I read the news today, oh boy—and oh boy did I get annoyed.

To be sure, this is nothing unusual. It’s a rare day in the last few years when something in the news doesn’t annoy, anger, or downright piss me off.

And the catalyst for my annoyance was nothing new or unusual either; I’ve seen it many times over the years.

It was in a nytimes story about a man being freed from prison after 19 years for a murder that he did not commit.

This sad story has been repeated countless times over the years. In an effort to find a culprit, any culprit, for the killing of a white dude, the police used let’s say questionable tactics to intimidate false testimony from witnesses and used misleading photographs of suspects to get false identifications from other witnesses. And the prosecutors went along with the weak evidence to get a conviction of an innocent Black teenager.

It should surprise nobody that this occurred in Minneapolis where it has been clear for several years that law enforcement is woefully corrupt.

But that’s not what annoyed me in reading the article.

No, it was this passage:

“I always knew I was going to find a way to get justice,” Mr. Haynes said in a phone interview from prison early Monday shortly before being released. “I knew God was going to lead me through this.”

God? God would lead him through this?

What the hell does a god have to do with his exoneration?

What about his lawyers who have been working on his behalf? What about his family who lost their savings fighting for his freedom? What about the Innocence Project that worked to secure his release? What about the current prosecutor (a former public defender) who, faced with the exculpatory evidence, concluded that setting him free was the right thing to do? Shouldn’t they be credited before some imaginary god?

And yet I see this all the time. Believers always seem to give their god credit whenever something good happens, but don’t blame their god for all the rotten shit that happens to them.

Let’s assume for a moment that Mr. Haynes’ god really does exist and does interact with this material world. Where was this god 19 years ago when Mr. Haynes was charged and convicted for the murder that he didn’t commit?

Can you picture the scene up in heaven? I see the chief deity as a Mr. Grant type as played by Ed Asner,  and one of the cherubim as Murray as played by Gavin MacLeod.  So when the cherub reports the latest miscarriage of justice to the chief it might go like this.

“Hey, Lou,” says Murray,  “there’s another innocent Black guy accused of murder in Minneapolis. He’s asking for your help. Do you want to intervene now to get him off the hook?” 

Mr. Grant looks down from his lofty throne and smiles. “Heh, heh. No, let’s let him stew for a few years. Like all the others. Oh, on your way out, send in Mary.” 

Or something like that.

The point is if Mr. Haynes’ god really exists, it either didn’t do anything for 19 years or it took that long for it to act. Not a very powerful god, if you ask me.

A few years back a former co-worker of mine was in a serious bicycle crash and was hospitalized for some time and required multiple surgeries. Then one day I saw he put a note on Facebook to thank his god for saving his life.

Now this was someone who, for as long as I had known him, had not given any indication that he was particularly religious, so I left a comment that perhaps he should be thanking all the medical personnel who worked to save his life.

He promptly unfriended me.

I guess that was the Christian thing to do.