Uncle Charley Discusses Prayer

Uncle Charley was over for dinner last week. "I just came from a prayer meeting", he began.

My wife gave me a look which clearly meant "Here we go again".

Trying not to provoke anything, I said "That's nice, Charley. Didn't know you were religious".

"I ain't," Charley said. "But I like to know what the opposition is talking about, in case I have to hang out with them."

"I'm guessing they were talking about prayer," I said as neutrally as possible. My wife gave a barely-audible sigh and reached for her wine glass.

"Well, they were asking God to save them from a calamity, like that tidal wave that hit Japan. And they were thanking God for the ones he saved."

"I know you have some kind of problem with that, or you wouldn't have brought it up. So what's your objection?"

"Let me ask you something," Charlie said. "You think those people in the meeting believe that God can intervene and save folks?"

"I'm sure they do believe that," I said. "They wouldn't be there if they didn't."

"So why didn't God save all those people in the first place? I mean, if they think God could save some of 'em, why didn't he save 'em all? Among them hunderd thousand or so people, there musta been at least some nice ones, kids and babies even, ... Didn't they deserve help?"

"Some of them did get saved," I answered. "I don't know why some and not others."

"You think the ones that died or got hurt deserved it?"

"No. I don't think that," I said.

"Seems to me you got a pretty basic contradiction in yer thinking. If God is responsible for saving people, which I guess is why you thank Him, then he has to be responsible for the ones who died or got hurt as well. They seem to be thanking God for not having been quite as bad as he could have been."

"Wait a minute..." I said.

"If God can save people, and he doesn't, then he should be held responsible. We sue people for not doing things they oughta do to save somebody."

"That's been a problem since people first started thinking about some kind of Supreme Being. The problem is how to account for evil or bad things that happen. Either just one boss is in charge of everything, including evil, or he isn't. So if you want a loving god, you gotta separate duties. Mostly people have decided that some other junior god must be in charge of evil."

"Well then," Charley said, "since there's a whole lot more bad stuff happening than good, the evil side must be mostly in charge. Because if God allows the Devil to do bad things, he's just as responsible as the Devil. It's called a 'criminal conspiracy' or somethin' like that. If God was here we'd have to arrest him."

I thought about it for a minute. "When the illogic of the whole thing is brought up, religious people usually give as an excuse that there are things we just aren't meant to understand, like God's reasons for things."

"That's just about as lame an argument as you could possibly come up with. We got brains that can think. We gotta judge what happens with the brains we were given, just simple old human brains. So in our human world, we got to judge things with the equipment we got. We'd never accept from some other mass murderer that we simply can't understand his reasons for killing a lot of people. To jail he'd go. So God is guilty by all the standards of reason I can think of."

I said, "The real problem, I think, is that we all need to think that the universe is governed by either God or logic or both. We don't want to think that things happen to us randomly, even though the evidence is overwhelming. When you try to force random things into a logical pattern, you get some weird explanations."

"On the idea that 'weird explanation' is better than none at all?" Charley asked?

"I guess so," I said.

Charley laughed, reached for his wine glass. He bumped the salt-shaker over and quickly set it upright."

"Oops," he said. He picked up a pinch of salt from the table and tossed it over his shoulder. "Fer good luck", he said with a grin.