Every once and a while some media item will burrow its way, insect-like, into my brainpan and set up such an unholy buzz it can only be exorcised through writing. This is one of those times.
I recently watched CNN's Wolf Blitzer interview a survivor of Oklahoma's recent F-5 tornado. "You gotta thank the Lord. Did you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?" he asked the woman of her choice to leave the house with her infant son, saving their lives. "I'm actually an atheist," she replied with a laugh.
I would have played it differently and told the bearded cable news fixture that as a Hellene I worshipped Cerebus, the three-headed hound that guards the Gates of Hades. The tornado was just another "Act of Dog," I'd insist. Then again, it would probably be difficult to joke with my home flattened behind me and a swath of missing neighbours.
There are several disturbing things here, beyond Blitzer's crowbarring religion into disaster coverage. His routine had a subtext; God either targeted or ignored a number of tornado victims while saving others from death. As soon as you start thanking an interventionist deity for close shaves, you have to rationalize all the miseries, afflictions, deaths and disasters He or She engineered or approved. As Stanford professor of biological sciences Robert Sapolsky observed, "the God concept gets mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say, untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia."
I'm reminded of a speaking tour by an African-American evangelist who survived the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers. He insisted his survival was proof of God's love, though it sounded to me more like one man's posttraumatic spiritual inflation.
History is full of challenging theological moments. On the morning of Nov. 1, 1755, Father Manual Portal awoke from a nightmare in which Lisbon was destroyed in an earthquake. He went to mass and prayed. A few hours later his monastery was in ruins, just as he had dreamed. "Tens of thousands of pious citizens were on their knees in their Churches on the All Saints' Day of 1755, listening to the familiar exhortations to rejoice in praise of their Lord, when they felt the first faint shuddering of the earth beneath them," writes Otto Friedrich in his history of apocalyptic beliefs, The End of the World.
The earthquake was centred just offshore of Portugal, but it caused tremendous damage hundreds of miles inland, with worshippers unwittingly scheduled for burial in collapsing churches. It's not known if Vatican officials asked any survivors if they "thanked the Lord."
After the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, there were a rash of "Where was God" editorials and commentaries, with pundits inquiring how a supreme being could have allowed thousands to die in such a manner. In a world where hundreds of thousands of children die routinely and unnecessarily every day, it takes a class of comfortable, blinkered people - who've never been troubled by lack of food, fresh water or reliable shelter - to imply their SkyGod has an ADHD problem.
For his part, Blitzer unwittingly dragged the baggage of "theodicy" onto the plains of Oklahoma. That's the branch of theology that attempts to reconcile human suffering and evil with a loving Creator, a problem that dates back to The Book of Job. A pious man, Job suffers through a nightmarish raft of afflictions after God and Satan place a wager on his faith. As scripture, it makes for compelling reading - even if it makes the CEO of Smite, Incorporated seem a bit sociopathic.
Let the octave-climbing diva give a shout out to God for her Grammy win. Let the college football star drop to his knees in praise for a winning field kick. I won't argue for or against the existence of a supreme being or beings, or that people aren't entitled to faiths that sustain them, including atheism (which is just another doctrine beyond formal logical proof or empirical validation). But I will argue there are very good reasons to remind CNN's Wolf Blitzer and his contemporaries on Fox News and Canada's Sun Media for keeping church and state separate. As history shows, those two are very bad company together. Hybridize them with mass media and we'd have a genuine three-headed hound on our hands. www.geoffolson.com
