When pressed, I claim to be agnostic. I assert that I don't possess the arrogance needed to deny God with conviction. In actuality, I am probably an atheist, because the idea of God seems wholly implausible on every level. Though in my heart, the conceptual one connected to my emotions, I wish for a God, because we all wish for a God. Life is such a difficult proposition.
It is this part of my contrived belief system that prays, when I think about all the people living in devastating shocked disbelief at the pain there is to come, whose only real crime is bad luck.
There are so many of us whose only real crime is bad luck, whether that stems from timing, or genetics, or location, or circumstance. People who will be sent away from their current home back to a place they had, and have, nothing. People who were given the right to love freely and openly, who now fear they will be closeted again. People who have chosen not to bring a life into this morass, for whatever the personal reasons -- all of which are wrenching -- and will have that choice no longer. People who recognize the dying earth and wish to keep it alive for future generations, and because God or not, that is the moral thing to do. People who have a certain color of skin, faith, or history, that is not currently in fashion.
My personal crime is the need for medical care that is beyond my means. I sit waiting for the good luck of being born in a time of modern medicine to be ripped out from under me, because I am a high risk expense. I envision the day I am not able to take a pill or get a treatment, and that begins the terrifying countdown to my early and foreseeable demise. This is dramatic, but not the least bit dramatized.
From one day to the next, with a count of ballots, millions of us have become criminals of some kind, and I pray to God -- who or whatever that force is -- to come to our defense. The problem is, I am an agnostic, or an atheist, particularly when faced with the realization that man is in control of punishing us for our crimes of bad luck.
Whether you have more or less certainty in the spiritual and metaphysical than I, I implore you, don't allow man to punish us for the crime of bad luck. Preventing this is not the job of God, it is solely the purview of man, meaning human of every kind.