- Professional athletes who make some sort of religious gesture when they come to bat, prepare for a foul shot, or line up for a field goal. Leaving aside the chutzpah implicit in the assumption that the deity has nothing better to do than take part in their activity, what happens if they make the gesture and are unsuccessful? Does it mean that the deity favors the other team or likes some other player better or that this player is unworthy of help? If a player constantly prays before coming to bat and then hits for a low average, does the player reexamine his or her life and try to become more worthy of help? What if a player prays before the action and then cheats by, say, taking steroids?
- The religious right who are praying to god to create more vacancies on the Supreme Court to replace the godless activitist justices with more correct justices, justices who would allow the placement of the ten commandments in court buildings (despite the fact that, as Bill Maher has pointed out, only two of the ten commandments are actually laws) and permit prayer (Christian prayer) in public school. If god is all powerful, then how did the current justices get on the Court in the first place? Did they sneak in whilegod was on his annual five-week vacation? And if god is all powerful, and justices are removed by death or illness, are the people who pray for that to happen accessories to attempted murder or reckless endangerment?
- The settlers in the Gaza strip who resisted leaving because they claimed that god had placed them there. Isn't it also a possiblity that god now wants them to leave?
- And leave us not forget to mention people who feel that god wants them to kill people by committing suicide, despite the fact that there is no scriptural authority for this contention.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Higher Logic
The logic of those who would have us believe they have a special relationship with a deity is nothing if not fascinating, infuriating, and entertaining. Some examples:
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A defect of much theology is not having given much thought to the question whether God, in the temporal infinity he inhabits, might not get bored. If we are made in God's image, and we get bored when we have too much time on his hands, then there is good reason to suspect that God, who has an infinite amount of time available, probably gets REALLY REALLY bored, especially since he apparently existed even prior to creating the universe, at which point there was nothing for God to play with or mess around with at all. And I think that, if God can get bored, then it is very likely that he likes to play baseball and other sports, at least vicariously by intervening in what baseball players and other athletes do, i.e. making certain ones hit home runs, certain other ones strike out, and so on. So to me it seems quite natural that ballplayers and other athletes should pray to God before games or when they step up to the bat etc., because in his boredom God probably does pay attention to such prayers and probably does intervene in sports, even though in inscrutable ways that mean that,as you point out in your blog, God may intervene in ways that do not match an individual players wishes. But I think it quite likely that God does intervene in the outcome of sports events and that it is appropriate for athletes to appeal to him for support and intervention.
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