August 25, 2012

"Michele Bachmann thinks natural disasters are a warning sign from God about government spending⁴ — but she claims there "isn't even one study" that carbon pollution is dangerous.⁵ Bachmann implied that Democrats could be the cause of the swine flu, and said the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation,⁶ while repeatedly voting to restrict access to birth control and to deny women life-saving medical care." - Becky Bond

One of my biggest questions for religious persons is, "Why don't you want to take credit for your successes?"

Think about it.  When something that is seen as "good" happens to someone, they give all the credit to their god.  What about the hard work, sweat and determination they put into it?  Is is that they don't want to seem boastful for taking the credit?  Or do they really think that god gave them the strength necessary to get through, and they couldn't have done it without that assistance?  I have done everything in my adult life without the thought of god, and I have done fine for myself.

I guess it could come off kind of self centered.  "I'd like to thank all the people who helped, and praise be to ME for finding the courage to follow through on my dreams."  We are all very scared of sounding like braggarts, and are told that we must be humble at all costs.  I guess this means that we are not allowed to take the credit for any good things we do in our own lives. 

The flip side of this coin is that apparently their gods are not responsible for any bad things that happen.  Perhaps this is just a way of only seeing the good in situations.  Take for example a natural disater that claims thousands of lives and leaves just a few.  We all know that these types of tragedies are inevitable in our volatile world.  Most people claim that earth was created by one god or another, and so wouldn't that mean that those gods are directly (or at the very least indirectly) responsible for it?  We do not hear, "God took the lives of thousands of people today," but we DO hear, "God mercifully saved the lives of these select 30."  What made them so popular with god that day?

Even the Xtian Bible includes incidents of a wrathful God smiting people, and yet I can't imagine the repurcussions of blaming God for any of these natural disasters today.  What if someone stood up and actually blamed God for a disaster?  INSTEAD, Xtians find the need to blame humanity instead.  "It is because of your sinful ways that this tragedy occured," some say.  SOOOO, in a round-about you ARE saying God did it, but by blaming humanity for invoking His wrath.

I'm so very confused by this roundabout way of thinking and processing data.  Why not just state facts.

We live on the earth.
It is a volatile environment.
Once in a while this leads to a disaster that claims human life.

Where does or should a god ever enter into this, even if said god was responsible for our universe?  Looking back on the history of humanity (minus the fairy-tale books of religion which are not valid as having been proven wrong time and again,) we see no evidence of a god ever intervening to save OR take human life.