Some People Are Bad People

Or, chickens are better people than people:
George Carlin - Chickens

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There is a Bible passage (there's a phrase I don't use very often) that used to puzzle me, but which I now think is the societal-level equivalent of one of Newton's Laws of Motion. It says, "To them that hath shall be given, but from them that hath not shall be taken even that which they have." The rich get richer, the poor get poorer; those of us who already have plenty keep getting more, and those that have nothing keep getting screwed. I am, of course, thinking of the terrible tragedy in Haiti, a country which was already part of the Axis of the Seriously Fucked Up, and which is now rubble.

So Rush Limbaugh (I keep waiting for that man to explode. When will it happen? Will it be on YouTube?) said he wasn't going to donate money to relief efforts in Haiti because they're already getting our tax money, whatever the fuck that means, and that this will just "burnish the Obama administration's credentials with both light and dark skinned black people" please die already, okaythanks. But the topper, as always, goes to Pat Robertson, who opined that Haiti was hit by an earthquake because they did a deal with the Devil.

And this is why I don't believe in God. Bear with me. See, Pat Robertson has to believe that there is a reason for things. He believes in an omnipotent, watchful, vengeful--but not unjust--God. If bad things happen to good people, then they clearly were not actually good people. The proof is in the pudding, the shit pudding, the natural disaster dessert flambe. So when sucky bullshit like this happens, Pat Robertson has to scratch around in his empty little bag of tricks and pull something out. Gays, lesbians, fornicating, uppity womenfolk, deals with the devil, what have you: you got what was coming to you! (As Jesus so eloquently said.)

The thing is, though, that this means that Pat Robertson has to believe that, along with the (only apparently) good people who were killed, the infants and children who died in Haiti yesterday made a deal with the Devil too. He has to think that no one who died in the earthquake (or who will die, be raped, starve, or catch an easily preventable disease, in the aftermath of the earthquake) is innocent. He has to believe this, because there's a corollary assumption: he, Pat Robertson, has succeeded not because of a fortuitous combination of race, education, background, timing, and con artistry, but because God loves him more, because he is a good person. In a way, I envy the simple egotism of this belief system. Bad things only happen to bad people, and it is their fault that they are bad, so let's not lose any sleep over it.

More proof that there is no God.