Wild About Writing

I am forever fascinated by the simple faith of people who, on being rescued from some death-defying ordeal, pronounce their survival as due to “God watching over me.”

An example of this is in the news currently, involving a man who went snowboarding on Mount Seymour, north of Vancouver, B.C., and was lost for three days before being resuced, frostbitten and exhausted.

In this instance, it is his mother who has credited God with ensuring her son’s survival. “I know he knows that God, obviously, was watching over him,” she told the media.

These accounts always tug at your heart strings, and I share in the relief of the young man’s mother over her son’s survival. As one who grew up in the mountainous interior of British Columbia, I know only too well how hazardous it can be to find yourself disoriented in the wilderness, even in the best of weather.

I have to wonder, however, how special one must be to have God intervene personally on their behalf.

Where was God, I am thinking, just a few days before when eight young men perished after being caught by avalanches during a snowmobiling expedition in the mountains of southeastern B.C.

Three men survived that tragic outing. I have not seen any assertions that their narrow escape was due to God’s intervention. Had any such claim been made, it would clearly have been outrageous. It would have meant God had differentiated among these men as to their worthiness, saving some and allowing others to die.

No, these claims of Godly intervention are almost always the result of situations in which sole survivors are rescued in the brink of time. “A miracle,” the media call it. “God was watching over me.”

As an expression of appreciation for enjoying good fortune, these pronouncements are harmless enough. And at the risk of being thought cruel and heartless, I have to say I also find them dangerously fatalistic, lacking in recognition of the connection between cause and effect, and oblivious to the element of chance in ordinary life.

Carried to the extreme, as Godly sentiments too often are, they become downright dangerous.

I share the sentiments of Christopher Hitchens, whose God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, is one of the most challenging works of recent years.

This is the book that set off fierce debate when it was published in 2007. The nexus of his argument is that there are “four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.”

Worse than that, in my judgment, is the consequence of God worship in justifying territorial and property claims that must be backed up by earthly force in order to prevail.

There is no more dramatic example than the interminable struggle in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Semitic peoples whose lines separated in ancient times, both lay claim to this part of the world on the strength of their age-old presence. Extremists on both sides assert their rival claims to be sanctioned by God.

There are many rational reasons for these peoples to contest possession of Palestine, including the Gaza Strip. Chief among them are economic interest and geopolitical considerations. If these were the only causes setting them apart, there would be hope for rational negotiation leading ultimately to a reasonable settlement of differences.

But when God is injected into the picture, the cause becomes more durable, the conviction more rigidly enforced, and the argument more likely to defy rational explanation.

So when people say “God watched over me,” I say be not so certain you have been chosen. Think of it as luck.