SONS OF ARES  

16 December 2012 | Stop Invoking Heaven



We need to stop asking where God is when tragedy strikes. He's not there, and he never will be.

Never once has any divine being showed up at the scene of a crime to explain its tardiness, or point people in the right direction to answer the question of why something happened. These are for law enforcement officials, but even sometimes, there are no answers. There is no note, no digital footprint, no confidants to help figure out what in the end is an act of evil.

That senselessness terrifies people because we all want an explanation. There is no reason why. This doesn't make asking any less meaningful, but it may ultimately go unanswered. Little comfort there, yes, but this is when communities come together to say, "I don't know."

But there are, of course, those who want to invoke God in order to make cheap shots. They can't explain the failure of their alleged supreme being to make a killer trip and snap his neck and prevent murder, so they switch the conversation to lay God's absence on what man does. Witness the ridiculous Mike Huckabee who claims mass shootings occur in schools because God has been "taken out" of said schools. So this lays the stack of corpses directly at this invisible person's feet -- an obscene offering. Tell that to the parents, Mike, and if not one of them slugs you in the mouth, I'll go along with your explanation whole-heartedly. Of course, people like Mike Huckabee who blather from a safe distance will never be in that position. He has books to sell, columns to write in sympathetic rags and air time to fill with despicable and heartless ideas.

But I also don't care for responses like that of Bill Maher, who quickly took to Twitter and rage against praying and hugging your kids as doing anything, and let's talk about gun control. Spoken like a public figure who has no children! Again, go tell the parents how praying for their dead kids is useless because now is a perfect opportunity to advance gun control laws, and again, if none of them punches you, I'll start mouthing your line to everyone within hearing distance.

We need to stop invoking God, not because you're a believer and I'm not, but because it's unanswerable. God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, guardian angels -- none of them did anything to stop the killer and they're not going to stop the next shooting or the one after that. Dead kids are not divine punishment. Dead kids are not a wake up call for a society that keeps calling piles of dead people wake-up calls over and over again. We choose to do nothing concrete-whatever that is-because we don't want to. And that right there is reason enough to stop asking where God is. You cannot lay the blame for tragedy on God, nor the solution, because neither one of those approaches has ever worked.

Ever.