File under God's Mysterious Ways

An image of god making the stock market go down

From time to time, I am completely puzzled by what Christians attribute to their god. Today, I opened RightWingWatch.org to catch up on the insanity and found one such person claiming that business leaders who resigned from advisory councils had so upset the Lord that he decided to take aim at the stock market of all things. You see, these business leaders had insulted the divinity's chosen leader, and the stock market hit would in turn hit them in their wallet.

Lance Wallnau said "They insulted the president and his base. It doesn't surprise me [that] the stock market had its first setback today. That's not a coincidence. That's not a coincidence, that's a prophetic response to the uprising and insult that came from these CEOs."

Yeah, guys, it's totally not a coincidence! That has to be Yahweh's work because the stock market doesn't fluctuate at all. It's always just going up, just all the time.

Can I just ask how this is prophetic in any way? Who prophesied it? When?

Again, if they did, it must be prophesy because the stock market never fluctuates!

He then said, "When those CEOs mocked Trump and made this  a political issue, the judgment would come where their pocketbooks are. How fast does God sometimes settle accounts."

First off, I'm not sure how taking a principled stance has anything to do with mocking, but then people like Wallnau are not know for their accurate use of language. The business leaders didn't call him names or go nanny-nanny-boo-boo with their thumbs on their noses as they dashed out the door. They decided they didn't want to be associated with a man who refused to condemn racists and racist-lites.

Second, how do you know that these men suffered in any way because of the stock market? And how do you know that their business volume didn't increase because of their stance? There's a little piece missing here and it's called evidence.

Third, and this is something I'll never understand, assuming there was suffering, it wasn't limited to these men. The stock market impacts lots of people everywhere and the US markets have ripple effects to other countries. Yahweh always seems to have a need to cause as much disaster as possible to punish a small number of people. The Noah's ark story always disturbed me because I thought (assuming this were in any way true, which I don't believe), why does Yahweh need to destroy absolutely everything - plants, animals, infants, small children? I really don't  understand how absolutely everything except this one small ship of people and animals could be so worthy of a terrible destruction. It's the same when hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes are blamed on progress in the LGBTQ community or the fact that abortion is legal. I mean, here is this all-powerful, all-knowing deity who apparently needs a sledgehammer to push a tack into drywall. Couldn't he specifically take aim at the targets of his ire? Why all the other fallout? Why must a whole swath of the country suffer to punish a handful of people marrying people of the same gender, trans people using the bathroom of their choice, or a woman who had an abortion?

Finally, why is god so interested in punishing people on earth? Isn't there enough time after they die?

But I know that really what is going on is that these Christian yackers is that they want to weave lots of tales of god's involvement on this earth so that their marks keep tuning in and giving money. Correlation is fine. No need for evidence of anything. Take any events and weave them together. Ignore history - like the fluctuations in the stock market that you didn't correlate to anything, natural disasters happening without any other news going on, etc. Voilà, you have proved your god and supported your favorite hypothesis with no work. And made yourself relevant in the meantime.