God is amazing, alright.

On Thursday night the Marlins played the Pirates, and it was about as average a baseball game as you could hope for (Pittsburgh beat Miami, 7-2)... except that Marlins pitcher Dan Jennings got hit in the head with a line drive.

That's always a scary moment, and frankly I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often: a screaming line drive comes right back at the pitcher's head, and before they get a chance to get their glove up for protection or duck out of the way, bingo, ball meets skull/temple/face. Seeing as how these batted baseballs are moving at, at times, 110 mph (175 km/h), and the pitcher is standing a little less than 60 ft (18 m) away...

v = 175 km/h = (1.75 x 10⁵ m)/(3600 s) = 49 m/s

v = d/t ... t = d/v = (18 m)/(49 m/s) = 0.37 s

...that's not a lot of time. (Always show your work.) Actually, that's not even the length of time you have to react. That's the length of time from when the ball leaves the bat to when it would hit you 60 ft away; you have to get your glove up by that time, and that takes a fraction of a second too.

So, Jennings got clocked. Preliminary tests suggest a concussion, but if you check the video clip above, dude didn't even fall to the ground. Ball smashes off his head, he spins around and takes a few steps, then puts his hands on his knees. Tough guy.

Anyway, he was well enough to tweet this afterwards:

The scans were negative-it seems I'm going to be ok. The support shown tonight has been unbelievable, speechless. God is amazing

Easy there, Dan -- that may well be the concussion talking. But let's unpack this statement.

God is amazing because...

1. the scans were negative
2. you're going to be OK
3. you've received support from people

These are all good things, don't get me wrong. I'm glad the scans were negative, that you're going to be OK, and that you feel the support of family, friends and fellow players.

But is this really evidence that God is "amazing?"

According to all the descriptions of an almighty deity I've ever encountered in Christianity, God is everywhere at all times. Now, there's always a question of how "interventionist" you want your God to be, of course... but omniscience and omnipotence seem to be pretty key features.

If God is omnipotent, and if God loves all His creatures and creations, you'd think that getting nailed in the temple by a flying five-ounce spherical projectile would be something that God wouldn't want one of His precious little things to experience. And yet, it happened.

The way I see it, there are two events here in which God could have intervened:

1. the initial incident of ball hitting face
2. the relatively-positive aftermath

Also, there are two ways in which God could have reacted:

1. do nothing
2. make things happen the way they did

I smell a 2x2 table coming on.

	God did nothing	God did it
ball hits face	Geez, do something already.	Dick move! You DID this?!
positive aftermath	Humans are pretty great.	It was the least you could do.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I don't know if God exists or not. But if so, come ON.

On religion.

So, Fred Phelps died this week.

Am I happy about that? I suppose. But not very, because the church he created (and apparently from which he was excommunicated last year) lives on. George Takei had a good take on it; to summarize, he suggested that love always triumphs over hate, in the end. And, more generally, I think it was Mark Twain who observed that there can be people whose deaths aren't to be celebrated, but aren't necessarily appropriate to feel sad about. Phelps being gone fits that bill pretty well.

The Westboro Baptist Church is an extreme flavour of religion, of course; its extreme-ness is why anyone talks about that particular, tiny congregation in a nondescript part of the US at all. But, religions find their way into a lot of corners of our lives, either through overt displays/rituals/symbols/practices, or though more subtle ways like the idioms in our language ("god forbid...").

The more I think about the whole concept of religion -- blind faith in something you can't prove is there, rituals that go back thousands of years that have weird and nonsensical meanings, rules that defy logic -- the more ridiculous the whole thing seems. It's a waste of time. I used to think it was interesting to think about different religions, and I guess it has a bit of a value in terms of historical curiosity, but these days that's fast losing its appeal.

Maybe part of it is because I'm actively seeking out a significant other, and in this town you've got a lot of people from a lot of backgrounds, and a lot of 'em belong to cultural groups that have a lot of rules, and a lot of those come from religion. (Full disclosure: I find a lot of different women attractive. Haven't always, but this place tends to open up your eyes.)

I am a member of the following groups:

• males
• white males
• straight white males
• straight white males who are passably Christian-ish
• straight white males who are passably Christian-ish with an education
• straight white males who are passably Christian-ish with an education who are employed
• straight white males who are passably Christian-ish with an education who are employed in an occupation that is near-universally respected

To quote Louis CK, "you can't even hurt my feelings!" As such, there aren't a lot of explicit "rules" I have to follow in my day-to-day life. I can kinda do whatever I want, and that's pretty bitchin'. I wish more people had the freedoms that I have, and, boy-howdy, does religion (in some cases) handcuff some people.

