Better leave God out of it, I’d say…

From this angle, where God actually stands on the issue – with the victims, or with the terrorists – suddenly becomes important to determine.

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury
Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

Sometimes it takes a tragedy to force people to confront their own beliefs. And it seems that the recent terrorist attacks in Paris have had much the same effect, on a wide variety of levels.

In the UK, for instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury has admitted that the Paris attacks caused him to “doubt the presence of God”.

OK, it was only an off-the-cuff remark during a television interview… and the doubt didn’t seem to last very long, either. 

“Saturday morning, I was out and as I was walking, I was praying and saying: ‘God, why – why is this happening? Where are you in all this’?”

According to the Most Reverend Justin Welby, God stuck to the script by actually giving him a reply. “I’m in the middle of it, Justin!'”, the Creator of the Universe reportedly said… adding that he was also in Psalm 56 : ‘he stores up our tears in a bottle, none of our sufferings are lost…’”

There is, I’ll grant you, a touch of poetry in there somewhere. I am reminded of Milton’s frustrations in the face of impending blindness: “But patience, to prevent that murmur, soon replies…” 

But there is also something deeply irrational in the entire outlook. I don’t want to overinflate what was ultimately a throwaway remark… nonetheless, those words home in precisely on the crux of the entire dilemma itself. 

Whether God actually exists or not, the attacks on Paris were carried out in his name – the God of a different religion, yes; and there is evidence that the terrorists may not have actually been religious at all. But the cause for which the Islamic State stands – as its name alone immediately confirms – is inspired and motivated by religion. 

From this angle, where God actually stands on the issue – with the victims, or with the terrorists – suddenly becomes important to determine.

But I find the sentiment bizarre for another reason. Atrocious though it was, the Paris attack left 130 dead. That’s a lot for an act of terrorism… but it’s also the sort of death toll that is reached every day – sometimes every hour – in places like Syria today. Or Rwanda in the 1990s.

And it almost pales to insignificance compared to the havoc occasionally wreaked by natural disasters. In 2004, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean left over 100,000 dead and countless homeless. There were no human agents at work behind the scenes: no terrorists, no weapons of mass destruction. Just the force of Nature that is supposedly – according to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s beliefs, shared by Christians of all denominations worldwide – harnessed to God’s will. 

I am unaware if any of these atrocities ever caused the Archbishop of Canterbury to doubt God’s presence in those regions, too… perhaps they did, and he never mentioned it. But still: what is it about this latest attack that makes it so difficult to reconcile with the presence of a loving, merciful God?

Only one possible answer presents itself, really. The victims were Europeans. Much more beside, they were Parisians, no less… inhabitants of the most elegant, sophisticated and ‘je ne sais quoi’ European capital of them all.

How could an omnipotent, benevolent Creator possibly sit idly by, while so many fine, fun-loving Parisians are pointlessly massacred by psychopathic infidels? No, no, it cannot be. That God ignores the ongoing massacre of thousands of non-Europeans each day… that’s presumably fine. But people with whom we share a cultural affinity? Whose wine we drink, and into whose ‘foie gras’ we dip our ‘gressins’? ‘Non, non, c’est ne pas possible’…

OK, perhaps I’m exaggerating the natural bias inherent in that remark… but it is there nonetheless. And the Archbishop of Canterbury is not exactly alone in this sentiment, either. In a sense it is inevitable; I feel that way myself, though we see the world very differently in other respects.

Like it or not, our reaction is indeed different when a calamity affects people like ourselves, in a country that is perceived to be ‘close to home’. There was more outrage in Europe over Paris than over Syria, and probably than all other global conflicts put together. It is irrational, but perfectly useless to deny. The senseless murder of fellow Europeans will anger and outrage Europeans more than the senseless murder of any other nationality: even if one occurs once every few decades, and the other once every few minutes.

It is inevitable, yes… but only from a human perspective. If we are also to question where God fits into this particular equation, all such considerations must be left at the Pearly Gates. If God exists, and created all the universe and everything in it… and if the rest of the Biblical account is true, at least in theory… then he would be surely expected to care for all his human creations equally: especially seeing as he created them all in his own image and likeness. 

