<i>Dialogue:</i> Put God on hold? Give him a break

19 Sep, 2001 08:26 PM5 mins to read

By GARTH GEORGE

It has been fascinating to watch the reaction of the public to the dreadful events that took place in New York and Washington on Wednesday morning last week as disclosed in our letters to the editor columns, which are the newspaper equivalent of radio's talkback.

The outstanding impression I have had is that nearly all of the scores of letters we have so far published tell us much more about the writers than they cast any light on the subject.

There has been little concern for the families, relatives and friends of the 6000 or so people who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, for many of whom the loss of a spouse, a parent, a sibling means life will never be the same. The number of people directly and indirectly affected must run into tens of thousands.

Mainly the reaction has been self-centred as people have used this tragic event as an excuse to climb again on to some well-worn hobby horse.

There have been rancid outpourings of hatred against Muslims in general and Afghans in particular and demands that the Government rethink its decision to admit the Tampa boat people to this country, although the number of Muslims who would even contemplate committing such an atrocity is probably a fraction of a percentage point of the Islamic billion.

The anti-United States brigade have used the event to bolster their old and tired arguments against what they see as American military and economic imperialism and to say in a dozen different ways, "It serves them right", although the US has unselfishly contributed more to the welfare and benefit of the post-Second World War world than any other.

I would not be alive today had it not been for the determination of the United States to halt the advance of the Japanese then drive them out of the Pacific at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. My father, turned down for active service and an officer of the Home Guard, kept a pistol at home to use on my mother, my brother and me if the Japanese landed on our shores.

The pro-defence brigade has used the tragedy to demand that the Government rethink its defence policy, although the atrocities took place in a country which has the biggest, most modern and most sophisticated armed forces in the world.

There have been those who have jumped at the chance to blame religion for this catastrophe and while there's no doubt that religion has been used as an excuse to perpetrate evil - as it has been for hundreds of years - the number of Muslims, Christians or Jews who would do so is minute among those bodies of believers.

And then, weirdest of all, have been those who have blamed God himself. I say weirdest of all because it is obvious that none of those who blame him believes in him, and how you can blame a deity whom you don't even believe exists for anything is quite beyond me.

The suggestion that if God were put on hold, the world might be a better place seems rather strange considering that in most of the Western world, and in New Zealand for sure, he was put him on hold a long time ago. Is New Zealand a better place?

God does not impose himself on humankind. He gave mankind the power of choice. We can choose to believe in him or choose not to; we can choose to honour him or choose not to; we can choose to obey him or not to - and the number of times he has interfered with or overruled our choices are few and well documented.

It makes as much sense to blame God for the American atrocity as it does to blame Garth George.

I wonder why it is that God gets blamed only when things go wrong and never gets any credit when things go right. What of the fourth aircraft that failed to reach its target because a prayerful believer and four others gave their lives to make sure it didn't? Does God get the credit? Fat chance.

I wonder, too, what the world would be like if there were no believers to carry out God's commandments, such as to love one another, to feed the poor, to tend the sick, to bind up the broken-hearted.

Imagine a world without, for instance, the Auckland City Mission, the Salvation Army, World Vision, the Christian Children's Fund - and tens of thousands of other similar organisations staffed by hundreds of thousands of believers of all creeds who devote their lives to the service of those less fortunate than themselves.

You don't hear much about them because most of them shun publicity. These people of God are too busy trying to hold back the tidal wave of human tragedy, sickness, poverty and hunger that engulfs so much of the world, including our little part of it.

And I'll bet a goodly number of them were and are right there in the thick of it in New York and Washington.

garth_george@nzherald.co.nz

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