Madalyn Murray O’Hair has caused untold damage to our culture, I believe, by her push to get prayer removed from schools. Let’s face it, she was quite successful on that front. But a recent piece just shocked me on how juvenile her thinking about God was. And it made me kind of sad.
Jeremy Lott writes:
One night, the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair received absolute proof of the truth of atheism.
According to Brian Le Beau’s great biography The Atheist, “in early 1946 during a violent electrical storm…Madalyn, still pregnant [with a married man’s baby] and in despair, announced that she was going out into the storm to challenge God to strike her and her unborn child dead with lightning bolts.”
For some time, O’Hair “stood in the rain waving her fist and cursing God.”
Her arm failed to act as a lightning rod that day, so she went back indoors.
“You see?” she cried “If God exists he would surely have taken up my challenge.”
You’ve heard of similar stories, I’m sure. People challenge God and when that challenge is seemingly unmet they cite this as PROOF that God doesn’t exist when all they really did was prove that they themselves are not more powerful than God.
If a child walked up to his father and yelled at him and cursed him and dared the father to hit him, would that prove that the father didn’t exist?
Hers was a teenage temper tantrum that proved only that God doesn’t throw teenage temper tantrums.
I know that when I was younger and unsure of…well…anything, I too challenged God. I made demands. And if I’m being honest with myself I probably still make demands of God. But when I don’t receive the answer I demand, I don’t question God’s existence, I question my pride which led me to believe that God was accountable to me.
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