Last night we got a call from R’s mother. One of her cousins, Bryce, was in a bad car accident yesterday morning. Apparently an oncoming car swerved to avoid something and ran head on into him. He’s alive, but not breathing on his own and in a medically induced coma while the swelling in his brain goes down. There were two people in the other car, one of whom is dead and the other apparently not expected to make it. Bryce was alone in his car.

Needless to say, this turned the down a few notches last night. We walked some about how bad it must be for his immediate family (mom, dad, one sister and wife) who now just have to wait 3 days until they stop doing whatever induces coma and see if he wakes up. Worse still, if he has too much brain damage, they will have a very difficult decision to make.

His family is very religious, and so we talked a bit about the whole ‘bad things happening to good people’ thing.

My take on this is basically that the universe just is. It has no morals, no plan, no conscience. Trying to make any moral or ethical sense of the world just doesn’t work for me. There’s no correlation between immoraltiy and what accidents befall which people that I can see.

I honestly can’t see how people who really believe in a benevolent, all-powerful/knowing (or nearly so), activist God deal with stuff like this. He’s got a plan? What sort of plan involves killing a 28 year old who was married not too long ago and is genuinely a good person.

If that’s part of his plan, and he’s actually paying attention to the world, it’s a piss-poor one and he’s clearly not so powerful and wise as we’re lead to believe. Basically, I always end up at the conclusion that if God exists, is very (or infinitely) powerful, compassionate, etc, and is actively involved in the world then he’s a mad scientist watching his little human experiment. I can’t see how anyone could have faith in such a being, let alone love or worship him.

Even if God is utterly incomprehensible – which, if he exists and has any of the infinite qualities ascribed to him he almost certainly is – we’re still left only with our meager faculties to evaluate him and I can only arrive at the conclusion that he’s very detached and just kicked off the ::Big Bang:: to see what would happen. Maybe he hasn’t even noticed us yet.

Or, of course, there is no God.

Can you tell I’m agnostic and have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about Christianity and its cousins?

Another thing popped into my head, tangentially related to this. How many people die in car accidents every year? Over 40,000. Now, just think if we sank the $200 billion spent on invading and occupying Iraq (which has increased terrorism) on say, since we’re talking about driving here, a national public transportation system. Do you think that would save a more people each year than died in the 9/11 attacks?

Think about that, or spending that money on any of the other major killers in our society and do the math. If we were serious about protecting lives, really serious, where do you think we should be spending our money?

Enough ranting for today. Blarg!

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