The co-hosts of The View are debating the topic of God and BP, the suggestion being made that prayer might be the thing to offer up since nothing else seems to be working.
Whenever I hear these heated discussions, where there is disagreement and yet everyone on the panel seems to agree that God is an entity, I sit here dumbfounded (which is maybe why no one asks me to moderate a television show).
Sherri Shepherd has just announced, by the way, that it’s okay if someone else understands God as a female, but in her eyes, God is a (the capital H is understood) He.
What’s wrong with people? Why is it that they expect that God, if there is such an entity, will come out from wherever s/he is hiding and rescue human morons from our man-made mistakes? Don’t you think the holiest of holies would have better things to do?
Are there not, for example, 22.4 million people living with AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa? Indeed, in the Asian, African and Latin American countries combined, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty." And every year 15 million children die of hunger.
In fact, according to ThinkQuest: Projects by Students for Students, “to satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US $13 billion – what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year” – little more than half the 20 billion offered up by BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward.
Further to the oil spill and closer to home is cancer, which will afflict every family in the world – as will alcoholism, drug addiction, and severe depression.
Where is their God? Where is mine? Where was God for my mother before she committed suicide; when Don was afflicted with neuro-endocrine cancer; when my brother was addicted to drugs?
And who is any one of us to expect, were there an exact idea of God that they expect, that this almighty spirit is going to issue forth a solution for the issuing forth – thus far 160 million gallons of it – in the Gulf Coast?
Call me naive, but it seems to me if we spent more time working on traits – generosity, understanding, study, hard work and compassion – we wouldn’t be spending our mornings (okay, I wouldn’t be spending my morning) listening to the co-hosts on The View debate whether God is male or female and whether he or she should be appealed to to stop the oil spill – the one created by greedy entrepreneurs who ought to have been stopped, by us, long before now.
