That bishop move over North America? That's Carl Crawford missing the catch in the 9th inning. God has it all worked out.
Now before you start complaining that this is yet another Red Sox post, let me have my say. Yes, the incident that inspires it relates to the recent event that is slowly driving me to the brink of madness, the collapse of the Boston Red Sox(Go Rays!). But it is not about baseball.
It is about the misuse of God.
Red Sox Boston Globe beat writer Pete Abraham, interviewed many of the fallen in the Red Sox clubhouse after Wednesday’s final humiliation, to gauge the reactions of the players. He got this response from Adrian Gonzalez, the superstar first-baseman, who blamed the Boston failure to make the American League play-offs not on the team itself, nor on his own mediocre performance down the stretch, but on the Big Manager in the Sky, who as usual was moving in mysterious ways. Gonzalez told Abraham:
“We were wholly confident that we would make the playoffs but it didn’t happen. We didn’t do a better job with the lead. I’m a firm believer that God has a plan and it wasn’t in his plan for us to move forward.”
That’s right, Adrian…the team went 7-20 in September because God’s inscrutable plan for the Universe relied on the Boston Red Sox failing to make the first round of the play-offs. That’s not mysterious, however. That’s stupid.
And so convenient for Gonzalez. Rather than look to his own failings and the part he played in his team’s miserable showing, attributing the collapse to God permits Gonzalez to embrace a complete abdication of accountability. Even if there is such a perverse and omnipotent baseball-obsessed entity as God, really does have a plan, mysterious beyond human reason, that does require the Boston Red Sox to make fools of themselves, how much better it would be for the players to think and act as if it were otherwise, taking full responsibility, and not shrugging off what happened as beyond their control.
Using God in this way is a lazy and cowardly cop-out, a too-easy escape route from accountability, and an all-purpose dodge to avoid looking in the mirror. I wonder how many more runs Adrian might have knocked in for the Red Sox if he had known that he himself, not some all-powerful sports fan sadist, would be the one he would have to finger as an accessory to failure.
Ethics Alarms 
I really think the Almighty has more important things requiring His attention than who wins a baseball game and causing a team to win when the other team really deserved it would be unsportsmanlike.
Adrian Gonzalez is an Evangelical Christian, and from all appearances a serious one. He knows God has a plan for his life, which certainly includes his baseball career. I would not try to understand his faith from a sound bite, but this may just be an expression of Gonzalez trying to make sense out of his disappointment and how God fits in it.
Trying to determine God’s plan is, as they say, above my pay grade, but I believe God’s plan for the Red Sox has little to do with wins and losses on the field and everything to do with people (players/fans). For a Christian to try to understand God’s plan for him in this situation is one thing, but to say “it wasn’t (God’s) plan for us to move forward” without that context misunderstands the nature of God and is indeed a misuse of His name.
You’re making the same category error while disavowing it.
While Adrian Gonzalez has a clear ethics failure, you misplaced it. If it’s appropriate to thank God after a homerun or big game, it’s appropriate to blame him after a poor stretch. Gonzalez’s statement logically follows from his belief in a loving god. Gonzalez should be lauded for his consistency.
So why is Gonzalez still an ethical failure? The inappropriateness of thinking that some god interacts with the world at all…not that his plan was Sox failure.
On the plus side, this is a great example of the stupidity and irrationality of religious believers. Not Gonzalez, but those attacking his words while saying that God has other plans and other things to do.
Both are inappropriate, but for different reasons. Thanking God for a home run is immodest, and vain—why are you so important that God wants you to hit home runs? Putting off failures on God is an accountability dodge. The Red Sox lost because Adrian Gonzalez didn’t hit enough home runs in September. I agree that the first facilitates the other, but I wouldn’t call that consistency. I’d call it a syndrome.
Yes, believing that a mythical god affects your life is a syndrome, but the consistency of Gonzalez is better then the inconsistency of Modern Knight.