Where is God during the coronavirus pandemic?
Found this near the top of Fox News page
Many people want to know why God won’t stop it. Where is He in the middle of this global pandemic?
To be clear, no evil comes from God – but nor can any evil happen without His permission.
Despite all the strife and suffering, God is there – because He is everywhere.
God is currently in every hospital, strengthening doctors, nurses and medical personnel as they treat the sick and comfort the dying.
God is working through the government’s response to this crisis, providing President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and the Coronavirus Task Force wisdom and guidance as they plot and plan their attack on this lethal pathogen.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jim-daly-where-is-god-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic
= new reply since forum marked as read
Nor a difficult argument. It is difficult to understand, depending on where you're coming from.
There's more than one basis for morality. It's a bit of hubris to think there is only one and we have it. Downright WEIRD, but you see it all the time if you're WEIRD. (And, to be honest, the non-WEIRD are no better at being tribal and judgmental. At least they haven't typically said, "We must be tolerant and understanding, even as we ourselves show intolerance and blindness." They're usually flat out, "We're right; you're wrong." It's good to see the left finally chucking that bit of hypocrisy after 30 years, even if it now comes off as duplicity, "You only wanted tolerance when you benefited from it, now that you're getting power you insist on everybody falling in line behind the righteous."
Problem is, much of Xianity thinking has been caught up in a shifting basis for morality, so some of the old sayings make less sense. And no sense to those outside that moral system entirely. Because it's hard to see outside the wall the tribe erects.
The traditional Xian view had 3 options for theodicy.
1. Punishment. You do something bad, you get spanked and told, "Stop it." Seldom does a note arrive telling you what you did wrong, we're not issued weekly progress reports with divine comments specific to each of us, so this can be a bit confusing.
Then there's collective punishment. It's an OT thing, but when there's an unrighteous people even the righteous among them suffer. There are no especially protected classes in many cases, and there's no reason to exempt certain groups as being out of bounds. Specific individuals might be spared in some contexts, or removed from the battlefield, but maybe not. "Come out from among the unrighteous, my people, before I smite them." Think Lot, think Rachab, think Revelation. Don't be part of the evil group.
Problem is the angst when you or your tribe gets smacked, usually you're thinking, "Huh? Wait! We're the good guys!" Not all those who call themselves good are, in Xian thinking.
2. Personal testing. If your god is a parent figure, well, good parents test their kids or let their kids get tested. There are claims that if you're one of God's select that nothing will happen without a purpose, but since we're not issued little "God's select" cards there's nothing keeping a lot of people from saying, "Yup, that's me. Huh? Wait! Why am I being tested like this, I'm a good guy!" Or even worse, "See, God loves me because he's testing me. The more you hurt the more it shows you really care!" (Oops, starting channeling The Offspring there.)
3. Random shit. Apparently at some point a tower in Jerusalem collapsed and killed some folk. Now, random instant death makes for a pretty bad kind of test--it doesn't really show your persistence, nor does it give you much of a chance to fix a mistake. In that 1/10 of a second between the time you see the big block o' rock a few feet away from your head and when the back of your head meets the front of your head as the rock crushes it there's not a lot of time for soul searching and way-changing. That leaves option 1, "They're being punished because they're bad, bad people" as the only option so far.
Jesus' question was, "Were they any more sinners than anybody else?" Now, these days a lot of people would say, "Absolutely, we're no sinners, nope, not us. We're GOOD!" But humility was a bit more common before social media and they didn't want to answer. The lesson was, "Shit happens." When a person's god says, "Shit happens!" (or words to that effect) it's hard to accuse that person of having a god that specifically punishes the good (even if there's no real basis for assuming that a little kid is intrinsically good).
By that token, having a 5 year old die from cancer is not much different from having a 5 year old die in a car crash. Just more painful and emotion-producing for those who watch.
The traditionally correct formulation was that "if you sin, you get punished." That was popularly turned around to "if you're punished, you sinned." But if A --> B it is not true that B --> A. This only holds if you start with "only A" --> B. So "if you erred --> you get punished" the correct flipping is "if you get punished --> maybe you erred".
There's a whole chunk of Bible written about theodicy. Job. Job suffered. His friends said "you erred." He said, "Show me how." And in the end God said Job could use a bit of humility, but otherwise said Job was right. However, until God issued Job his report card, the jury had to be out: Was he being tested or was this just random shit?
It pays to remember that for some folk, this life is to be taken as prelude. If you take that seriously, then you get an entirely different set of parameters for your argument. Somebody I knew died long ago, and I found out only when I arrived at a church retreat. (He died on Tuesday, retreat began Wednesday night, not a lot of turnaround time there with an 8-hour flight.) Somebody older responded to the sad by pointing out that we don't mourn the dead, we mourn ourselves. If we really believe the dead will live and were "saved," then why are we sad? We're sad because we'll miss them; because we think of all the things the person could have done and never will; because we think about how much we'd like doing them ourselves and can't think of any alternative being better. (I'd add that part of it is also because we know others will mourn them, and pose that as a weak counterexample to Bud's response.)
That's pretty much going to be any deist's or theist's set of choices. Bad puppy! Let's see what he does. Oops! And then, "Oh, well, it was nice while it lasted" or "He's in a better place" or "Maybe he'll do better next time 'round".
So the 5-year-old who died from cancer? Maybe it was punishment (but on what basis? and why are we sitting there judging?). Maybe it was testing? (Who the hell can say?) Maybe it was a random genetic coding error or something the parents did by accident. (And maybe it'll turn out okay after death.)
I flip between mourning the parents' loss and thinking, "Eh, in 5000 years nobody'll remember any of us were alive, and in 100,000 it's unlikely that this'll be any more important to the fate of the universe than the death of my pet fish back in 1968, so get over it and push on. There's entropy to be resisted."
Right there at the top of the page
Notice Fox News showing their class with the Kenny Rogers story
Much more unethical stuff in the Bible than ethical. The only ethical stuff I ever read was the parts in red.
Why aren't the faithhealers visiting hospitals?
Admittedly, I am no Christian. Nonetheless I have pretty high tolerance for religious people as long as they don't try to force anything down my throat and are not too judgmental.
If there IS a god, I simply cannot imagine he/she (?) would want to soil herself by having ANYTHING to do with those two swine: Pussy-Grabber and Pence. . . Furthermore, the repig party is the one that does all the moaning and panting about Jesus. . . They sure like to imagine what Jesus might say, but they NEVER manage to actually model what Jesus would DO. . .