Praise God! Oh, that's the Devil.

I have to admit that when I hear someone attribute a personal achievement to god or a personal failure to the devil, it really annoys me to no end. How does actually believing this make for a healthy perspective on what it means to live in the real world and embrace how life actually works? From my perspective, this kind of thinking is a symptom of a person who is still struggling to grasp the reality of their lives and this world.

When you attribute an accomplishment to god, you are not honoring what it is that YOU have actually accomplished all on your own. You are denying yourself the full praise for what YOU have done. I think that is bullshit and self destructive. At the same time, we often achieve accomplishments through the help of others. Typically those others would be people who care about you. So here you are also disrespecting or dishonoring their efforts to help you achieve what you did.

When you pawn your failures or shortcomings off on the devil, you are not taking full responsibility for your own actions and mistakes. This is clearly an issue in any society considering that your actions and decisions will always affect someone else to some degree or another and here you are skirting some or all of the responsibility to closely and fully evaluate the results of YOUR decisions and actions so that you can determine if there are better ways or even what those other ways are.

That touches on the concepts of what critical thinking and intellectual honesty are all about. These are two things that people in the scientific, skeptic and free thinking worlds strive to honor and raise up above most other things. It baffles me that apparently most of the world prefers to live their lives and often force decisions onto other peoples lives based on how they have personally been able to decipher a bunch of contradicting made up non-sense about a vengeful yet loving sky daddy thing that cannot be proven exists and that we quite certainly could never truly know the motivation or desires of even if it did.

My perspective on this also goes for "random" or "uncontrollable" events beyond the individual. One could say that the insanely low quality of the infrastructure in many of the poorer countries that have been hit with all these various natural disasters was to blame for the resulting horrific numbers of deaths. Of course, there are also psychopaths like Pat Robertson who have their own unique perspective on things. The answer is quite simple in my eyes. WE, as a whole planet full of the same human race, are to blame for the fact that WE are failing in our responsibilities to ensure that we are all protected and provided the same safe guards equally or at least much more equally then they are now.