Hump’s Advice to the Non-Religiously Afflicted: Responding to “God’s Plan”

From time to time I am asked for my opinion by freethinkers on how to handle debate questions or deal with personal issues related to religion. The following was posed to me by a Facebook friend who finds herself under siege by platitude spouting God Virus infected Bible belt denizens.Kelly from Tennessee writes:

“Dear Hump,
99.9999% of my fb friends are xtians. What is the best response to people who claim ‘I must trust in God no matter how much I suffer, he has a plan for my life.’
Thanks,

Kelly”

Dear Kelly,

Naturally there are a number of responses, but I assume you want to keep these religious nutters as your fb friends, so that narrows the options. The simplest and most direct reply is this:

"Trusting in an imaginary friend is something thinking people gave up once they outgrew toddlerhood. If one finds comfort in believing their life is guided by the imaginary friend they have opted to retain in adulthood, that's fine for them. Suffering, sadness, death, happiness, success, failure, comfort...they are part of the facts of life, part and parcel to man's existence - no spirit thing is involved, nor need be invoked.”

“I prefer to take control of my life; do my own planning, set my goals and objectives, and work toward them with education, self reliance, and with eyes opened to the reality of the world...the only reality and the only world there is. It works for me, thank you."

See how that goes over. If they are unable to comprehend this, which many won't; or if that doesn't end the proselytizing, and it probably won't, may I suggest as a last resort my alternate approach to wit: "Well go screw yourself and the man-god you rode in on."

Hope that helped.

This Xtian need for their lives to have a plan managed for them by their god thing must be very comforting. It absolves them of any responsibility for their lot in life, and sets a low expectation for the effort they put into controlling their own destiny.

If their child dies from an untreated disease; if an infant is born with an alcohol induced birth defect; if their double wide is destroyed in a hurricane; if they lose their job; if they get kicked off of public assistance; if they roll their pickup and break their neck; if their club foot isn’t cured by the faith healer; if they drop their long neck beer bottle during a bar fight; if the road kill they scrapped off the interstate for dinner has mange rendering it unfit to serve to the visiting Pastor - somehow, some way, it's all part of a complex plan that their Sky Buddy has laid out for them.

Of course, when Cousin Mary Ellen came out of the closet and declared her full blown lesbianism, that wasn't part of God’s plan at all, nuh uh! That was Satan at work.

It's not for them to understand God’s plan, it never is. After all, who but their omniscient God could conceive of the plan behind why Aunt Mildred couldn't find her way out of her darkened house crammed with 60 years of accumulated bibles, paper church fans, pictures of Jesus, unpaid electric bills, magazines, newspapers, fried chicken bones, assorted trash, seventy-two cats (living and deceased) and their associated waste when she dropped a lit Pall Mall onto her bed bug infested urine stained mattress and burned her and her house into oblivion in twenty-five minutes?

But God must have had an ulterior motive. Clearly, Aunt Mildred (aka Crispy Milly) was just a small wheel in the big cog of the inner workings of God's ultimate game plan for her and the universe. Even Mildred knew this.

I, however, prefer to think it was nature's way of thinning the herd, natural selection at work - and at its best.