Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Does God get a holiday on Good Friday as well?

The ‘Sunday News’ had a little snippet of an article, which garnished my attention, and appealed to my dark sense of humour, but not I must add, my innate empathy for the victims.

An elderly retired priest from Pennsylvania accidentally drove his car into a group of churchgoers following a Good Friday service, killing an elderly woman and injuring four other people.

Police and witnesses said the priest had just finished assisting with an afternoon service and was driving around to the church entrance, when his car sped into a small group standing under a shelter.


Parishioner Angela Thomas, who helped tend to the injured, said the priest told her the car accelerated by itself.

"He told me the accelerator of his car went on its own and he could not stop the car”.
To the non-superstitious this is clearly this is a tragedy, an awful accident – nothing more.

To Christians however the question that befits deep pondering, is that old-chessnut “Why would God let this happen?”

This was one of Gods greatest servants here, on a sacred day, worshippers to his cause.

Those most deserving of his protection, were the victims.

Surely just this once, God could have ‘pulled-out the stops’ and short-circuited the vehicles electrics?

May be God could have rendered the elderly priest sick for that morning, so he would have never attended that fateful service on Friday.

There were literally hundreds of options open to God to prevent this tradedy occuring.

Yet, he did nothing.

Was taking advantage of the day-off and off fishing or on the golf course perhaps?

Anyone would think there was no God.


3 comments:

Kerri Love said...

no, the car was being controlled by Satan! Did no one connect the dots?

And thanks for the video; this is one of my favorite songs. Did you know that the "boy" singing in the beginning is actually a girl :) I heard it's actually the singer's daughter. Not sure why they went with a boy for the video.

Canterbury Atheists said...

Hi there Rabbit,

You are right on one score, the singer in this clip is a girl, but it’s not Andy Partridges daughter.

In-fact she is the former musician and record producer Todd Rundgren’s.

Andy Partridge also wrote a book by the same name, that was the inspiration for the song.

The XTC album it’s from ‘Skylarking’ is fantastic.

I saw them live in Christchurch in 1986 (ish)

Paul.

Kerri Love said...

Sarah McLachlan does a nice version of the song too :)

I was lucky, a friend of mine was an XTC fan and introduced me to the song at about the same time I was becoming an atheist so this was almost a theme song for me.