Another Divine Oopsie

One of my favorite bits about disbelief is the question of "acts of god." You know: the divine hand works in strange ways, its wonders to perform. Like Norwegian stave churches being hit by lightning. Or churches swept away by tornadoes or hurricanes. Or arsonists setting fire to churches filled with little black chillin'. All that.
     The bad shit comes down and the divine being, even as omniscient and omnipotent as it is, does zilch to prevent the conflagration or destruction or death.
     With Norwegian stave churches, you have this weather pattern problem. Like Norway is far enough north to assure that the wonders of auroral displays being more frequent than thunderstorms with concomitant lightning. Something about air pressure & off angles of solar heating. So here you are in Norway and ZAP! A stave church, built somewhen in the 1400s or 1500s gets hit by lightning and burns to the ground, destroying the center of worship to the divine hand supposedly in control of the lightning bolts. Gone.
     ZAP!
     As is usual after such events, the believing will say that the destruction is a test of their faith.
     Yeah, right. An omniscient god, a being transcending time and space, a being supposedly knowing all that is, was or will be, wants to test the faith of those about whom the divine knows everything.
     I don't get that.
     How does a being knowing past, present and future, complete and inerrant of every person on the planet, need to "test" the faith of believers about which god knows everything?
     If god knows everything and every thought of every person on the planet, wouldn't it know beforehand who is weak in faith and who is strong?
     ZAP!
     Same-same with churches blown down by tornadoes (as has happened around here frequent enough) or churches full of worshipers set to fire by racist bigots. Since when is all that a test of faith? Since god wasn't sure about what it knew? Since god forgot about what it knew?
     An omnipotent, omniscient being forgets? Ain't sure? Has a weakness of mind leaving it in doubt?
     Don't make no sense to me, yo.

ZAP!

So here we go, get up Tuesday morning after a night of rains and storming, only to discover that the famous "Touch Down Jesus" along the roadway to Cincinnati, Ohio, had been struck by lightning overnight. And burned to the ground, leaving behind only the inner metal framework of the "statue" supplicant to heaven.

ZAP!

But even more mystifying is how this particular piece of amorphous, slightly tetched piece of Midwest semi-demi-PostModernist art is part of the grounds of one of those mega churches. The kind with a couple thousand tithing congregants with, I can only guess 'cause I've only read about such stuff, a Starbucks or some such franchise inside the "community center," not to mention other perks to participants in the weekly divine tuchus-licking.
     You know: monster church, two deck parking lot, somebody's always got something going on inside, fancy audio system with flat screen TVs about the place so you don't miss a syllable of the divine word being interpreted for the weak-minded by Reverend Pastor O'Seanessysteinovitch & his pretty wife (with too much make-up) of sixteen years. One of them places.
     Which might make it possible to say that this was a truly righteous "act of God."

ZAP!

By way of this thinking, it might be possible for the divine hand -- if it exists at all in any truly participatory sense in the universe -- to have decided that blotting the church's choice of lawn decoration might have been a justifiable act of the divine will.
     The place makes enough money to spend it on a butter-colored piece of tripe containing damn near every symbolic metaphor of the faith. (And no, I ain't going into how present time Christianity is an accretion of even older saviour/hero myths.)
     There's a freakin' cooling pond out front, from which the Lamb o' God does beseech heaven for release.
     From the pond.
     And even if there ain't a Starbucks inside, it's still pretty nuts, all that money spent on flash and glitter.
     Kinda like the buskers in Seattle makin' enough money in donations to afford an iPod and a nice suit.
     Maybe -- just maybe -- the divine hand dealt this hand to the church to tell 'em to straighten up and go back to Christian humility and caring for the sick and poor and homeless. Like they should in Seattle or Portland, but that's another rant.
     Or, on the other hand, the burning down of the butter Jesus is just another in the millions of lightning strikes occurring around the planet any day, 'cept this one went for the statue, which turns the statue and the church into metaphors by way of interpretation of ancient blathering scripture from the mouth of some guy don't want to miss out on a dime of tithing from his congregation of the multitudes.
     More 'n likely that, at least to me.

Which brings me then, as it always does, to the question of why people will believe myths going back to the early Pliocene if not earlier and have no sense of even grasping the base-band basics of, say, genetic theory or evolution or even the physics of lightning strikes.
     "My church got hit by lightnin'! Oh Lord, what is it that you're trying to tell me?"
     "My church's statue of the Lamb of God got set on fire by latnin'! It is a test of faith! Praise!"
     Yeah, a test of faith.
     A test of faith in the simple laws of physics involved in lightning being a charge between earth and sky, which charge must be dissipated, usually through the highest standing local structure capable of handling the extremes of voltage and current. Like the metal support structure for all that exterior claptrap of a white man's version of a supposedly Middle Eastern holy figure, metaphor or not?
     A test of faith in the guy who designed the framework?
     A test of the volatility of the materials used in making the statue?
     A test of simple lightning strike phenomenology?
     Noooo!
     "It's a goddamn test of faith, you disbelieving pile of evil white shit! Goddammit! Get down on your knees and pray it don't happen to you, scumbag of Satan and god-hatin' sinner!"

ZAP!

So the old "Butter Jesus" is now gone up in smoke. A burnt offering, you might say, to the lord of creation, a lord which took the time out of its busy eternal day to smite a piece of metal and whatever that offended its divine aesthetic.
     One of those rare moments when the divine anger was directly dealt, as opposed to those all too frequent moments when the worshipers of the divine take it upon themselves to smite the heathen disbelievers & others who would insult the faith.

ZAP!

Kinda like that extra brush we had layin' around the yard what we burned up a couple weeks back. 'Cept for us there weren't no god in it.
     It was instead a burnt offering onto the sky. A wisp of smoke & pollution onto the neighborhood. A tendril of "stay the hell away" to the moths and mosquitoes and flies.
     Sure. Lightning Strike Jesus was test of faith. The thunder must have been awesome!

ZAP! . . . . . .
It has come to my attention, by way of the quickness of a friend, that the Lightnin' Strike Jesus statue cost the church in question $500,000. Half a million freakin' dollars! Enough to build at least two schools in Haiti. Enough to feed a whole island in the Pacific for days if not months! And they say now that they're going to rebuild it! What kind of flaming assholes are these believers anyway? Mental defectives? Yep. Delusionals? Yep. Self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, better-than-anyone-'cause-they-believe morons? Yep. Yep. And . . . yep.

ZAP!