In 2022 a 20-year-old woman was driving her father’s car in Door County (Wisconsin, USA) when she caused an accident that resulted in the car running off the road and crashing into a tree. Unfortunately, she had been drinking, was over the legal alcohol limit, and had two friends in the car. Luckily all three survived the accident, but the incident raises interesting points based on what transpired during the rescue of the women.
The incident was recorded and published to YouTube:
At about 3:58 minutes into the clip, the driver (pointed to by the yellow arrow in the following image) uttered the words “I know that god has so much planned for me“. It was such an important point for her to state that she repeated it at about 4:05 minutes in the video.
The point of this page is not to name and/or shame anyone and it has to be stated that the driver took responsibility for her actions and assisted the authorities in every way during the rescue. The point of the page is to investigate the result of “belief” and indoctrination. However it must be noted that the fact that she didn’t kill herself, her passengers, pedestrians, or the occupants of other vehicles is just a matter of luck and, due to her actions, was ultimately beyond her control that evening.
It’s a pretty safe assumption that the driver is referring to the Christian god and not someone like Budha or Thor, so she’s referring to the god that she knows made an observable universe 93 billion light-years in diameter containing about 2 trillion galaxies (all on a work day). That’s a pretty powerful god! And she just knows that her god has taken time out to incorporate a plan just for her with all his other plans. And the way that she added “for me” means that she’s not just referring to the generic plan of: be good and atone for your sins or you’ll go to a place for which she’s dressed too warmly, for all eternity – or whatever it is she believes are the consequences for less-than-acceptable behavior in this life.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a believer would be pretty fearful of such a god, and it’s clear that she kind-of was based on her statements under stress. What’s interesting therefore is how she didn’t let that fear influence her actions prior to the accident. At some point in the evening she would have been sober yet didn’t think to answer the question: “what will god (the all-powerful one with a specific plan for me) think when I drive drunk and risk causing injury or death to myself and to my friends”? So what’s the point of a belief in a deity if it doesn’t help with some of the more obvious decision making?
While we’re in the neighborhood, what sort of plan does she imagine her god has for her? Get her through her education? Get her a job? Get her to meet a nice boy? Get her to have kids? Get her a nice house? Get her a good job? Get her up to concert standard on the ukulele? Have her figure out a way to protect kids in Africa from getting eye parasites (something her god has failed to do)? How are the first six of those different from the things that someone similar to her is going to achieve – even if they don’t believe in her god and therefore don’t believe that they are subjected to one of his personally-designed plans?
And this all comes back to indoctrination. There’s no way that she’s sitting on the grass near the wreck of her car just after midnight and talking to a police officer about her god’s plans without an enormous amount of indoctrination over the previous 20 years. One of the huge problems with religion is that it promotes the concept of a second chance. That’s both in the short term by atoning for “sins”, and in the long term by looking forward to the paradise of a life after this one. So what does it really matter if you drive drunk – it will be figured out either in this life or the next?
Here’s the secular alternative that those responsible for this type of indoctrination could think to adopt: emphasize the fact that the only credible evidence we have is that this is the only life we get and therefore it should be treated preciously both for your own sake and for the sake of others you might affect. If you don’t, then you will be subjected to the full force of real punishments, e.g. fines, jail, death, injury, guilt, condemnation by friends and family, ridicule by the public, etc. Now those are useful, and real deterrents.