AAAAAAAAAAH

[filkertom]

I'm sorry. I can't help myself.

There was this awful thing earlier this week -- a man needed a double lung transplant. A woman donated her lungs upon her death. A U-M medical team was en route to the man earlier this week when their plane crashed into Lake Michigan. No survivors. Someone else donated lungs, and now the man has his transplant.

When the daughter of the original donor heard about the plane crash, she said:

I'm still having a hard time processing it.... You wonder if it's all for nothing. Sometimes you just don't know why things happen. You just have to believe that God has a plan.

I don't even know what to say to that... but it wouldn't be particularly nice.

Comments

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

You ever notice how, in science fiction and comic books, the only ones with overarching "plans" turn out to be the villains of the piece?

Yeah.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Not always...

Arisia.

[lariss.livejournal.com]

Actually...yeah.
Sort of like.. George Bush has/d a plan.
Reagan had several plans (Trickle-down economics and the laughably disastrous, yet still-funded War on Drugs)
Can one identify a villain by his/er plan?
This merits pondering.

[magicaltrevor.livejournal.com]

I hear ya. Well, everything you didn't say. I mean, she's basically said, "Well, it wasn't orchestrated logically, BUT THERE IS STILL A GOD AND IT TOTALLY WAS ORCHESTRATED LOGICALLY."

Plus it's that creepy thing where people attribute Bad Things to their god-figure so they can relabel them as Good Things. I'm not in the business of smiling blankly at tragedy, and I'm glad you're not, either. So no need to be sorry-- I think we can agree it's perfectly reasonable to get upset when someone tries to tell us that we wouldn't be upset if we just shut off our critical thinking switch.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

I have always said that Zoroastrian-style dualism, which postulates two co-equal, opposing gods, one good and one evil, was a lot more intellectually defensible than what we got stuck with.

[pandoradeloeste.livejournal.com]

Isn't that run-of-the-mill Christianity anyway, with Satan always working to oppose God? (Then again my impression of Satan wasn't an equal god, but more like a Snidely Whiplash character who was always foiled at the end.)

[nightmarewriter.livejournal.com]

Me, my idea is that any light has it's shadow, and the ultimate opposite for a good God, isn't Satan, but God's own darker face. Satan has his role defined in the Old Testament as the acuser of the brethren, but in no way is he God's equal.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

What we have, in the Xn religion, is one of the oldest known examples of the good cop/bad cop con, starring YHVH as the bad cop and JC as the good cop. Satan in this scenario is little more than a white elephant to disguise the fact that YHVH is really the bad cop. The surprising popularity of this religion over the past 20 centuries is due, I think, largely to the fact that the good cop/bad cop con is remarkably effective. To give an honest answer to the original question of what God's plan is that could justify the given scenario: the bad cop is a serial killer. He is all powerful, so he could have made us immortal, but he didn't because he gets off on killing us in ever more creative and gruesome ways. It's not a nice theory, but it explains a lot.

[lucywiggin.livejournal.com]

I'm strongly reminded of the time I learned at a Jewish theology course about how God prevents people who shouldn't die from taking a ship that's about to sink. Naturally, I asked if that means that God thought that all the people that went down in the ship needed to die. The lecturer said (in fancier words) that yes, they needed to die.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I always wonder, when I hear things like this, whether those people even realize that they've just accused their God of being either malicious or capricious -- and in either case, totally unworthy of worship?

[lucywiggin.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing - some of them understand, but they worship him anyway. The usual excuse is that 'we can't understand God'.

[eleri.livejournal.com]

Actually, I totally get what she's saying. She wants there to be some overarching *meaning* for the shit that just came down on her family's head. She wasn't to believe that God *isn't* just mean and nasty and random, that people didn't just die on some whim. She's putting her faith in thinking that, somehow, the end result of this is that the world is a better place.

It's not what I believe, but for people who do, I don't see that it's such a bad thing.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

She's putting her faith in thinking that, somehow, the end result of this is that the world is a better place.

That's the one part of this that is true. She's saying what she wants to believe...what she has to believe, otherwise she might just snap. It's a support mechanism. Everybody has them.

Believe me, if religion were nothing but a support mechanism (instead of a political/societal force), I'd be thrilled.

[pandoradeloeste.livejournal.com]

I read "God has a plan" not as "six people had to die", but as "even though the original donor's lungs never made it, there was a Plan B".

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

God did have a plan - the guy's lungs would fail.

When humans screwed it up by finding some replacement lungs, God had to scramble but still managed to take down the carrier plane.

Unfortunately for Him, another bunch of humans came up with yet a third set of lungs, thus thwarting not only God's original plan, but wantonly defying His obvious goal not once, but twice.

Bloody humans :)

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

Ah, the Jehovah's Witness "take" on this scenario...

[morpheus0013.livejournal.com]

Meh. I believe there are reasons for everything. It doesn't seem to have resulted in an significant retardation.

