The Impossible Vagaries of God's Plan
No, the stars do not look down upon us with neither pity nor concern. There is no universal energy that speaking to us or notices our comings and goings. Planets only align based on our perception and have no effect on us.
And God does not have a plan.
Think for a moment about God's plan, that often invoked and poorly defined concept that rolls so easily off the lips of religious leaders. It would take an almost supernatural act to account for everyone's actions, much less to plan out the life of every single human being who has walked, walking and will walk across this earth. All for some conclusion that is so vague as to remain useless from a temporal perspective.
God cannot have a plan for every person on this planet, because it means that there truly is no free will. You turned left instead of right because you had no choice. You wore what you did today because you had no choice. Everything must accord to God's plan because God is perfect and nothing can deviate from his inexorable will. We have the *illusion* of free will, perhaps, but our decisions have already been decided and we're just watching shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.
"You cannot understand the divine mind," comes the response. That's right, not only because I deny there is a divine mind acting solely on human consciousness to begin with, but because there nothing bordering on the logical to declare that God has a plan for every single person in the world. For this means that Jane Smith's plan involved her being raped at knifepoint, impregnated and then deciding to terminate the pregnancy all so...what? She could burn in hell for having an abortion? Be used as a pawn by unscrupulous pious frauds for whom the abortion was the true crime here? To live the rest of her life with a vague sense of fear because she was attacked? Sounds like Jane Smith was set up for failure from the very get go.
Imagine Jane as a small child growing in Lawrence, Kansas, the second daughter of her parents who were neither rich nor poor but made their livings, raised their daughters and whose love for one another waxed and waned. She drew pictures of her family in first grade, made a clay cup in second, then scored very well on statewide tests while in high school. She had two boyfriends but mindful of her upbringing, toed the line at premarital sex but found a different kind of freedom when she went to college in Missouri. She was not perfect, she could be brittle and indecisive, but she was ordinary in every sense of the word. God's plan for her seemed to going just well, until the night she was attacked and brutalized.
The very concept that a divine being, with the admittedly awesome power of being able to direct peoples' lives from afar but remain oh so close, deliberately crossed her path with Robert Jones--the clean-cut child of David and Mary Jones who harbored such ugly violent tendencies with incredible control that no one ever suspected--so that she would be raped is repugnant. It's indefensible and obscene no matter how it's put. You see, the problem with God having a plan is that he is culpable for Robert's evil act. Robert is the vessel, not the independent author of a crime. Think for moment to the Book of Job: "Have you noticed my servant, Job? There is no one like him on Earth, who fears God and avoids evil." When Satan duly points out that if things were to go wrong for Job, he'd curse God, the Supreme Being obliges the wager and lets Satan inflict all sorts of disasters, all of which have God's approval.
The supertsitious skip that last part. They want to make it all about Satan, who is according to his name, is merely an accuser in the legal sense, not some Miltonian character. Satan does not act independently but by God's express command. No matter how creative the Accuser is, the sole purpose is to push Job beyond the limits of human endurance merely to observe if the poor man curses God. Now imagine Robert Jones in this conversation: "Have you noticed my servant Robert? Go ahead and let him rape this young woman, so it can be seen if she aborts her pregnancy." Repulsive? Of course it is, but to listen to pious frauds, this is what the story is all about **and it was God's plan for her.**
For God to have a plan for everyone is enslavement by other means. It is to give a child cancer, kill thousands of soldiers, cause miscarriages, starve millions, withhold vital medical knowledge at the expense of the suffering, let women be burnt at the stake, allow generations of slavery to flourish and let human smoke arise from the camps of World War II. It was not God's will that crossed the paths of Jane Smith and Robert Jones that night, planned out long ago and watching the slow, inevitable act of terror and violence. And to what end? Foisting the idea that God has a plan for everyone is to make an idol of man, that each of us is chosen by God for some special task that furthers along some overall divine scheme for the universe. How is this not egoism to the most dangerous degree? Every politician thinks he's chosen by God and so does every suicide bomber. They both can't be right.
And what if they are? Then we **do** live in a universe run by a supremely diabolical will that has no compunction not only causing suffering and misery on a temporal plane, but extends this to eternal punishment. So is the divine plan to fill up hell with the souls of the tormented? How exactly do you fight against a fiend like this?
No my friends, the stars do not weep for mankind, nor do they lineup to serve our childish ideas about humanity's alleged role in the universe. Nor does God have a plan for all souls that crosses paths with others deliberately for violence and destruction, all for his glorious, mysterious will. We are alone and we better get used to it. Maybe then we wouldn't be so quick to murder one another.