(no subject)
"It was God. God was with me. And I asked Him to be with me, and He never left my side."
--Jeanne Assam, the woman who killed the shooter
I'm sure the blogosphere has been contemplating this over the last day, but I'd like to apply my own brand of recursive analysis to the situation.
We start with her statement, of course: God was an active force in preventing carnage. He took personal interest in the struggle and Assam was chosen to be His fist.
The reflection of this sentiment is obvious and comes to the mind from tens of perspectives in my experience. "A police officer trained with a weapon can easily kill an unstable, demonstratively insane assailant. Why bring God into this?"--I hear Coolhand from my days at the Forum. "Isn't it arrogant to place God on your shoulders?"--maybe a standup comic re: thanking God for sports victories. "Where was God at Columbine? At other school shootings? Does God only protect the churchgoers?"--the atheist reply is simple and clean. What place is there for a God when all that really happened is a man, a bullet, and a well-deserved fate?
So we recurse again. There are at least two sides to every issue, and maybe no more than that; certainly I think every issue can be broken down into a series of axioms. And the dimensionality of this problem is fairly clear: either someone believes in God or doesn't. Generally speaking--we might have to broaden the scope of religion, such that a Hindu might say the hand of Krishna intervened, and that Assam was engrossed in bhakti even as she was focused on her version of devotion. The specifics of religion can be precipitated out, as they must as a condition of religious harmony... but I digress.
The point is, if we take each side of the axiom as equally viable, then we can generate equally viable arguments using both perspectives. This is why arguing over abortion is retarded.
More importantly, though, these explanations have to actually be concurrently viable. You can't just leave it at the two viewpoints expressed above, because those are merely contradictory.
So what's religion's answer to rationality?
Well, mostly I just have to show that the atheist perspective above is not necessarily in exclusion of God's existence.
Unfortunately I have a final tomorrow, and a paper due after that, so I might have to return to this at a later date. Good night.