I believe that everyone should have the right to believe in a gendered or genderless being/force/flyingspaghettimonster who may omnipotently care or chose not to care about the 9,000-year-old, (or older), speck of cosmic dust called Earth and the creatures huddled thereon.  But…because most of those beliefs imply, infer or out-and-out boast about the free will of His/Her/Its creatures, it may behoove us to take an empirical breath of sanity before we undo all of His/Her/Its hard work.

If you believe that everything is due to God’s will, you simply needn’t try so hard to convince anyone else of that fact.  He’s already taking care of it…and by “it”, I mean everything.  Of course, you’d have to be 100% certain that you’ve got “it” right and that someone else’s God isn’t the real one or you, you blasphemer you, are going to some very uncomfortable place for eternity.

The United States of America birthed itself, (maybe in Kenya…I don’t know), with the boldest of all ideas in modern civilization; that the religiously contentious dogma that had wreaked havoc in Europe, Asia and North Africa for centuries would have no place in our government.  This superior intellectual idea lasted exactly no minutes, (reference acknowledgement to Now.Hear.This!).  The religious BS, (when I become president I’m going to use the whole word), at every turn, hijacking intelligent conversation for the inanity of bickering over what God did or didn’t will, (an argument no one can win), stifles us from getting down to the important work needed to make this a safer, more just, and productive society.  The atrocities, worldwide, in the name of religious doctrine are escalating at an alarming pace, and we, still Constitutionally compelled to govern separately from religious interference, continue to blather on the wrong side of righteousness.

I would not have interpreted Richard Murdoch’s statement, “I think that even when life begins in the horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”, as meaning that he thinks God wanted the woman to be raped.  But, if everything is God’s will, Mr. Murdoch, He wanted it all, and personally, I’ve got no time for such a God.  Or for that matter the one under which we are supposed to be indivisible in our Pledge of Allegiance or the one we’re supposed to trust according to our money or the one who sticks His nose into any other place than someone’s personal and private belief.  In religion, as with everything else in our society, we have minimized the beauty of the teachings of humanity and understanding that is nearly universal and focused too intently on our unsupportable differences.

If, in fact, God has a will…he has left us all out of it.