The works of God

God, according to his devotees, does more than occasionally appear on pieces of toast.  People have been known to thank God for winning a football game, or for successful surgery, or for surviving some disaster such as a tornado that wiped out the rest of the neighborhood, or even for finding a lost set of keys.  Even in the modern world, apparently, miracles abound and prayers are often answered.

Such claims suggest, though, that God has very peculiar priorities.

Slavery existed in this country for several generations.  Most of the slaves were Christians, having been converted to the religion of (conveniently) "resist not evil" and "turn the other cheek" by their enslavers.  No doubt many of them, in the course of entire lives spent in forced labor and degradation and brutalization, prayed to the Christian God for deliverance from their lot; certainly all of them deserved it.  Yet generation after generation, no such deliverance ever came, except in occasional cases of escape or manumission -- acts of individual human effort or mercy.  The end of slavery was finally achieved via a bloody war and the Thirteenth Amendment, with no sign of any supernatural intervention.

During the Nazi holocaust, millions were murdered purely due to their ethnicity, or in some cases due to being disabled or homosexual.  And again, many of them must have prayed to be saved, and none deserved their fate.  Yet God, whose miracle-working power (displayed again and again before the eyes of the world during Biblical times, according to Christian mythology) could easily have stopped the whole thing in an instant, did nothing.  Turning water into wine to keep a party going 2,000 years ago was sufficient reason for a public display of that power, but stopping a genocide was not.  Eventually the mass murders and other atrocities ended because Nazi Germany's military might was laboriously beaten down by that of other countries, at staggering cost in death and misery and destruction.  Not a scintilla of evidence of even the subtlest divine intervention can be discerned.

And yet the God who never visibly interfered in those horrors casually reaches down to help you find your car keys?  Or to help one side win a football game?  (How does he choose which team to support?)  Perhaps the clearest sign of God's non-existence is his failure to strike down the people making such claims with lightning bolts out of exasperation at their sheer self-importance.

Does the tornado survivor thanking God believe himself to be more worthy of such divine aid, not only than his neighbor whose family was obliterated, but even than the tormented slave on an antebellum plantation or the child facing his last moments in a Nazi gas chamber?  On what grounds?  As for the person who comes through risky surgery, his survival is due to human technology and skill developed over many decades with no noticeable sign of supernatural assistance.  I'd also note that centuries ago, when we had less technology and more faith, the rates of survival in such situations were far lower.

A world in which God routinely intervened for our benefit, as so many believers claim that he does, would look very different from the world we actually see around us -- especially its history.  A world in which anything like the God they believe in existed at all would look very different from the world we actually see around us.

You found your own car keys.  Give yourself the credit, if you want to make that big an issue of it.