Thank God!!!

"I just thank the Lord that he shielded me when all of this took place."

The above statement was made by one of the guards who were shot by a right-wing nut case attempting to gain access to the Pentagon a few weeks ago. Both guards’ wounds were, fortunately, only superficial.

These kinds of devotional statements seem to fall from believers’ mouths faster than M&M’s can fall through the holes in Jesus’ hands. Whether it’s a crisis from which one escapes serious harm, a victory in a sporting event, winning an election, the remission of a loved one’s cancer, or even when fate and probability deals a hideous hand -- all reasoned thinking comes to a halt as the believer’s brain goes into supernatural mode.

At the National Republican Convention in 2004 Rudy Giuliani said: "Thank God, George Bush is our president."
Drew Brees wins the Super Bowl and the first thing out of his mouth to AP is: “God is great.”
A Canadian survivor of the Haitian earthquake said: "… thank God for saving my life … praise him for his greatness."
On a Christian apologetics site a father of a horribly deformed and vegetative baby offered: “God blessed us through [him] and [has] shown Himself to be more real.”

Can these peoples’ logic be anymore convoluted, ignorant and down right obscene? Please!

Fact: 80% of gunshot wounds are non-fatal.* God or no, the odds were substantially in the guard’s favor. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html )

Fact: If George Bush had not been elected President, over 4300 US service men and women who have so far died in Iraq would be alive today. If god is responsible for G.W. Bush’s presidency, then god is responsible for their needless deaths.

Fact: If “god is great” and thus credited with the New Orleans Saints’ victory, it assumes that if the Colts had won god wouldn’t be great. Or perhaps he’d be great but only for the Colts and not for the Saints.

Fact: If god is to be credited with saving a specific individual’s life, then logic has it that god must be blamed for the deaths of over 200,000 Haitian earthquake victims.

Fact: If having a deformed vegetative baby is god’s blessing for the parents, the inference is that it’s a positive for the infant versus normalcy or spontaneous abortion and/or that the baby’s condition is a good thing.

In short, these knee jerk statements of praise and thanks make no sense from any perspective if one takes a moment to evaluate their meaning. They are senseless not just because there is no god; or because the events / outcomes are all manmade or natural; or because they are a product of probability; but because the obverse of the outcome, the condition for which the thanks / praise are offered, are in and of themselves evidence of the fallacy of god ... or of an evil god.

All of this is lost on theists of course. Their bleating will go on. Heck, most of them haven’t figured out that “Thank God it’s Friday!” is rather pointless since Friday happens every seven days… like it or not.