Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a field of rubble after a tornado went through a suburban neighborhood and flattened everything in its path, let’s say in Moore, Oklahoma. Imagine further that you have a microphone in your hand and are a senior news reporter with a major TV network. Let’s call you Wolf Blitzer. Now what is the one thing that you should not under any circumstances, given the destruction and death around you, say to one of the surviving victims of said tornado if you have a functioning brain?
“I guess, you gotta thank the Lord, right?”
Let that sink in. What exactly are clowns like Blitzer suggesting when they thank a supernatural being for surviving a natural disaster? That the natural disaster wasn’t god’s doing in the first place? But god is everywhere and knows and does everything, right? So either he’s sloppy or he’s a mass murderer, and he most certainly is not benevolent.
Or are they implying that their god purposefully picked them over other people to survive? That would seem extremely arrogant.
Seriously, this tendency of religious believers to be thanking the same being which they hold to be omnipotent and omniscient for surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made, a disaster which this being either caused or at the least allowed to go ahead in the first place, can only be explained with the severe cognitive dissonance caused by religion.
Religion doesn’t only poison everything, it also makes people’s brains turn to mush. Faith is the great separator in the head, everything good that happens gets attributed to god’s will and work, and everything bad that happens is either magically nothing to do with god at all, or him working in mysterious ways.
As to Wolf Blitzer, there is of course also the sweet irony that the person he was interviewing turned out to be – an atheist.
