Friday, January 2, 2009

Give Credit Where Credit is Due

And I'm not talking about the financial crisis. I'm talking about humans acting as good human beings.

Picture this. A child goes missing, the parents call the police and alert the media. The police and the general public actively help in the search for the missing child and, happily, the child is found.

The first thing any rational parent would do is thank those who helped and remind everyone that humans are generally good and caring people.

This is how it normally plays out. "Thank 'god' our child is safe. We had faith that he would return our child to us." Sometimes followed by "and" "we'd like to thank everyone who kept an eye out for our loved one".

F#$k god - that worthless piece of sh!t was just as involved in the child going missing as he was in having the child found. He/she/it had nothing to do with it.

Why can't we simply thank the people that helped? "Thank you to the police. Thank you to my family. Thank you to the general public who called in tips and helped us locate our child. Thank you to the technology that enabled this. Thank you to humanity."

If you ever, ever, ever, ever, ever need medical assistance for a life-threatening situation and happen to survive it - god didn't do it. Thank modern medicine, thank science, thank humans - thank the doctors, nurses and ambulance attendants - give credit where credit is due.

2 comments:

C Woods said...

To me, this is relaled to the following human tendency: If something good happens to us, it is because of our own talent, skill, intelligence, perseverance.... If something bad happens, it is because someone else was stupid, made us look bad, was jealous, took credit....

When something good happens humans give god the credit. But when something bad happens, it's still someone else's fault.

The plane crashed and one child survived. "It's a miracle. Praise the Lord."

They don't blame the deaths of the other 200 people onboard on god. That's the fault of the pilot, the plane manufacturer, the airline company, faulty maintenance... And if none of those work, you can blame it on people of a DIFFERENT religion: terrorists.

sarniaskeptic said...

You do make a very good point - I think we, as humans, hate to think that it might have been our own fault when something goes wrong.

I would like to think that it is a problem caused by the environment and that humanity hasn't truly evolved such feelings.

It is my hope that with the loss of religion and dogmatic beliefs, this will dwindle away too. People will take credit for their good actions and responsibility for the bad ones.