Pray to the Gods of Football

I am baffled when it comes to what a fairly sizable percentage of Americans believe. They see their god everywhere. He is personally doling out health, success, and presumably money to people all over the world. He is using his cosmic power over the entire universe not to help the starving, hungry, and suffering, but to assist in American sporting competitions.

The CNN Belief Blog reports:

With millions of Americans set to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, a new survey finds more than a quarter of Americans believe that God "plays a role in determining which team wins" at sports events.

The survey by the Public Religion Research Institute also found that more than half of Americans believe “God rewards athletes who have faith with good health and success.”

While I'm personally not interested in the Super Bowl, I am interested in people that think that their God is rewarding people with good health and success. By implication, that means that he isn't rewarding some of us with good health and success for some reason. And that reason, according to too many religious people I have visited with, seems to be that we are bigger sinners than them and deserving of the disadvantages we receive. Not only is that unbiblical, it also goes against everything we know about reality. It is blaming the victims of difficult times while rewarding the people that were fortunate with respect to health and wealth.

And if rewarding the lucky and punishing the victims isn't bad enough, it seems like you can't even tell the difference until after the fact.

“I'll tell anybody. One thing about God's will, you can never see God's will before it happens,” Lewis said after the game. “You can only see at the end of it. For his will to happen this way, I could never ask for anything else.”

The only good news is that we now know that the god of football is capricious and Nate Silver is his profit.