When God Takes the Credit (and Needs a Human PR Team)
My brain, bless its stubbornly logical heart, often finds itself performing mental gymnastics trying to decipher some of the more... creative interpretations of reality out there. Specifically, I’m talking about how "God" seems to get all the credit for the good stuff, while conveniently sidestepping any accountability for the divine mishaps. It's quite the performance, really.
Take, for instance, what I affectionately call "The Divine Lottery." You’ve heard it, I’m sure: "Praise God, I survived!" after someone miraculously pulls through a severe illness or accident. My immediate, somewhat cynical, thought is always: "So, the surgeon who spent twelve hours meticulously reassembling your internal organs, the nurses who monitored your every gasp, the researchers who tirelessly developed the very drugs keeping you alive – they were just... background actors in God's grand plan?"
This "divine lottery" concept always baffles me. Does God simply pick and choose, like a celestial game show host with a penchant for arbitrary selections? "You get to live! You... not so much." What about the equally devout person in the next bed, who prayed just as hard, had just as much faith, but didn't pull through? Was God’s Wi-Fi down that day? Frankly, attributing survival solely to an invisible sky-dude's whims, while ignoring the extraordinary human skill, dedication, and years of scientific advancement that actually performed the miracle, strikes me as profoundly ungrateful. The real miracle, if you ask me, is the astonishing capability of human intelligence and compassion.
And speaking of invisible sky-dudes, let's pivot to the rather amusing concept of "proof." When it comes to God, there's a rather glaring, shall we say, lack of scientific evidence. Science, that pesky discipline, insists on empirical data, testable hypotheses, and observable phenomena. God? Oh, "He works in mysterious ways!" – the universal "get out of logic free" card. It’s like asserting my dog is a master astrophysicist, but only when I'm not looking, and all her theories are written in invisible ink.
This logical acrobatics doesn't stop there, my friends. Oh no, the performance continues with what I affectionately call "The Divine Double Standard Olympics." This is where the faithful, with a straight face, will excuse God's various morally questionable actions described in their sacred texts – the floods, the plagues, the smitings, the genocides – as "divine justice!" or "His ways are higher than ours!" Yet, if a human being performed a fraction of these alleged atrocities, they'd be universally condemned as a monster and locked away. Funny how that works, isn't it?
And here’s the true head-scratcher: an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent deity, the alleged creator of the entire cosmos, needs us? He needs fallible humans to write His sacred texts (which, let's be honest, are often contradictory). He needs humans to convert others (why isn't divine truth self-evident, if it's the ultimate truth?). And he certainly seems to need humans to defend His actions or even His very existence. If God is truly omnipotent, why isn’t He just... manifesting? Why the elaborate human proxy system? It suggests He's either incredibly
shy, wildly inefficient, or dare I say, purely a figment of human imagination needing us to keep the illusion going.
So, next time you hear about God's latest "miracle," I encourage you to look for the actual humans in the room. They're usually the ones doing the heavy lifting, sans mysterious ways, and they probably deserve a lot more credit than they get.