Where was this God?

June 8 2021

My paternal grandfather, I knew him as Pappy, he was a hard cold man. Trying to get love and affection out of him, was like using a toothpick and thread to try to pull the island of Newfoundland closer to mainland Canada. I did not know him very well. All I really knew about his and my father’s relationship was that Pappy and my father’s mother Helen, had been on vacation down in North Carolina U.S.A. where Helen had been killed in a car accident and for months after, Pappy had not informed my father of his mother’s death.

This sad state of affairs was brought about by Pappy having thrown my father out of his house at the age of sixteen; due to my father’s alcohol and drug use. As we know, drug addiction is usually brought on by trauma either real or imagined. My father’s trauma was real in that he suffered emotionally at the hands of Pappy who truly was an ass.

But what about Pappy, how had he become the way that he was? He had spent his childhood in Winnipeg in a lower middle class home. His father had thrown him out at the very young age of twelve when the financial crisis of 1929 hit. Pappy spent the years of the great depression tramping the rails of western Canada, where he was forced in to the position where he had to sell sex for both food and protection. He was sexually assaulted innumerable times. Now remember that this took place during the 1930s, and after world war 2 and during the 1950s, while dad was growing up in Pappy’s home, counseling was almost unknown. So there was my grandfather ruined even before he had a chance to start his life.

Most people raise their children in similar ways as we were taught by our parents, sometimes that works out very well, and other times not so much so. I find it interesting that Pappy at the end of his life, gave the majority of his life savings to the Salvation Army. Not because he was religious, but because he would have died if not for the charitable work that they do.

Pappy was an atheist (had no belief system) through and through. And really, considering all that he had been through, you can not blame him. His question to me was, how can I believe in a god that allows the kind of suffering that I have seen? It is a good question, how could the dewy eyed sap that Christ is portrayed as, allow his creation, us, to live the nightmares that we do?

I once had it explained to me that god allowed shit to happen to us because, he was incredibly busy looking after six billion people. Perhaps so but, you would think that he would catch stuff like the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 or the tsunami of 2004. Or maybe the Fukushima earthquake and its resultant nuclear disaster. My particular question is, where the fuck was he/her, during WWII when six million Jews were exterminated? He supposedly had a covenant with them, and during that period, not to mention the previous 1,935 years, he had allowed his “chosen” people to be treated pretty shabbily.

So when we look at the micro (individual), the intermediate (large scale human suffering), and the macro level, E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event), I think that instead of asking where was god, we should be asking who is this unreliable prick that we call “god”?