It's a Divine Message! You Can't See It?

One of the subtle incongruities that always gives me more than enough proof that there ain't no divine hand keeping everything moving along smoothly is the continued bad shit that happens to good people.
     Like this guy I know. He's a church-goin' guy who participates in the operation and governance of the church to which attends. He works hard. His wife works hard and between the two of 'em, they manage to make their house payments and have food on the table. Every so often up comes a problem and here this guy is short on cash to put gas in the car. Every so often up comes something that takes the tinsel off the Christmas tree or reduces that summer's planned vacation in the back yard to another week at work.
     His car dies three weeks before Christmas.
     So much for that pay check.
     He gets in the car after work, and on the way home, somebody blammoes him from behind.
     And the person who drove into him? No insurance.
     Then his wife's job tanks 'cause the money company she works for filed Chapter 11 and has to reduce its staffing so the honchos at the top don't miss out on their Christmas bonus.
     Cigar smoke and slaps on the back all around, Attaboy.
     So now he's down to getting a ride on the bus earlier in the morning than I wake up so he can get to walk through the rain to get to work to earn some money to find another car ain't beat up too much that he can drive to work.
     Until the next accident.
     Or the next thing goes wrong.
     And all the while he's at church every Sunday, playing music in the service, helping get the choir directed, participating in the worship of his god in heaven who loves him so damn much that this guy and his wife can't get clear one week after another straight.

Oh yeah, his god loves him.

Now to me or the next disbelieving person, this kind of thing is a dead give-away. You can almost hear the George Carlin rant about god's love for your being superseded by god's need for your money. If there were ever a sign of the absolute absence of a divine will – especially a loving, caring & merciful divine will – it would only be a pope dying of some horribly degenerative disease.
     Or hadn't you noticed?
     Nope, this bad shit happenin' to good people thing is to me the most obvious of all signs contrary to the existence of god.
     And we ain't even gonna talk about the money a divine being might need, transcendental and all that.
     Now this subtle incongruity of existence is applicable not just to this guy I know but to every one I've ever seen who tried mightily to maintain their faith and their worshipful attitude toward what the divine "has in mind" for them.
     You know: god has a purpose for each and every one of us.
     Like driving a car into the ass of a devote believer's car.
     That's a purpose, ain't it?
     As if.
     So when something bad happens to me or my family, someone – and it's usually someone fairly distant from whatever's happened – will suggest that god is trying to tell me something.
     "Listen to your heart" is the usual sort of remark gets made.
     I listen to my heart all the time. It goes "lub-dub, lub-dub" a lot.
     But the remarks get made all the same and I'm glad that I have yet to hear such a remark from anyone close to us, which is another reason I love my family.
     But the bad stuff happens and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what it is bad that I might have done to result in bad shit happening. Even as a non-believer.
     And the idea that god is trying implies that the omnipotent god is not as omnipotent as the claim goes, no matter how much free will I am purported to have. Which is another argument.

The ultimate truth of bad shit happening to good people always comes down to the simple fact that such shit does happen. Happens all the time. One day the butterflies are happy in the field and the next day they's daid 'cause they fulfilled their destiny in keeping the DNA around.
     One day it's a beautiful, clear sky and the next day a plane full of people drops out of the sky, sometimes because a believer thinks that everyone on the plane should die 'cause the believer's god told him so. Or her so, if the believer's a female delusional.
     Six hundred and fifty million-odd years ago a bunch of molecules somewhere around here linked up into the beginning of the DNA strands that now cover this planet and somewhere in that molecule a glitch was waiting. Somewhere in that molecule was the glitch that makes people drive cars without collision insurance. Somewhere in that molecule was the glitch that made Stalin such a horrifyingly bitter sonovabitch murderer. Somewhere in that molecule was the glitch that gave my late brother-in-law the degenerative disease that, one way or the other, ended his life a few days before Christmas some years back.
     Somewhere back in time there was a molecular glitch that let the genetic propensity for muscular dystrophy pass through millions of generations of women, ultimately reaching my mother-in-law and eventually her youngest son.
     It ain't my mother-in-law's fault that this happened.
     It's the way that the molecules combined and separated and rejoined over maybe even a billion years that led to that disease and death.
     And it's not much different from what happens when my son gets sick and it turns out to be another genetically derived disease, this time from my side of the gene pool.

