Playing GOD

My friend has an odd pet peeve. Whenever anyone comments on an odd event occurring by saying, "What are the odds of that happening?!" He says "1 to 1, obviously...because it just happened." This statement is eerily how I feel about free will and timescapes. Since time is essentially linear, only one thing can ever happen; what does. In this vein, I was thinking about the phrase "playing GOD" that always seems to crop up in political and social debates from time to time.

I guess it will be hard to take an objective stance since most atheists would label me religious and most religious people would label me atheist. But I just don't believe in the phrase at all. It means absolutely nothing to me. It is hollow. Especially the ideals it is supposed to defend and the rhetoric used behind it. My favorite is the abortion argument. People say abortions should never be performed because it is playing GOD. Whatever stand you take on abortion, I have to take issue with the logic of being against it for this particular reason. The reason I take issue with it is that they use revisionist history to prove it.

As in the classic: "What if Jesus had been aborted?" or for the secular: "What if Gandhi had been aborted?"

This kind of logic pisses me off. I usually think about some other slogans to point out this flawed logic. "What if Adolph Hitler had been aborted?" or for the non-western "What if Mao Zedong had been aborted?" It's just as plausible but on the other side of the logical fence they laid down.

My personal musing on this subject is also that abortion is just simply another event in life in the upper echelon scheme of things. Big picture-wise, it is on par with pre-meditated murder, getting a cup of coffee, breathing, going to work, embezzling 10,000,000 from a company, or conning someone out of their life savings. They are all things that happen. So if this revisionist history logic works, my slogan would simply be:

What if Joseph knocked on the wooden door to their hut because his friend had caught the biggest fish ever seen in Galilee while Gabriel was about to impregnate Mary with Jesus and she had never met Gabriel?

In this vein, NO ONE SHOULD EVER BE ALLOWED TO FISH! That would be playing GOD and therefore, would have led to the interference of Jesus being conceived!