of two ways:  First, early man would wonder, just as we do today, how the world works.  The easy answers would be supernatural:  Lightning happens because some powerful being is throwing bolts of them at the earth because he or she is in whatever emotional state such a being would be in to want to throw lightning at the ground.  Early man invented these beings and the reasons they did the things they were thought to do in order to explain what he saw, from day and night to thunderstorms to the seasons to anything else he saw happen.

The second reason is a little less kind.  I think I have mentioned this before, but religious power is probably the easiest power to achieve.  To obtain political power, one needs to be charismatic and convince a lot of people that one will do a job better than anyone else vying for that job.  To obtain financial power, one needs to gain a lot of money, and that is a challenge for most of us.  To obtain military power, one needs to spend years in training, learning a complicated system, often surviving against difficult odds.

But to obtain religious power, one only needs to agree with the way a lot of people interpret some holy text.  It’s best to memorize that text, so one can quote it to suit one’s needs, but memorizing a book or two isn’t that hard.  It can be done in a few weeks or months at worst.  Go back far enough, and one is writing those texts based on what one believes the people want to hear.  Few would consider editing the Bible or the Koran today, but somebody somewhere back in history wrote them.  God–assuming He exists–did not write them.  God is usually described as a perfect being, after all, and most religious texts have contradictions in them, something a perfect being would surely not allow.

Or would He?  This is kind of the point I started out trying to make.  Who are we to second guess a deity?  We fleshy creatures are certainly imperfect beings filled with flaws who make boo-boos all the time.  How could we possibly have a clue about the mindset of a deity?  In my opinion, we can’t.  God is simply too much for our minds to fathom, so we imagine what we can and hope it’s real.  We can’t really tell when God has intervened as a result of a prayer or any other reason and when he has not.  So we imagine that he has and celebrate the occasion.

I’ll finish with a joke I once heard which I think illustrates this wonderfully:

Once upon a time, there was a terrible rainstorm and a river began to overflow its banks.  A church sat near the river, and soon enough the water began swirling around it.  The preacher climbed up on the roof to wait out the storm and watched as the floodwaters rose to the roof.  Some people came along in a speedboat and called out, “Reverend, please get in the boat with us and we’ll get you to safety!”  The preacher called back, “No, thank you!  God will save me!”  The flood continued to rise and soon the preacher was clinging to the church’s chimney as the water rose up to his chest.  Another speedboat came along, and again the passengers called out, “Reverend, let us save you!  Get in the boat with us and we’ll take you to safety!”  Again, the preacher replied, “No, thank you!  God will save me!”  Soon, the water was up to the man’s neck, and he was barely able to breathe.  A helicopter came along and dropped down a ladder.  The preacher called out one more time, “No, thank you!  God will save me!”  The helicopter waited a short while and then left.  Soon, the flood rose over the preacher’s head and he drowned.  St. Peter was surprised to see him at the pearly gates, and asked, “What are you doing here so soon, Reverend?”  The preacher replied, “I do not know!  I drowned!  I thought God would save me!”  St. Peter shook his head and said, “God sent two speedboats and a helicopter…”

Rant off.