In some weird transport / religion crossover an online magazine called Communicate Jesus has done a write-up on the Eurostar mess and has linked to my post about the issue. Seems they did not notice the Atheist Bus banner in my sidebar 🙂 Their article is entitled ‘Important lesson from Eurostar’ and the article is categorised ‘for Churches, for Pastors’. The idea of a sermon about Eurostar is a rather odd thought, or maybe they hope that some divine intervention will stop Eurostar breaking down in the future?
Or perhaps it was perhaps it was because you wrote a good piece on Eurostar and their comms failures, and a Christian website looked beyond the fact that it was written by an atheist to the fact that it ws just plain good writing? Christians (with the possible exception of certain extremists in the USA) tend not to avoid communicating with non-Christians.
God didn’t stop the trains breaking down. Nor did he flick Hitler’s head off (the current Edie Izzard riff on why if there is a God he’s not all good or all powerful so he can’t exist). That doesn’t mean he’s not there.
If he wanted us to be puppets operated by him, he could do that, but we wouldn’t be the fully human people that he loves. And the world isn’t operating in the perfect way in which he set it up to run – don’t think anyone could argue with the fact that the world doesn’yt operate in a way each individual would consider perfect?
But Christians believe that God knows all about suffering, having been through it himself as Jesus. And it’s our job to try to allieviate suffering and make things a little better in our private and our working lives – guess we need a few mighty-engineers-for-God in the mix…
The train broke down because God was showing his wrath that an atheist (i.e. Jon) was planning to travel on it.
Repent, embrace Jesus and be rewarded with reliable international travel.