People ask me why I began to doubt my religious convictions, eventuating in a vigorous skepticism.
A perfect example appeared in today's Globe on page 4C. Headlined "Young mom charged with killing son on playground," the story reports on the murder of a 3-year-old boy, suffocated by his homeless mother in Albuquerque.
The sobering account of the act went like this:
The police chief said Toribio told detectives that she suffocated her son in Alvarado Park before dawn on May 13 by putting her hand over his mouth and nose.Now, I know there are those who believe that God makes parking spaces at Wal-Mart available to them after a prayer request. And I know there are those who believe that God speaks to them, if not audibly, at least sufficiently understandably to encourage them to do things, like give money to televangelists or write letters to the newspaper.
She said she had second thoughts and performed CPR on the boy, resuscitating him, but reconsidered and smothered him again. Investigators said she then buried him under the climbing gym's hanging bridge, where the body was found two days later.
There are also people who believe that God steers hurricanes toward sinful cities, causes earthquakes in reprobate regions, and brings plagues like AIDS upon hedonistic homosexuals. I know people believe such things because I know many of them.
But I don't know anyone who can explain why God—who believers contend hears and answers prayers, who they insist is interested in every detail of life, and who they are certain is infinitely knowledgeable and powerful—could not persuade someone to go to Alvarado Park before dawn on May 13 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and stay the hand of that little boy's mother, who not once, but twice, smothered him to a dreadful death.
I have read and studied more theology than I care to admit, and have listened to every conceivable explanation for the incongruence between believer's speculations about the attributes of God and the testimony of reality in places like Albuquerque
or—lest we forget Rowan Ford—Southwest Missouri. Nothing in all the words written or spoken in defense of God, who allegedly can but won't intervene in such horrific acts, serves to assuage my doubts and make me believe that there sits on a throne in heaven an omnipotent and omniscient being, full of Love, watching 3-year-old Tyruss Toribio suffer at the terrible hands of his mother without dispatching help.
Nothing written by earnest Christians on the opinion pages of the Joplin Globe about "the love of God"—or more often "the wrath of God"—or any other such fantasy, serves to explain why 9-year-old Rowan Ford was raped and murdered by (still, "allegedly") two fellow-citizens, one her slobbish stepfather, the other his six-foot, six-inch ally, while God, who supposedly cares whether homosexuals marry each other, could not so much as whisper to one knee-bent believer that the little girl needed help.
And that is why I doubt.
2 comments:
Very good sentiments. I have my doubts, too, but sometimes don't want to admit them. Why are the dates different?
I have a blog on the Joplin Globe website called, "The Erstwhile Conservative." These articles were first posted there and I only now have had time to post them here.
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