EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 ALMIGHTY WILL

One reads many strange things these days about how people view the will of their particular god.

Some condone sending a 12-year-old girl into full-term pregnancy, perhaps to die giving birth to a rapist’s child, because their god views all babies as precious. More precious than the mother? It would seem so.

Some say that the murder of children, as in the annihilation of all of Jericho’s inhabitants, was intended as a blessing to the children as they would see paradise, guaranteed.

Adults avowed the same for the children marched in lines to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq wars. They even threw in some virgins to await the boy-children in Paradise.

The Spaniards, it is said, guaranteed the salvation of babies of native South American peoples by bashing the babies' heads against walls.

The death and suffering of children seems to be a favorite method of showing kindness.

Now we also read that a god directed a bullet, fired by a madman, away from a favored leader and into, instead, an innocent bystander. Anything, it is avowed, is permitted for a good photo-op.

Tsunamis and tornadoes, likewise, spare the chosen.

All in all, it seems that a member of the Almighty Club is granted the most extreme methodology in the execution of any chosen chore.

Followers are not at any liberty to question this process. In the words of a character from a popular TV series, “His ways ain’t our ways.”

All alone in a dark place, though, we might wish that some almighty might be more like Mr. Rogers and less like Charles Manson. After all, an end achieved by a blessing would be as worthy as an end achieved by a bullet.