If Hell Exists, then I will Meet Nancy Grace There!

Today , CNN.com posted a video. It is a Nancy Grace report on about how a 4 year old girl was abducted out of her own front yard by a carnival worker who had been targeting her. The 23 year old man drove up and chased the 4 year old and beat her 12 year old sister so he could snatch the little girl. Well, it seems that because the 12 year old sister gave such a good description of the man and his car, and because he was a known (or maybe suspected) predator, the police found him and rescued the 4 year old girl, unharmed. This is truly an exceptional event. It reminds of the following statistics:

• ~800,000 children go missing every year in the US ALONE
  
• While ~350,000 of them are found and had a "benign" explanation for why they were missing, that still leaves ~450,000 EACH YEAR that are more serious situations
  
• ~350,000 of those are classified as "runaways/thrownaways," ~55,000 are clasified as "family abduction," and ~62,000 are "missing involuntary, lost, or injured"
  
• That leaves about 12,000 that are "non-family abductions" each and every year. Think about that: 33 kids are abducted by a non family member each and every day. EVERY DAY! And that is in the U.S. alone.

Well, what do you think Nancy said in her report when one of these 12,000 kids was rescued? She started her report by saying "Well....THERE IS A GOD!"

What? There is a God?!?! I guess all of the thousands of little girls and boys who are abducted EVERY YEAR and are never heard of again (probably raped for a long time and then have their heads cut off and tossed in a ditch) had it coming in God's eyes, huh Nancy?

This type of crime is the absolute WORST thing that humans can do to one another. It makes even the stoutest opponent of capital punishment quiver with internal conflict. To point to one girl who survived as evidence of a god is to ignore the 1,00s of others who are raped and killed every year. "But God has a plan" I hear the religious saying. That's right. God has a plan. As Rick Warren, author of the hugely popular A Purpose Driven Life, writes in chapter 2:

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]

Ignoring the obvious issues with this (e.g. God planned every abortion...ever, it denies free will, etc.) why doesn't this make people who hear about a child being abducted and raped and murdered say to themselves, "Hallelujah! Witness God's glorious plan!" Why? I will tell you why: Because they want to give credit to God for the good things that happen and yet they do not want to credit him for all of the horrific things that happen. If they did, they would start to 1) doubt that there is a god, or 2) even if there IS a god, doubt that that he is all loving and/or all powerful.

Nancy Grace knows this yet she just wants to make money by exploiting tales of horror regarding lost children. Millions of people in her audience are religious and don't want to hear discussions such as these so she just points to the one child who WASN'T raped and murdered and claims "See? God exists!"

Shame on her.



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.