sue God??

There's no sense in suing God - we should just accept that life isn't fair
Lee Randall
22 September 2007
The Scotsman
29
English (c) 2007

PROVING beyond a shadow of a doubt that life imitates art - specifically the work of television mogul David E Kelly, the man behind Ally McBeal and Boston Legal - a Nebraska state Senator by the name of Ernie Chambers is suing God. This is a device Kelly has used twice, to my knowledge. In Ally McBeal, Ling (soft L soft G) helped a little boy dying of leukaemia sue God on the basis of it being horribly unfair to die so young. By sheer artistic coincidence, the kid was played by the same tyke who "saw dead people" in the film The Sixth Sense.

A few years later, in his even more outrageous show about a group of rapacious legal eagles, Boston Legal, Kelly featured an episode in which a woman sued God because her husband was killed by a lightning bolt. (Technically, shouldn't she have sued Zeus?) That case was settled out of court when she accepted a pay-out from the company who manufactured the mobile phone her man had been speaking into at the time of the conflagration, it having been argued that the phone helped conduct electricity and was partially to blame for his demise.

Who knows whether Chambers is an avid fan of television, or if he came up with this idea on his own. Reports suggest that he is trying to prove a point about so-called frivolous lawsuits with one that's as frivolous as it can possibly be. Chambers says: "The Constitution requires that the courthouse doors be open, so you cannot prohibit the filing of suits. Anyone can sue anyone they choose - even God." And, he argues, he can do it right there in Douglas County, Nebraska, because "the defendant is omnipresent", and, that being the case, he is as good as being a local.

The suit is not without entertainment value. Chambers points out that the defendant goes by many aliases, and accuses God of making terroristic threats against humanity in the form of "calamitous catastrophes resulting in the widespread death, destruction and terrorisation of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants". In other words, all those floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, wars, plagues, birth defects, etc. The suit asks that God cease and desist from such behaviour in the future.

Chambers isn't the first non-television character to sue God. A few years ago a Romanian prisoner doing time for murder tried it, claiming God broke the contract they entered into at his baptism because He failed to save him from the Devil. That case was dismissed on the basis that "God has no known address and so can't be taken to court". You'll note that Chambers has neatly sidestepped such considerations in his claim.

I don't think being a non-believer disqualifies me from pointing out some very practical problems here. For instance, how would you get God into the courtroom for the trial? How would you enforce the judgment or collect any settlement you were due? No, the whole thing is preposterous and a symbolic gesture. While it's a fine dramatic device on the telly, it's not effective here in the real world.

The bigger issue - one that keeps philosophers and theologians awake nights - is the question of whether or not life is fair. We keep insisting that it should be, despite a wealth of evidence proving it's anything but.

Why, within the last few weeks I discovered that my brother and sister-in-law, both younger than myself, in their mid-forties, are confronting serious health problems. He's had stents put into two badly clogged heart valves - the doctors marvelled that he hadn't dropped dead of a heart attack - while she has had to have a double mastectomy. The kicker is, neither of them smokes. They rarely drink alcohol. They're slim. They exercise and eat an extremely healthy diet. They even attend church.

Meanwhile, many other of my acquaintances - and, funnily enough, Crohn's or no Crohn's, I include myself in that group - live lives that are paragons of vice, yet they are significantly more robust. So what have we learned? That life is a crapshoot played with loaded dice? That something hideously awful will always find an innovative way to zing you?

I could offer many more instances of life's iniquities (and my solicitor has heard them all), but that way madness lies. No, I've decided it's more efficient to accept that unfairness exists and to find a way to work with it. I'm not arguing for passivity, but I reckon the sensible approach is to try to be good - to ourselves and to others - and to make the most of the best bits of what life has on offer. Suing God to prove a point? At the end of the day it's a pointless exercise.