The Great Divide: Thoughts and Prayers

Tree of Life synagogue (Chronicle/AP photo)

The shooting started at 9:50 AM Saturday. The first 911 call was at 9:54. At 11:13 the gunman, Robert Bowers, was taken into custody.

Eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh were killed, and four police officers and two others were wounded.

Newspaper and television commentators immediately looked at the massacre through the prism of politics--gun control, anti-Semitism, whether inflammatory speech triggers violence, and what effect the event could have on the mid-term elections. While your humble blogger does have political opinions, politics is not the be-all and end-all of existence.

Cannot the families be allowed to mourn a terrible loss that is far more important to them than who wins the seat in their Congressional district?

As for me they will have my thoughts and prayers.

Note: the above is one more example of the world-is-divided-into-two-groups trope, in this case those who believe "thoughts and prayers" are worthwhile and those who believe that they are useless. To the former, prayers are meaningful because there is a Deity who is listening (how or whether prayers are answered is a different question, but the fundamental premise is that Someone is receiving them at the other end). In the latter group it's possible that there are a few who believe that there is a God who is totally uninvolved in the Universe, but I suspect that most members do not believe in God.

The Great Divide is about much more than which party should be in office or the correctness of a court decision, it's about whether human life has meaning beyond death, in fact beyond the existence of the human race itself. It's about thoughts and prayers.