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Chapter 2 - The pair of ducks and bad exegesis by Mushfer Brains
In the May, 2004 issue of Guideposts magazine, there is a fascinating story about a huge wildfire that swept through San Diego, California. Steve Homel lived in a subdivision surrounded by that fire. Steve prayed and his house was spared from the fire. Of course, this story in a popular magazine offers a much better glimpse into the way that God works in our world, according to Christians, than any sort of article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that understands prayer in terms of patronage, or asks the question of how ancient Jews understood prayer at the time the Bible was written. But back to our duck. Our duck lived on Ping Pong Pond in the northern part of Tierra del Fuego. He saw the fundy atheist approaching and it was terrifying -- the duck describes it as "an eight-foot tower of lip-smacking knife-totin' hunger rolling down the bank that overlooks our pond." The duck and his wife (what do you call those? a duckess?) grabbed a few essentials, several beloved feather sculptures, and the eggs and evacuated as quickly as they possibly could. They waddled to the home of the duck's grown duckling about 15 steps away. There, as he watched the news on TV, the duck actually saw the fundy atheist reaching his nest area. What is the appropriate thing for a duck to do in such a situation? Actually, it was in fact getting away. And prayer itself isn't wrong to do either. However, the duck, like most ducks, had never bothered with any sort of exegetical understanding of the Bible's promises on prayer. The duck proceeded to do a very silly thing, really: "Suddenly the duck grabbed a piece of paper. 'God bless this nest,' he scrawled." The duck then faxed that sheet of paper to the fax machine in his nest. Days later, the duck and his neighbors returned to their pond where the fundy atheist was waiting for them and immediately gobbled them up. Of course the moral of the story is that any time any Christian works out some sort of story of the sort found in Guideposts, it will become fodder for any fundy atheist who is no better at exegesis and thinks that intelligent Christians really believe that sending prayers via fax machines is some sort of viable practice, as though the prayer were some sort of magic totem that protected the property. The fact is that nothing in the Bible or its context promises any such thing of prayer, as we have seen. This is not to say that it was not within God's power to do answer such a prayer positively; nor that there might be some reason why God might spare one particular person or duck or house from some tragedy. But it is really no better than claiming that your car keys were stolen by Satan unless you have far better objective evidence that there was a divine answer. The Pair of Ducks in the Pond Once prayer is properly understood, there is no "paradox" to speak of in God seeming to "answer" the prayer of X concerning a fire in his neighborhood while not answering Y's (even though both may be Christians). Like the entirety of what is found on the Why Does God Hate Amputees? website, it is a red herring of immense proportions built on a popularly misinformed view of prayer. Not that it's entirely sound in its reply in the first place. The fact is that we can NOT "safely say that nearly all of the neighbors prayed for their homes" simply because "the vast majority of Americans are Christians, and prayer is the immediate thing for Christians to do in any emergency." That's a very strained attempt to force out a point that Mr. Brains wants to try to force out for his own purposes. If I had to answer I would make the point that many Christians are not as shallow as the one featured in the Guideposts article -- that they would not be concerned for such perishables as possessions when their lives were in danger, and not do silly things like fax a prayer to their endangered house in the hopes that God would keep it from burning down. What ends up happening, however, is that silly little fundy atheists like Mr. Brains start asking silly little questions, like, "could we save billions of dollars per year by closing every fire station in the nation" and relying on Christians and their fax machines to take care of us. Prayer is not a gumball machine. It is never promised to be one, Mr. Brains' decontextualized, fundy-atheist eisegesis notwithstanding. I don't believe that God "answered" the prayer of the one man whose house didn't burn down while 39 others did...which is to say, I see no reason to think it was God's hand as opposed to something else (that say, the house was well barricaded naturally from a fire). But isn't it possible? It is. But before saying "God did it" I'd want to hear from a firefighter that there was no reason exterior to the house that it ought to have been spared. After that, things become Harry Turtledovish. Why spare X's house and not Y's? Well, in the long term (arguably) being displaced from his house may have made X less able to do something that he needed to do in the future to advance God's purposes. I don't know, and it's not my business. The point is that to reduce it to a game of numbers (even if we make the gratutious assumption that "God ignores 97.5% of the prayers offered up by the homeowners in [the] subdivision" because we assume that all did indeed pray, and for the same thing, which is a BIG "assume") is idiotic. No one with any sense of responsibility, if they think prayer is of any effect at all, views fulfillment of prayer as something done for satisfaction of short-term wants (not "needs"). That's certainly not how ancient patronage (the model on which prayer is built) worked. An ancient patron would hardly go around giving every client such personalized service for selfish reasons. People like Mr. Brains who live only in the here and now have no conception of the long term. "It is all part of God's plan, but what sort of plan is that?" he whines. The Civil War may have been decided (if we believe Turtledove) on the fact that a certain courier for the Confederacy lost a letter while riding his horse. I can readily see Mr. Brains as a Northern general who was told that a letter was lost because God ordained it, whining, "What sort of plan is that? Why doesn't God send us a bunch of Ak-47s so we can whip those rebels?" There is no "paradox of God" to resolve. Mr. Brains is mistaking popular naivete for sound doctrine.
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