A series of coincidences related to the Columbia explosion — it happened over Palestine, Texas (doubly resonant) & one of the crew was an Israeli pilot who’d bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor — have led folks inclined to that sort of thing to see some kind of divine message in the event. That includes conservative pro-war Christians, apparently.
Suggestions of this sort, if you mull them over a bit, end up attributing some semi-schizophrenic behavior to the Almighty, though. Whenever I hear someone announce that God has spared them (or some loved one) from a particular disaster or illness, I always find myself thinkng: “Gee, good thing God likes you specifically so much better than all those other poor saps.” So it is this with this one.
As I understand it, the logic here is supposed to run as follows. Allah is keen on the good folk of the Middle East, and not so much a fan of the U.S. & company. So He hands the latter unparalleled military and economic might, while leaving the latter, for the most part, in underdeveloped hellholes ruled by bonafide maniacs and sadists. Then, when they come into conflict, instead of just dropping an anvil on Dubya, or improving the lot of the other side, or even blasting a nice clear note into a mountainside in ten-foot-tall flaming letters, He sends a coded message by killing some people who are at best tangentially related to the whole affair in a rather dramatic way. We can conclude from this that sign & portent watchers generally think that God is a weird motherfucker. Or, as it’s more frequently put, that He “works in mysterious ways.”
One has to wonder, though: if God’s so very inscrutable that somehow these apparent inconsistencies fit into a Rube Goldberg-like grand design, what makes anyone think that they can accurately spot a “sign” when it happens, or figure out what exactly it’s a sign of? If saving one person & letting another die are equally functions of that patented infinite wisdom & compassion, couldn’t blowing up a shuttle be some sort of roundabout display of affection, rather than the reverse? Like the kid in first grade who’d pull the ponytail of the girl he had a crush on, maybe. If, on the other hand, the Prime Mover’s trying to be more straightforward than that, why leave all those little hanging inconsistencies? If it’s as a test of Faith (the mental state, not the rogue slayer), why bother with signs at all? Surely it’d take a higher Faith Quotient to believe absent any weird happenings than it does to brush aside a few logical quibbles.
Now, maybe the plauges & flaming shrubberies schtick played well a few thousand years ago, but it seems grossly inefficient to keep on in the same way, especially in light of the ambiguity inherent in the whole communication-by-natural-disaster protocol. So why doesn’t someone out there with a bit of free server space set up a blog for the Deity, so that these messages can be gotten across in a more direct (not to mention non-lethal) fashion? (Better make it a group blog, just in case the polytheists have got it right.) It wouldn’t even take up that much of His time; with that “post to the future” feature on Blogger Pro (someone will spring for that, right?), He can just set up all the posts in advance and let the software lay it on us in the appropriate increments — rotate in acolytes to click “publish” every few minutes. (We’ll have to remind him to lay off that “turn the other cheek” line, though; I’m sure the Big Guy doesn’t want to get slapped with a Sontag Award.) If there’s a particularly important post, Glenn can link it so the rest of us are kept in the loop.
