In the United States, received a piece of religious propaganda in the mail, a 16-page, tabloid-sized newspaper entitled Faith for Life, compliments of the local Baptist church. The lead piece, “Why Does a Loving God Allow Bad Things to Happen?,” is a 1,000-word attempt to resolve the Epicurean paradox in favor of Christian faith, though the paradox is not identified by name within the piece.
The first paragraph:
“In July of 1945, during WWII, the warship USS Indianapolis had just delivered the atomic bomb. On its way back home it was torpedoed by the Japanese and sunk, stranding many sailors in the Pacific Ocean. In the days that followed, hundreds of men perished by sharks or other means until the tattered survivors were finally rescued. How could something so tragic ever happen?”
In the first paragraph of the first article on the first page of this lengthy proselytization paper, the writer alludes to an attack on an urban center with an experimental weapon of mass destruction resulting in the instantaneous incineration of 70,000 civilian non-combatants and the consequent fatal radiation poisoning and burning of 70,000 more, and monstrously disregards this in order to, in the same paragraph, designate the death of 900 fighting men in the legitimate sinking of their warship as “something so tragic.” Presumably because the 900 were “us” and the 140,000 were “the enemy,” the writer presents the death of 900 warriors as a tragedy and flouts the massacre of 140,000 innocents as not worthy of comment, in a contemptuous affront to the hippie admonition to “Love thine enemy.” The writer goes on from here to argue for the existence of a benevolent god-being.
The piece is signed: “FfL Editor.” No editor's name, writer's name, or staff member's name appears anywhere within the paper.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
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2 comments:
Hey, good point. That was really hypocritical and blind of the author. While not paving the way for an objective reading, at least
I guess he/she illustrates well the point in the fifth paragraph of the article,
"If God
were to eliminate the source of the bad, He
would have to start with mankind, i.e., us!
We are the problem. The Bible says, “There
is none righteous, no not one” (Romans 3:10)."
By the way, you say that no writer's name appears anywhere in the paper, but I counted no less than six writers' names mentioned in this article alone. Maybe this author didn't want to take credit for their ideas! Okay, I'm teasing. Maybe you should contact Faith for Life and tell them they're wimps. (Although I must say, they demonstrate a certain audacity in sending reading material for scrutiny to the likes of you.)
My brother picked up this propaganda paper and was also stopped by the first paragraph, remarking: "He's referring to the sailors in the water as the tragedy? Not the bomb? That would be like me murdering everyone on the block and then on my way home falling down on the steps, and as I was lying there bleeding to death, crying out, 'How could God let this happen to me?'"
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