It ain't my fault that the boy's got asthma, that he had his first asthma attack on his first birthday or that he had his second attack a few months later just before Christmas. And it sure as hell ain't my wife's fault that she – and she alone out of all her male siblings – kept the genetic molecules around for the possibility of muscular dystrophy or Crohn's Disease available for our two sons.
     Nope. All that stuff happened long ago in the past and, because the purpose of life is to keep the DNA around, that's why all those potentials for life threatening or quality of life threatening illnesses are still here today.
     No divine hand willed this to happen.
     And if some divine hand had willed that my brother-in-law would some day way too early in his life die with his muscle mass nearly gone, such a divine being would certainly not be worthy of any worship whatsoever.
     No divine will worth worship in any universe of any magnificent physical properties would ever even design the possible combinations of DNA molecules that could lead to Stalin or asthma or muscular dystrophy or pain or suffering of any kind. No such a divine being would be worthy of anything and any who presume to speak for or know the divine will are certainly as delusional as any Charles Manson in any species.
     And before you suggest that this is a rant against the divine permission for the existence of evil – which it most certainly is – consider also that it is a recognition of something so deeply ancient that no human will ever know the source of it.
     Yeah, we're talking about the fact that there are no choices and no opportunities other than those to which we are all headed.
     Eventually there will be nothing left and no one will be the wiser or the witness for it. And that little simple truth is the lens through which rational beings with reflective consciousness can finally realize that suffering is part of enjoyment and that even the most destructive elements of existence are not just preassigned but scripted from the first moments of the universe.

We get sick because we evolved from the weakness of the history of DNA. Germs and viruses attack us, lay us low and often kill us because they too evolved from the weakness in the history of DNA. Mutations and misreads and miswriting of DNA molecules over billions of years has led to a huge number – perhaps even an infinitely limitless number – of possible calamities and successes.
     Germs survive by infecting us. Viruses the same.
     We evolved to figure things out and thus we know about germs and viruses.
     As we have learned about viruses and germs, the germs have been responding to what we do against them, based on what we know about them now.
     At some point there is a zero crossing, a place where what we know will be sufficient to cover the worst possible infectious germ or virus but by the time we get there, the germs and viruses will have evolved so handsomely that nothing we can know or do against them will stop them from infecting us.
     Happens to rats in labs and cats and dogs in the street.
     One day you’re here and that's fine. Next day your not and that's fine too.

So before anyone tells me that some delusional mythic father figure with a penchant for hyperbole and knee-jerk meanspiritedness is trying to show me how much it loves me by my son getting ill, please give me a chance to leave the room before the preaching begins. After the past week and some between hospitals and doctors' offices, I think the message about a divine being has been laid out pretty damn clear.
     Out of all the ills that can beset a person, the most hideous is the delusion that any supernatural being tells other people what's going on in the lives of people they don't even know.
     There ain't no god. Dirt cheap, straight up, country simple. If you want to help, go get a PhD in biology or chemistry or genetics and work selflessly and ceaselessly to improve what bits of the human condition can be thus improved. Don't waste your time on gods or books or prayers or penances. Don't waste the time of the human species trying to kill off those who don't believe & certainly don't waste my time trying to convince me that I should.
     This universe has been as it is for fourteen billion years. There's nothing else to believe in. There's nothing else to know. Nothing lasts forever and only nothing ever will. And the idea that an omnipotent being is trying to communicate with me is so monstrously delusional that I have to invoke free will to keep from smashing your lights out right here and now on this page, on this planet.