Let's keep God out of our tragedies

The May 13 Daily Herald reports that a Libyan airplane carrying 104 people crashed on approaching Tripoli's airport, leaving 103 of the passengers killed, and a 10-year-old Dutch boy as the only survivor. The Dutch prime minister hailed the boy's survival as a miracle, and the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town declared, "We thank God for the sole survivor. In his survival, we see that even in this dark cloud of death, there is this ray of hope."

These remarks by a prime minister and an archbishop greatly disturb me. What these gentlemen are telling us is that God saw fit not to save and bless the 103 persons who perished in this terrible disaster, yet He did single out the little 10-year-old boy to save and bless him. This approach turns our God into a deity that acts arbitrarily in refusing to save so many people on that airplane while saving one specially favored person.

Why would God act this way? I care not to worship such an arbitrarily acting god, and personally I do not believe God played any role whatever in this airplane crash. It was a sad event that happened at random, and God played no role in it at all. This approach gives me more comfort than to believe God was there and acted in such a discriminatory fashion.

And as for the archbishop's comment that God let the little boy survive to serve as a ray of hope for us, surely there are better ways for God to provide us with hope than to take 103 lives while singling out one life for survival. Please, let us keep God out of our tragedies.

Theodore M. Utchen

Wheaton