Yesterday I posted a remark on Facebook about how someone claiming that "God got this" in regard to the virus might find 60,000 people who disagreed but couldn't because they were dead.That was a little harsh, and definitely without nuance.
A local legislator who is an atheist (although he dislikes the term itself) made this statement a few years ago:
"If someone's religion helps them get through the night, who am I, who am I to judge them?" This same man is very impatient when it comes to his fellow lawmakers attempting to insert their religious views into our state's laws.
In general, I agree.
Even though I don't subscribe to any particular religion, or subject myself to the whims of any particular god, I have no issue with people who do adhere to a religion and/or a god. I have no problem with others praying, whether it be the thanks/praise variety or intercession/supplication. Although with the latter, I suspect that a person who honestly logged all of their prayer requests and compared them to the specific, concrete results, they would find that the results were no greater than what one would expect from applying oneself to a problem, or even by random chance. However, I don't know this...but neither do the believers really know that divine intervention is happening. This is my opinion and I don't worry too much about how other people view it.
What I do object to, other than government trying to impose one set of religious beliefs on us all, is public proclamations of how, as a result of prayer, or some other adherence to a religious act, is going to cause God to protect someone (or has protected someone) from some catastrophe, most recently, Covid-19. Now this might not seem too controversial, or rise to the level of irritation or annoyance, but the implication in assuming that you have some special protection is that all those who didn't make it, specifically these days to those who died from Covid-19, somehow didn't rate God's intervention, or didn't pray, or weren't true Christians [or you can substitute any other religion in here - it's just that the Christians seem like the most vocal.
Of course I understand that everyone dies, and that there are many, many people who have their lives cut short by war, disease, famine or accidents even. Why God allows this is one of the ongoing problems that theologians have wrestled with for centuries, perhaps millennia. I'll let the theologians continue to grapple with it. Since I don't believe that there is a deity who intervenes in such a way to protect people who pray or obey his rules from harm, it's not a philosophical problem for me.
But to claim that you can ignore health safety guidelines and directives because "God got this" or "God is in control" either ignores the fact that despite God "having it" and being in control, around 60,000 in the United States alone have died from this disease just since the beginning of this year, or that you, by dint of your special relationship with the almighty, are somehow better than all those who God evidently didn't "have it" for. Do you really think that none of those 60,000 prayed? Or there families? Pretty arrogant, I'd say.
In my back and forth with a couple of ignore-the-guidelines people, one claimed that "God must have wanted to call them Home" and another questioned whether many of the 60,000 dead really believed that "God got it".
So, pray if you want to, convince yourself it will be effective in protecting you if you want to, quote Bible verses about how God takes care of you if you want to, but consider how you come across when 60,000 Americans, most of whom did pray, died, or when you assume that all those deaths are somehow part of your god's plan, but you're special enough to be spared.
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