Ego-centric Religion

I earned my private pilot's license a long time ago. The cross-country phase of the training is when you learn how to navigate an airplane and back then, it was all by using a chart and comparing the chart to what you saw on the ground.

I was on a cross-country flight with my instructor. We were in a Cessna 150.


Something registered in my peripheral vision, I looked up to see a Piper Cherokee pass overhead and it was very close. I was pretty sure it was a Cherokee Six, I could clearly see the longitudinal stiffeners that were riveted along the belly of the Cherokee. (At the time, I'd not flown any Piper aircraft or even looked closely at one, I didn't know those stiffeners were there.)

We watched as the Cherokee passed us and it passed through our altitude, as it was descending towards an airport about fifteen miles away. If it was descending at 500'/min, we were about three seconds away from getting killed.

I told this story to a family friend who was visiting not long afterwards. She said that my "guardian angel" was looking out for me.

First off, in the religious tradition I was raised in, the only angel I remember hearing of was the Angel of Death.

Second, assuming that there are such things as guardian angels, there could have been six people in that Cherokee. Counting my instructor, there were a maximum of seven other people there, all of whom presumably would have a guardian angel. They all probably weren't asleep on the job.

One time, I was waiting out a severe storm at a rest stop on the eastern shore of Virginia, as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was closed. A lot of people were there. The line into the snack bar was horrendously long. As I hung around in the lobby area, a young woman came out of the snack bar with a bunch of chips and other stuff. As she passed them around to her family, an older woman took a bag of chips and said: "Praise God. Praise God."

Maybe my mind is too small, but it occurred to me that there were roughly six billion people on this planet and that at any particular time, a lot of really bad shit is happening to a lot of them. War. Famine. Disease. Being a refugee. Being homeless. It's not hard to find stories about families that earn the pittance they need to survive by scavenging in junkyards. That same tropical storm we were waiting out probably trashed some people's houses and killed some folks. I just find it hard to conceive that God would then reach down and make sure that one woman has a bag of chips and a can of tonic.

You see and hear this stuff all the time. An airliner crashes on approach or takeoff; there are some survivors and, as sure as crap flows from a goose, you are going to hear one of them say "God was looking out for me." What sort of ego, what level of self-importance does it take to assume that the Creator reached down and saved that one individual from death and, if so, what was the reason why all of those other people were allowed to die? Why does God save one person from dying in a automobile collision but the rape, pillaging, ethnic cleansing and whole scale slaughter goes on Darfur?

What sort of ego does it take to believe that you are so important to the scheme of things that God saved you?