This article will not contain any thanks to God for providing the words, or guiding the fingers, or granting the gift of thought. While this might seem offensive to some who read these words, none is intended.

These prefacing remarks lead into a small and insignificant news item reported from Muskegon.  A letter to the editor of a local, published online, criticized CBS’s “60 Minutes” for an “unrealistic” interview with the flight crew of Flight 1549. The writer urged others to correspond with CBS pressing it to get more real in its broadcasts.  Seems the letter writer took umbrage with the fact that Capt. Sullenberger failed to thank God during the interview for the miraculous landing in the Hudson and for the lives of the passengers.

Let’s leave alone that the Katie Couric interview was very real, and that the flight crew are very real people, and their words were very real, and the events reported and described were very real.  Let’s leave alone, also, that Katie Couric is very real.

Apparently it wasn’t “Sully’s” skills that landed the plane safely.  God did it.  It wasn’t his presence of mind and his calm in the face of seeming disaster and loss of life.  God did it.

The letter writer and those who share her beliefs deemed the interview “unreal” simply because the interviewees didn’t mention God.

One question begged here is who sent the birds?  He is either all powerful or partially feckless . . . can’t give him only partial credit.  Actually, there are far more important questions than this, but let’s start there. Who set into motion the events that would bring that plane down?  Who chose for those passengers to be on that particular flight?  Why did they survive that landing while all aboard last week’s tragic plane crash in upstate New york did not?

Did God turn His head for just a moment and miss that one?  Did He not realize the conditions were icy and could lead to the disaster? And what sin are those poor people on the ground guilty of that, while just minding their own business,  a plane crashes down upon them?

A recent conservative radio talk show host criticized the use of the term “religious right” as being a derisive term intended to marginalize evangelical beliefs and those who insinuate God into everything everywhere.  While some who use that term are intending to accomplish that very end, it is to be remembered that Reverend Jerry Falwell was the first to refer to himself and those of his persuasion as the religious right.

Then again, the devil is in the details, and so that fact check really is unimportant, if not downright evil.

I recall many discussions from my theology courses at the seminary about the nature of belief in a God.  Did He map everything out aforehand, set it in motion, and then sit back to watch His creation over eternity?  Or, was He creating as He went along moment to moment?  And if the latter, did that mean if He forgot creation for even a nanosecond, creation and we would cease to exist?  Either way, was it even possible to have a personal relationship with such a God?

These more serious questions are more deserving of serious contemplation, to be sure.  And in a far more serious way than ascribing only “good” miracles to God, while ignoring the cause that lead to the effect in the first place, or the “bad” disasters that God seemingly fumbles.

So many people press for more religion in politics today – - let’s bring God into the discussion and wonder His will in these matters.  We’re a Christian nation after all, are we not?  If God truly were interested in American politics, I’d like to think he’d stop allowing birds to fly into the country’s engines.

Pressing forward one’s religious beliefs might be good politics, and playing to Falwell’s “religious right” might well lead to election success in some areas of this country. But I’d like to think He has more important things to do than serve as traffic controller for a bird’s flight path.

As the letter writer mentioned above exorts, let’s get real.