I find this way less "WTF" than the folks who have their kids survive a terrible car wreck or returned to them after a kidnapping and they say, "God answers prayers" or "This is proof that prayers do work." Uhh...so the kids who DIDN'T survivie the car wreck, or who were killed by their abductors, their loved ones just didn't pray hard enough? Or correctly? That always struck me as such an accidentally cruel thing to say.

Shit's gonna happen. How you deal with it and what you take away from it is all the reason I really need.

[morpheus0013.livejournal.com]

Er, not "way less." "A bit less."

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

(Course, were I the Daughter In Question, and had I been having the week that she's probably been having, and if someone stuck a microphone in my face, I'm not sure that what came out of my mouth would make all that much sense. I can guarantee it would be _different_ from what she said, but...)

[magicaltrevor.livejournal.com]

This is true.

[archiver-tim.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe more people will a aware of the need to donate their spare parts when they are done with them.

[lucywiggin.livejournal.com]

Well, I did sign a donor card just a week ago, but that's one card I'm not going to use. My organs are going to be well-used when I'm done with them.

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

Sure it's a plan.

To mess with us, and then laugh and laugh and laugh.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[mathmuffin.livejournal.com]

The standard Christian answer to why does God let bad things happen to good people is that we don't know. Sometimes we mumble that it has something to do with free will (I am quoting Time Bandits (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081633/) here).

But that answer is as dull as dishwater. Time to put on my heretic hat and speculate on a non-standard answer.

God put us in a world of natural laws. In the best case, we break the laws and suffer the mundane consequences: a hand in the fire will get burned. In the worst case, some parts of nature are random and we suffer the consequences not from our own fault but because life's dice rolled a bad result. Flying over Lake Michigan can be dangerous, that University of Michigan organ transplant team knew that, but they thought their mission was worth the risk. The risk proved fatal. An atheist would say it was just bad luck.

Except that we Christians believe that God can override bad luck with his will. The mission was worthy of his divine intervention, so why didn't he intervene? Was it part of some bigger plan?

I don't think so. I think it was just bad luck.

If God intervened every time people working for good would get hurt, it would be a new law of nature. Life would be like an overly romantic fantasy novel: the good guy not only never fails, he never even gets inconvenienced. "His strength was the strength of ten because his heart was pure!" Perhaps somewhere God did create a world like that. But the people there would not be human.

Humans are forged in a world of hardships. Humans take risks, humans suffer downfalls, humans pick themselves off the ground and trudge on, humans persevere or die trying. We are a glorious species of heroes. But we could not be real heroes without real dangers to face.

Once mankind fell into sin, we became a danger to ourselves. But it would be tragic if we were the only source of danger and suffering in the world. It would be like the world imagined by the craziest radical environmentalists in which all the world's problems are caused by humans and everything would be perfect if we went extinct. Instead, God put us in a world that is naturally dangerous. So that we could be human and not feel guilty about it. (Hmm, I think that last sentence demonstrates that I am a Lutheran not a Catholic.)

Imagine a father who was so protective of his toddler daughter that he would pick her up every time she tried to walk because he knew she would fall on the first few attempts. I wasn't that kind of father. I not only stood back as my daughters learned to walk, I stood back as they learned to climb. They were good at climbing, too, but Sharayah did once try to climb on the ceiling from her top bunk and earned a split lip from the fall.

God loves us, but being loving is not the same thing as being protective.

Erin Schram

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

I've been pondering this a lot myself, lately, after for some reason being reminded of an episode of Hercules, the Legendary Journeys (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111999/).

Iolaus had temporarily been granted godhood, and he tried to interfere for good in human affairs. He saw a man crossing a rope bridge that was collapsing and started mending the bridge. Peeking into the future a few hours, he saw that this man would then murder a family. Iolaus let him fall.

I guess the moral was that once the gods start interfering in human events (and yes, I know, the Greek gods did that all the time, but this show wasn't known for its mythological accuracy), there's no good place to stop.

I prefer to believe in a God that doesn't interfere so directly in human events. Maybe plants an idea here and there, taps the occasional person on the shoulder, directs a scrap of attention now and then. But interference on a macroscale raises too many questions about why one person was worthy and another wasn't; and, of course, there's the question of Where Does It End.

[dragonscholar.livejournal.com]

All part of God's plan? No I don't HAVE to believe that at all :P

[fuuberry.livejournal.com]

"When you do things right, it's almost as if you've done nothing at all."

I love you, Futurama.. You bring the wonky logic of people like this into a bit of perspective.

Personally, I don't believe that every action is set in stone. I'm too much of an angsty post-teen rebel to ever nuzzle up to the idea that some uber-power is poking at my life to nudge me toward every choice I make. I mean, I get it, believing in a huge, eventual plan, it's like a nice cozy security blanket to turn to when your life's gone to utter shit in some way or another. Heck, in a similar fashion, I'll always believe my uncle died within 3 days of my aunt, under entirely different medical circumstances, simply because he couldn't live without her. Doesn't mean I believe it was destiny that either of them die right then and there.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

I write it off as the things we tell ourselves to endure life's ultimate unfairness. I wish her some happiness in her life, after all this.