Thanks To The Almighty For Saving!: A Collective Stereotypical Reaction Of All Humans
By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
18 November 2025
Forty five pilgrims from Telangana perished in a bus accident in Saudi Arabia where they went for Umrah. This is very sad. Only one passenger could save his life. Similarly, in an Ahmedabad plane crash a couple of months ago, only one person survived. People, esp. the near and dear ones, are saying, god/ Allah saved his life!
Whenever someone survives a fatal accident, he or she will react spontaneously like a Pavlovian effect that god saved them. This is a universal collective human response that INSULTS (yes, insults) a god's benevolence, compassion and loving nature, provided IT (no He/She; I don't anthropomorphise a fictitious god) does exist.
Alexander Pope, a devout Christian, rightly wrote in his poem, An Essay on Man, " Who sees with equal eye, as god of all / A hero perish, or a sparrow fall." The lines suggest a divine and objective viewpoint where the most significant events and the most trivial are observed without prejudice or bias. The poem suggests god as a divine being, absolutely impartial and all-seeing and loving.
Can the same 'benevolent' and 'compassionate' god save just one person and let others die? Was that survivor such a noble soul that god had to save him? Weren't others noble and devout believing in the grace and kindness of the same Almighty? Why did they die but one survived?
Right from childhood, this universal refrain, 'god saved him' annoyed me no end, not because I'm a lifelong atheist, but because of the selective compassion of an imaginary god. God, if at all it exists, either annihilates or saves all.
Freak incidents and events keep happening in nature. You can't explain or justify them. Many times, atheists have survived but devout people have died. Those devout people were close to god. So, it (god) called them through a gory and ghastly disaster and allowed an atheist to survive to face the plight and predicament of the world is a trite and laughable logic. No sane person will buy it.
Who survives and who dies is not decided by any concocted god. One dies because his time came and one survives because he was destined to survive. Nothing is god-ordained. There's never an intervention of any god in the survival or death of any person.
People are so foolishly fatalistic and totally dependent on god's mercy. You may have noticed that when someone survives a disaster even with an amputation of limbs, people say, 'god saved him. He at least didn't die!' Rubbish!
God is ingrained in the human psyche right from the advent of human civilization. Unevolved humans are helpless without it. So, whatever good or bad happens is imputed to this fabricated god. Can we ever get rid of it? It seems improbable, considering the abysmal level of human intelligence at the moment.
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A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several languages including Persian
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