So why do you think God is punishing us?

So why do you think God is punishing us? 

I’m reading more and more commentary from professional religios who seem certain that they know what has caused this pandemic. They don’t think it has anything to do with a virus. According to them, COVID-19 is God’s punishment on us all. 

Every one of these spiritual whiz kids agrees with every other spiritual whiz kid that the pandemic we are going through is the handiwork of a vengeful god who has had it with us humans and decided to slap us around with an illness. Why this god of theirs — and I posit that he is a god of their devising and not the Almighty God the rest of us follow — decided to smite us varies from one religio to the next. 

For instance, a former executive of a Catholic television network who is a survivor of a nasty bout with COVID-19 that landed him in the ICU, seems convinced that we brought this on ourselves by taking communion in the hand instead of on the tongue. So far as I know, he hasn’t explained why his god saw fit to smite Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, et al, who take their grape juice (no wine for them) in tiny cups, or why the Buddhists, atheists, Muslims and various animists around the globe got smitted along with us communion-in-the-hand-taking Catholics. So far as I know, he didn’t even explain why good, “orthodox” Catholics who insist on sticking out their tongue at the priest and probably drop to their knees in front of him when they take communion also come down with the virus. 

God, in this Catholic television executive’s world, is awfully indiscriminate in his smiting. For instance, I’ve never once taken communion on the tongue and I do not intend to. In some circles, that makes me a pretty lousy Catholic. Yet the virus has — so far at least — passed me by. 

Go figure. 

There are, of course, other explanations for god’s smiting. I wrote a earlier about priests who’ve been out there claiming that God decided to slam us with COVID-19 because indigenous art from the Amazon was brought to the Vatican, and, something else. I forget. 

I imagine quite a few protestants would tell you that COVID-19 is god’s revenge on Catholics for worshipping Mary, and then there are the evangelical atheists who seem certain that all evils of every type are caused by Christians. 

Whew. 

You need a spreadsheet to keep up with this stuff. Uggidty boogiddity does come out when people are scared. 

The dangerous underbelly to this is that it’s not religion. It’s superstition. 

The Eucharist is real. Absolutely real. 

It’s not some hocus-pocus magical rite that if you don’t do it exactly correctly will bring the devil down on your head. That’s not faith. It’s magic. It’s superstition.

Ditto for all the other bizarre reasons the uggiddity boogiddity crowd is giving for god’s smiting us. None of it is faith or even faith-based. It’s superstition that goes back to the cave and the swamps we crawled out of at the beginning of human civilization. These are stories told around the campfire to explain the scary darkness out there beyond the flickering light. 

Superstition is an attempt to control that which you cannot control and which scares you. It moves in one step from trying to exercise control over the things that go bump in the night to controlling other people.

That leads inevitably to some sort of sacrificing of those other people, their comfort, their freedom, their dignity as human beings, or maybe, (calls to kill Granny for the DOW are an example) to killing them on the altar of our superstition to appease our false god. Propitiation to our superstitions doesn’t so much become destructive as it is destructive, right out of the box. 

I think that’s because it is turning away from God. It is also, as turning away from God always is, a lie. It is a lie and a manipulation. It is crazy-making self-deceit that rapidly turns into deceit of others. 

We can be amused by the stupidity of these oogiddity boogiddity folks. But we shouldn’t take them too lightly. There’s a streak of mean that runs through their superstitious manipulations that can cut and tear at anyone who comes too near. 

So I ask you, why do you think god has smitten us with COVID-19? It’s no fair, saying that this is a virus, not a demon, that it behaves according to the same rules of nature that govern all that lives. 

Rationality is not currency in the twilight world of oogiddity boogiddity. It has no value. 

You must come up with something that the human race has done, some one thing that has offended God so thoroughly that He has fashioned a virus to use as a cane to flog us. 

Or, you could just refuse to play the game. You could get up and walk out of the asylum and let yourself think free, like a full human being who was created with a mind that can unravel the mysteries of time and space, and know the God Who created everything, everywhere on a personal level. 

If you are truly made in the Image and Likeness of the Living God, you don’t need oogiddity boogiddity to deal with life’s challenges. You have been given everything — every single thing — that you need to conquer whatever comes. 

COVID-19 is not God’s punishment. It is a virus. We are backing it down by self-isolating. If we yield to the yammerers who want to let this thing out of the box, it’ll turn and back us down instead. That isn’t oogiddity boogiddity. That’s our own stupidity.  

Maybe — hopefully — warm weather will slow the virus and give us time to develop a vaccine. If we develop a vaccine, we’ll bring it to a hard stop.

If that happens God — the real God — will be in it every step of the way.  

He gave us our minds. He gave us our immune systems. He gave us the ability to work together and stand against it. He gave us the Gospels which teach us to stand for the common good.

God made us so that we can do this. 

If the devil is at work in this, he’s in the superstition and lies. The devil is out there driving the idiots who are waving Nazi flags and carrying guns and demanding the right to infect themselves and others. The devil is behind the stories of unsubstantiated cures and the deliberate lies saying that we should ignore the virus. 

The devil’s there. But neither he nor God is punishing us. 

We’re punishing ourselves and each other with our lies, greed and lack of concern for other people.