Faith and Obesity.

I’m quite fond of analogies as you may know by now. I find that people of faith share a problem with people who are obese. The obese among us, once the medical community identified obesity as a disease, breathed a great, collective sigh of relief and thought, “See, it’s a disease, it’s out of my control.” It’s a way of shirking responsibility for your actions. Of course, what doctors were thinking was that if people thought of it as a disease, they would then try to CURE themselves of it. Needless to say that’s not what happened, as one in three Americans are now obese. 

Similarly, people of faith are more than happy to shirk their responsibility to the rest of humankind. We hear it all the time, “It’s in God’s hands now.” This highlights the problem of religious faith, because it can be used to justify anything at any time for any reason. “God must have wanted this atrocity to happen” or “God gave us free will.” The free will argument only gets you so far, however. People of faith are constantly thanking God for the positives while simultaneously relieving him of responsibility for earthquakes and holocausts. It’s awfully convenient to be able to stop thinking about a problem and to fail to come up with a solution if you can attribute anything and everything to the will of God. 

This is why faith is bad; it allows perfectly good people to ignore the problems of the world and do nothing, just as obese people go on eating and not exercising and using the ‘disease’ angle as an excuse.