Thank god for what?
People are hopeless.
About three hours ago I get a call on the radio about a woman who crashed her car in the southern reaches of the county. She suffered a few cuts and bruises, a broken left arm and a fractured right leg, whiplash as well.
Southbound on a one lane road, she smashed past a telephone pole, through cattle fence, and then into a small pond. Her hood had wrapped around the tree and shifted the entire back end of the car at a 90-degree angle to the right. No airbag deployment, severed a few lines which had leaked into the water. She wasn’t too banged up, and sad as it is to say, if she didn’t weigh three hundred or so pounds she would’ve been killed.
We go through the phases of extrication when we arrive on scene: limbs stabilized, windows broken out, clipped the door off, and then pulled her out. Took a little longer than it should’ve, but things went as smoothly as they could have. She gets packed up the embankment to traumahawk and she passes out momentarily. Being as big as she was, they couldn’t find a good vein so they drilled right into her bone. Nasty stuff, really.
So feeling that the scene is getting to be too packed I pace up and down the road, safely out of anyone’s way. I figure if I’m gonna do nothing, I might as well remove myself from the wreckage.
An older woman (sporting a shirt with some faith-based-nonsense on it) approaches me and asks if the young lady is alright, to which I tell her that “If she’s cursin’ up a storm what with all them scrapes and such, she’ll be just fine.” This older woman then tells me “She shouldn’t be cursing, she should be thanking god! Now how long will this take? I live up on the hill and I need to get my dogs”.
Just short of slapping the stupid out from between her ears, I told her she’d have to wait. I don’t understand it. How can something terrible happen to someone, and the rubberneckers think it’s by the grace of the almighty that the person survives? Given the supposed omnipotence and omniscience of god, why is it that people only attribute a small portion of an accident to god? If the abrahamic god is as powerful as they claim him to be, why would he allow the accident to begin with? He must not be omnipotent. If he is as wrathful as others say, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to claim that he is evil for almost killing that woman. Or maybe, he doesn’t actually exist.
It’s a pretty cut-paste/beaten argument, though tried and true: god cannot be benign for there is much evil in the world, and he cannot be wrathful for there is much good in the world. If he is as loving as he is described in the KJ’ versions of the bible, he must be lazy for allowing so many regions of the world fall into disrepair. If he is as wrathful as the older versions have described, then we are living underneath an evil dictator who is prone to random acts of power: earthly phenomena, destructive storms, war, famine, disease.
Why, oh why? I suppose it’s a matter of making one’s self feel a little bit better about the world’s atrocities.