And at all times, too. Time and space are themselves God’s creations; he must perforce exist outside both. So what difference could it possibly make to him if an atrocity took place today, or thousands of years ago? Either God exists – and was around for all of those atrocities, including Paris; or he doesn’t, in which case we are wasting our time. 

There is no reason under the sun why anything that happens today – however tragic or despicable – should in any way alter that particular balance of probabilities. 

Naturally, everything I said above applies in equal measure to the ‘other’ God also: the one in whose name the Paris attack was carried out. The God of Islam created all the universe, too. That would surely include the 130 people killed in Paris two weeks ago… not to mention the Charlie Hebdo victims last January. 

The same intrinsic dilemma is visible here, too: like the Archbishop of Canterbury found with his own version of God, it becomes difficult to reconcile an omnipotent, benevolent creator with the violent, senseless actions he himself (from the perspective of the perpetrators) has ‘ordained’.

Meanwhile we see the same intrinsic contradiction in various other responses to the Paris attack – interestingly, across the full spectrum of different perspectives. While some believers struggled to perceive God’s presence in this madness, others interpreted the madness itself as God’s own handiwork. One Evangelical pastor in the US (later echoed by one Republican Presidential candidate) suggested it was God’s punishment for people attending a death metal concert. 

So God, in his infinite wisdom, created ‘ISIS’ as revenge for Black Sabbath. And there I was thinking he’d already created Justin Bieber for that very purpose…

Meanwhile, I imagine this pastor will never see the analogy himself: but his reasoning is entirely indistinguishable from that of the IS terrorists. The only difference is that the terrorists perceive themselves to be active agents of divine retribution. The US pastor, on the other hand, is merely a passive spectator to the same show.

Even here in Malta, there has been a chilling similarity between some of the local responses, and the senseless hostility they were actually responding to. One such response caught my attention: it was a picture of a Maltese flag on one side, a crucifix on the other, with the words (translated from the original gibberish): “THIS IS MALTA: IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, LEAVE!”

I am no longer surprised when such blatant contradictions pass entirely unnoticed in this country. Let’s face it: irony is not, and never will be, our forte. But all you have to do is replace the Maltese flag with an IS banner, the crucifix with the Koran, and ‘Malta’ with ‘Islamic Caliphate’… and the sentiment expressed is identical in every way. This country (in our case it’s the entire planet for IS) is just too darn small to accommodate two different viewpoints. One of us has to go…

There is also the same false sense of entitlement. IS has earmarked an entire territory – comprising all the Maghreb and much of Southern Europe – as its own uncontested domain. The Maltese patriots have likewise simply annexed the country as their own private possession, and have arbitrarily decided – by what authority, exactly, remains unclear – who cannot and cannot stay. They have proclaimed themselves (as Christians) to be the sole guardians of Maltese national identity, and have labelled all those who don’t fit (including myself) as ‘infidels’.

It’s beginning to look like one of those ‘spot the difference’ competitions, isn’t it? Death to all infidels, whatever they believe…

Which brings us to the supreme irony of these supposedly ‘different’ religions, and how they view the world. There is only way these patriots can actually substantiate their boast; and that’s by resorting to the exact same sort of violent intolerance underpinning the Paris attack. 

Like IS, they would have to physically kill people, if they are to ever rid ‘their’ country of ‘infidels’.  Unlike IS, however, in this case the ‘threat’ is just meaningless bluff. It may be the only tangible difference between these two sets of religiously motivated hotheads… but it’s an important one nonetheless.

Either way, it matters little in the bigger picture. The rest of us – i.e., people who prefer leaving God out of their considerations altogether: either because they don’t believe in him, or because they don’t see any point in involving him in human affairs– now find ourselves wedged in tightly between two jostling juggernauts of sheer unadulterated irrationality, each claiming to be acting on divine instructions.

Only one rational conclusion as far as I can see… the world would be a much, MUCH safer place, if everyone just kept their private obsessions with the Divine to themselves.