The Lord Protects the Simple

I've never been a fan of the view of God as some bearded dude on a cloud, getting all up into our everyday lives and doling out consequences according to some ridiculously lumpy formula.

As a young man, this skepticism led me to atheism. Then I meditated enough to recognize that this is a material world full of propositionally material “individuals,” and the whole thing is a caprice of—what else?—subjectivity. Subjectivity is so utterly what we are that we're hardly able to even consider it. In fact, we tend to drop to our knees and light incense whenever we get close. And from this framing, I found that an awful lot of God talk made sense—just so long as you don't need it to involve some bearded dude on a cloud.

But I still have a tick. Whenever I see someone bumbling along, oblivious to danger while doing life horrendously wrong—pushing a baby carriage behind my car as it backs up with reverse lights gleaming, or speeding through blind turns without watching—I peer at them closely and check to see if they're limping or missing teeth. And I estimate their age.

While any of us might slip and momentarily zone out, there are people who behave this way as an ingrained habit. And such people, I can report, walk the Earth uninjured for years. Decades, even. People with white beards, who long ago should have been culled from the gene pool, stride confidently into harm's way and emerge unscathed. And they're usually not limping.

I, the careful one, am the limper. Though I'm thoughtfully cautious and shrewdly strategic, my outcomes resemble those of hapless straight men in slapstick comedies.

I'm beginning to reconsider the notion of a God capriciously goosing the settings as part of His “mysterious” work. How else are we to understand these superhumans blazing from point A to point B without watching, thinking, or caring? Either some paternal sky figure insulates them (and definitely not you or me), or else they're not bumblers at all, but a higher form of life—as unknowable to the likes of us as a man is to an ant.

Either way, it's clearly some God shit.