While I actually haven’t personally heard anyone blame God when they lost a close one in a tragedy, it’s a timeworn message in fiction novels. The protagonist wails against God when tragedy occurs or sometimes we read the words of an atheist shouting, “Where was God when the tsunami (earthquake, cyclone, hurricane, mass shooting, etc.) killed thousands? If there was a God, wouldn’t He have stopped this?”

 The truth is, God is an unlikely scapegoat and if one reads the Bible, especially the Old Testament, one would give Him the benefit of the doubt.

I confess to not being a regular reader of the good Book, but several years ago, before I became immobile, I was a lector at my church and I paid more attention to the passages I had to read. The Catholic Mass usually has the first reading from the Old Testament, the second from New Testament, in books such as the Acts of the Apostles, and the third is the Gospel, read by the priest. One Sunday, I read this passage from the Book of Wisdom:

Do not court death by your erring way of life, nor draw to yourselves destruction by the works of your hands. Because God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being, and the creatures of the world are wholesome; There is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of Hade on earth, For righteousness is undying.

These words stunned me and I used them in a column that I wrote for the New York Sun. I had concluded that sin and death came to the world in the Garden of Eden and thus, it was the serpent a.k.a., the Devil, who was responsible.

At the time I wrote it, the Iraq War was raging and there had been jihadist terror activity with its leaders claiming that they were not afraid to die because they loved death. I also surmised that those who loved death were heeding Satan’s demands.

I also received an email from a supporter who said that he couldn’t find such a book in his Bible.

Further research revealed that the Wisdom of Solomon is included in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles, but not in the Protestant ones. Wisdom and the first and second Book of Maccabees were removed by the Protestant churches in the 1500s. 

Needless to say, the hate mail that followed was quite significant, but as a conservative pundit, I was used to it. I once started grading these critiques in the range from nasty to scary and the most hateful ones came from -- surprise -- feminists!  Allegedly, the Protestant churches determined that these books were not inspired by God. Nevertheless, to me, it meant that Eve was the proverbial Pandora unleashing the evils of the world including death because she couldn’t resist temptation. We women have been paying for her sin ever since. According to the Book of Genesis, God said to her:

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

Gee thanks, Eve, I said during the labor pains of my six children’s births.

Of course, if you’re not a Judeo-Christian, you think God et al. is all a fairy tale, but this explanation makes perfect sense to me.

As a Christian pundit, I’ve received many emails from the atheist community challenging my beliefs and I recall getting a very interesting one from a secularist who goes by the identifier Religion sucks. He sent me a list of famous people whom he alleged were atheists and in my response to him, I disagreed with him about Albert Einstein.

Einstein has been quoted as saying that he is not an atheist but believes in Spinoza’s idea of God, i.e., not one that gets involved with us.  “My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly.” 

Many academics tend to view most scientists of high intellect to be skeptical of religion and the existence of a higher power. The late renowned scientist, Stephen Hawking was an outspoken atheist who wrote in his final book, that “there is no God… No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in the afterlife is just wishful thinking.”

Hawking’s intellectual prowess has been compared to that of Einstein but I believe that anyone who cannot recognize the utter majesty and order in the universe is not as intelligent as an agnostic who admits he just doesn’t know.  Compare Hawking’s quote above to this one by Einstein:

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”

One of the most inspiring speeches I ever heard was by Pope John Paul II speaking to a massive audience of young people in Denver 1993 on World Youth Day. I wish I had taped it because as I enter my senior dotage years, memories are the first fatalities. However, I do remember these words which I have to paraphrase but hope you’ll appreciate their significance:

“Before man ever wrote his name on a cave wall, God carved His name on the human heart.”

Thus, the brilliant minds of the scientists may just not get it but the most primitive of all humans from time immemorial has sought to know its creator. 

P.S. God loves us.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License