(I used the phrase "passably Christian-ish" because I was raised in it, but don't consider myself Christian anymore, but can speak most of the lingo and am familiar with the general ideas, some of which are actually quite nice.)

But, just think about what we could do as a world if we just stopped thinking about religion, giving money to religious organizations, paying attention to who fucked who over, thousands of years ago. Who's specially-chosen, who's not. How much you have to cover your head/face/body in public. Who has a historical/divine right to certain places. Wasting time sitting on uncomfortable seats/kneeling on rugs/burning incense in shrines/getting up early/fasting/whipping yourself/going on missions to far-flung places/and so on.

The moral of the story is that it's Sunday morning, and Sunday mornings are for sleeping in.

A logically-airtight system of belief.

I've been running through this in my head for the past few minutes. Let me get this straight, and allow me to think out loud (or, in print).

• You create a system of religious belief which is derived from an extremely common pre-existing system.
• This system you've created highlights, as its central tenet, that anything which occurs is the direct consequence of the existence of the source of your belief system, which you naturally believe to be true, because you're an adherent to the system.
• It doesn't matter if the things that occur are "good" or "bad," they merely need to take place.
• Again, the source of your belief system is the sole determinant of whether things happen or not.
• And since things happen, they must have been caused by the source, thereby reaffirming the source's existence.
• "Good" things -- that is to say, things which the majority of people approve, enjoy or like -- are easy enough to attribute to this source, due to its all-powerful nature.
• "Bad" things, while deemed to be unpleasant to the majority of the populace, are also attributable to the source and thus prove that it exists because, well, the thing happened.
• People tend not to like "bad" things. But you posit that these things prove that the source of your belief system indeed does exist, thus reaffirming your beliefs and thus your system.
• If you showcase these "bad" things which have happened as, conversely, "good" things -- because they prove that your system of belief must be right -- people tend to get mad.

Alright, I think I got it.

The system of belief, of course, is the Westboro Baptist Church. They have about 40 adherents, which might be roughly the number of members in attendance at your local Elks Lodge meeting, but people around the world have only heard of one of the aforementioned small groups, and it ain't your local Elks Lodge.

The beauty of this system of belief is that, no matter what happens, you can point to the thing that happens and say, "Look, because God is the direct source of everything and makes everything happen, this all proves God exists. And because we know this fact, and we take pride in never deviating from it, unlike others, we're the ones who got it right."

Is this controversial when, say, a baby kitten sneezes in a cute YouTube video? Nope. God made kittens, and sneezes, and YouTube -- so we're all good, baby.

Is this controversial when, say, a US soldier dies in battle in Iraq? Yep. Americans tend to like their soldiers, and get bummed when they die; they tend not to celebrate dead soldiers as yet another affirmation that God exists and does things. But, not the WBC -- this is a time to show that, look, God did this, and therefore God is powerful, and you may as well just join up with us, because we're the only ones who look at a soldier's death this way, which is to say, the right way.

At this point, you have to make a choice. Do you...

1. grieve the death of a fellow human being, which is arguably a somewhat natural human response, or
2. put all that aside and take this opportunity to reaffirm the existence of God?

I think I may have said this before in a previous blog post, but it goes like this... if your system of religious beliefs makes you less human, it's probably not a good system to which to adhere.

Now, I'm not entirely certain why they chose the God Hates Fags thing. I can imagine that they probably figured out that homosexuality is a pretty controversial topic -- or at least it was, however-many years ago -- and that'd be their angle on the whole thing. I mean, sure, that list of bullet-points above hangs together on its own pretty well, but if you want to make things practical and comprehensible for Joe Sixpack, you've gotta give an example.

A: "Why does God do bad things to us?"
B: "God does bad things to us because... uh... hmm. Well, I know in numerous places in the Bible, it says that God loved the world and thus everything and everyone on it, but... there's this one little thing it says God's not too keen on, but we do it anyway."
A: "Oh, you mean eating shellfish? Way ahead of ya. Don't touch the stuff, myself."
B: "Well, yes, that could be. You get a bad shrimp, you're gonna be alternately shitting and puking for days. But crustaceans don't really add much zing to a religion, you know?"
A: "Yeah, I know. Besides, I like Red Lobster. How about all those fags, then, mincing-about?"
B: "A, it looks like we got ourselves a church here."
[A and B, both dudes,* furiously make out in celebration]

And thus, Fred Phelps and whoever-else was equally demented and happened to be around and agree with him, created the WBC. Hallelujah, indeed.
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* also works for two chicks, trannies, ladyboys or two-spirited persons