God de Sade?

I occasionally like to remark that God is a black, Jewish, pro-choice lesbian. It's a joke that is designed to irk...well, white, non-Jewish, anti-choice heterosexual men, or at least the right-wing nutjob portion of that particular demographic. Today I got a reminder of another remark I like to make about God, and while this one is also a joke, I think there may be a grain of truth to it: God has to be either incompetent or extremely sadistic to allow so many innocent people to suffer so greatly.

Natural disasters are one thing, but what about child-molesting clergy? Greedy politicians whose positions favor the wealthy? And so many others? They cause so much pain to so many -- especially the politicians, whose actions affect so many more people -- yet God doesn't smite nearly enough of them. Hardly any, really. Don't you think a bolt of lightning striking down one or two of these creeps live on national television would send a message to the rest that they'd better clean up their act?

What reminded me of this thought today was, as you might expect, Twitter. And the National Football League.
In a game yesterday, the sad-sack Buffalo Bills rallied to force overtime against the mighty Pittsburgh Steelers. In the overtime, Buffalo had the ball at the Pittsburgh 40-yard line when Ryan Fitzpatrick fired a perfect pass to a wide-open Stevie Johnson for what would have been the game-winning touchdown had Johnson caught the ball. Sadly, he dropped it. The Bills ended up having to punt, and the Steelers drove down the field and won the game on a field goal. Johnson was distraught after the game, as you can imagine:

“I had the game in my hands and I dropped it,” Johnson said. “Humbled. Humbled.”
Then, growing emotional, Johnson added: “I’ll never get over it. Ever.”

Then, sometime later, he apparently decided the blame should be placed upon a higher power...

A quick aside: on ESPN's "Bottom Line" crawl at the bottom of the screen, they reported on this tweet, and ran it in its entirely, exactly as it's displayed above: in all caps, all the punctuation and grammar intact. It looked really funny going across the screen.

But back to the God issue. So many times we see athletes in post-game interviews thanking God for allowing them to score the winning TD/basket/goal/run (pick your sport) or make the great defensive play or whatever. I find this so irritating, not only because I'd prefer people not try to convert me to their faith during my sporting events, but because if God is helping them win, what about the players on the losing team? Surely there are Christians on that team as well. Why didn't God help them? How are they any less deserving? I think it tends to prove my point about God being sadistic. But I think it's nice to see that Steve Johnson is willing to call God out on this inconsistency, even if he'll probably offer up an apology and delete this from Twitter in a day or two.

And, just because, here's "Dear God" by XTC: