Cold Comfort

I got a peek at a Christian funeral program recently, and found this allegedly comforting bit of verse on the back page (author either unknown or unwilling to admit complicity):

God saw he was getting tired and a cure was not to be
So He put His arms around him and whispered, “Come with Me.”
With tearful eyes we watched him suffer and saw him fade away.
Although we loved him dearly we could not make him stay.
A golden heart stopped beating, hard working hands to rest,
God broke our hearts to prove to us He only takes the best.

YIKES! That’s supposed to make people feel better?

What’s this business about God “seeing” that “a cure was not to be?” I thought the big guy was in control of illnesses, cures and such. A god that merely “sees” an inevitable conclusion to a course of events and doesn’t do anything about those events either doesn’t exercise any more control over those events than we mere mortals do, or he/she/it doesn’t give a damn one way or another about our fates. I don’t buy the stock Christian answer that god doesn’t perform tricks, cures and miracles on demand. Of course he does, if he exists; that’s why people pray. If god doesn’t perform on demand, then Gov. Rick Perry and his friends should cancel their prayer rally. Christians can’t have it both ways (although that certainly doesn’t stop them from trying) – their god either answers their prayers and intervenes in their affairs, or he doesn’t. This nonsense of “sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t” is ludicrous. It drove me nuts when I was a believer and it drives me nuts now when I see others struggling to make sense of it. The simplest, most elegant answer to questions about why god doesn’t ease suffering, cure illnesses, etc., is that no gods exist to do such things. Personally, I’m more comfortable living in a universe with no gods than one in which gods are capricious at the best of times and downright cruel at others.

And what’s this stuff about breaking hearts to prove something? The god guy could only “see” that a cure wasn’t going to happen – couldn’t do anything useful about it – but he had the power to “break hearts” just so he could “prove” something esoteric about his preferences? It’s interesting that god couldn’t do anything that could be seen and measured, like a physical cure of an illness, but he could do something that necessarily remains unseen and immeasurable, like manipulating people’s emotions. If my boss can expect me to produce measurable results when I work, why shouldn’t people expect at least as much from their gods? Seriously, does any of this make any sense to anyone? It only makes sense to me as a slick marketing package that dupes a) the gullible, and b) the vulnerable. Otherwise, no, it makes no sense to me and certainly is not the least bit comforting.

It escapes me how anyone who attended that funeral found any solace in that doggerel. All I can find is a simple (perhaps even simple-minded) testament to confusion, credulity and grief.

– the chaplain

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