All Praise God's Plan and Free Will

WARNING: This story is about very disturbing events. Anyone who does not handle stories about children being abused by their parents well should avoid this! Scroll down for story.













In a story today, a local Bakersfield news station is reporting on a father who got high on PCP and ate the eyeballs out of his four year old son's eye sockets. Both eyes are reported to be damaged beyond repair. The son was found naked and bleeding by neighbors and could only say "Daddy ate my eyes."

I wept out loud upon reading this story. The absolute horror of this event is not in the physical attack itself, but the fact that it was a four-year-old's own father who did this. I was shaken to the core and it took me a long time to recover to the point that I could think about it. The first reaction I had when I could analyze it dispassionately was, "This type of thing happens all the time all over the world. Why do people still think 1) there is a god, and 2) she is worthy of worship?"

The inevitable answer from the Christians I speak with is "free will." This is, of course, total bullshit. For one thing, what happened to the boy's free will? I would assume that he wanted to avoid this. But more to the point, as I wrote yesterday, the pat answer of "free will" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Also as I discussed earlier, Nancy Grace was the first person to yell "There is a GOD" when a 4 year old girl was found soon after being abducted. Why doesn't she yell "Praise the Lord! More proof of God" when a boy has his eyeballs eaten out of his head by his own father? Even if she knows that this is evil behavior, she should still say "See? Look at the glory of free will that God chose to give us." As Rick Warren wrote in his best-selling The Purpose Driven Life:

Because God made you for a reason, he also decided when you would be born and how long you would live. He planned the days of your life in advance, choosing the exact time of your birth and death. The Bible says, "You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your book!" [Psalm 139:16]

Does Rick hear of this boy and think, "Praise the Lord. His plan for this boy is glorious?" No. of course not. Nobody sane does. People who hear or see things like this and think that they are good are insane.


UPDATE: After a technical issue and an absence, I have had to re-post all of my old posts. As a result there will be many posts listed as published today, Dec 3, 2009, that were posted sometime earlier in the year, but I do not know the exact date. this post is one of them.