I've seen this move before. The first most obvious response would be that Christians and other believers arguably don't believe in other gods either, but that has never stopped them from mocking them and their worshipers. (Historically, both Jews and Christians have accepted that other gods exist, but they're demons.)
The second obvious response is that the meme is making fun less of Jesus or his heavenly father than of the people who believe in them, who do unquestionably exist. While the meme is unkind, it's not an inaccurate representation of popular religion: God needs a million prayer warriors, thousands of Christians rallied in the streets for Christ last weekend, etc. So what does God do while only half a million prayer warriors are on their knees? Why doesn't Jesus heal the sick child right away? Does he really need to be informed? What is the tipping point at which he'll (supposedly) take action?
A few months ago I saw a lot of video clips on Facebook - and no, I didn't have to watch them, but it was very educational for me - from a number of online preachers warning Christians that if they aren't constantly watchful, demons will sneak up on them and drag them down to Hell. Why, I wondered, did God let that happen? If a person is saved, how can demons even get near them? If Satan can undo your salvation, what are the Christian promises worth? That these preachers put the burden of resistance on the believer is even worse: how can a mere fleshly person fight off supernatural Evil? One of the most basic premises of Christianity is you can't, which is why people need the intervention and protection of supernatural Good.
It happened that not long before I saw these videos, I'd also read The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, a 1962 novel about the demonic possession and exorcism of a teenage girl, "a devout girl who attended Mass regularly." Two Roman Catholic priests take on the job of driving the devil out of her, and much of the book is about their struggles and doubts as they perform the rite of exorcism. I thought of writing about the book then, but at this remove I'll need to reread it. For now, I'll just say that I had the same questions: why doesn't the Christian god protect his children against demonic harm, and why does so much depend on the efforts (weak and ineffectual by definition) of the exorcist? The accounts of exorcism in the New Testament may be abbreviated, but there's no doubt that in that context Jesus and his followers drove out demons by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by theological disputation. (To anticipate one possible objection, those stories were not merely symbolic. Christian writers were bragging about the power of exorcism and healing for at least a couple of centuries after Jesus' day. I should also concede that in one gospel exorcism story, Jesus admits that "prayer and fasting" are needed to drive out especially stubborn devils.)
The larger issue is what's known to philosophers as the Problem of Evil, though it's not just a problem to them: why, if there is a god who is both all-powerful and all-good, is there so much suffering in the world? Nowadays there's an apologetic tendency to distinguish between 'natural evil' like earthquakes and plague, and 'moral evil' committed by human beings, like the Holocaust. I learned from Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2004), that the distinction is a comparatively recent one: "evil" referred to natural disasters, also known as "acts of God," no less than to moral ones. Sometimes evil might be the work of Satan, but it was always difficult to tell whether a given unpleasantness was Satan's mischief or God's judgment.
Not that this mattered much, because as the biblical book of Job made explicit, Satan couldn't bother a righteous person without God's permission. In Job's case, which should be even more troublesome for simple faith, God gave that permission not because of any failing of Job's, but as a bet with Satan that Job wouldn't complain if God withdrew his protection. Some theologians have argued that the opening prologue of the book of Job is a later addition to the main text, but I consider that apologetic invention. It wouldn't change the point of the book very much if at all, and anyway, that exit is closed to less sophisticated believers who work from the text as they find it in their Bibles.
After several decades of examining other interpretations, I still think Walter Kaufmann's discussion (The Faith of a Heretic, Doubleday, 1961) of the Problem of Evil in general, and of Job in particular, to be the best. It's ironic that the usual attempts to escape the problem are exactly those which the book of Job rejects, offered by Job's friends: You must have done something wrong, or God wouldn't have done this to you! As Kaufmann stressed, it never occurs even to God's self-appointed defenders that God wasn't responsible for Job's misery, nor does God himself protest when he appears from the whirlwind that the Devil made him do it.
I thought of all this when the philosopher Helen De Cruz, who's undergoing treatment for cancer, posted on Twitter/X in December: "As a theist, I not only am angry at my own body and it not responding enough to treatment, I am also very angry at God. So that’s been fun." She's been posting for months about her case and treatment, and she has quite properly received plenty of support and sympathy. But Job's 21st- century friends promptly lined up to set her straight.
"I so understand your anger, dear H, but I think your body deserves compassion," wrote one. "It's doing its best to resist the onslaughts of cancer & treatment. As to God, he's, in appearance at least, mostly absent. Moreover, his demands are higher of beautiful souls bc life is an initiation."
And: "What did [you] think about The Essence of Christianity ~Ludwig Feuerbach 'People forget that their lives will end soon. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.' Seems you are quarreling with your own body and with God. Though Nietzsche suffered terribly and died: belle âme". Yes, De Cruz is quarreling with God, how astute of this person to figure that out. She's not forgetting that her life will end soon, though; that's exactly her complaint. What Nietzsche has to do with this exchange isn't clear, but everybody dies. That's part of the Problem of Evil.
And: "Helen, I'm not a theist, but I'm not an atheist either. I don't think death is the end of our stories. (Still, I hope a longer life for you.)" So what if death isn't the end of our stories?
A few took this tack: "To be angry is to believe you are entitled to something you did not receive. There are others that didn't receive half of what you have. It would make as much sense to be overjoyed about that. In reality, both responses have no merit." Think of the starving children in Ethiopia who'd be glad to have your cancer! I commented elsewhere in the thread that the callousness of Christians toward other people's suffering amazes me; this comment is a good example of that callousness. Maybe the next time I encounter Christians complaining that infidels mock them and their god, I should respond along the same lines?
Sometimes when I've invoked the Problem of Evil by pointing to the suffering of children with cancer (for example), Christians protest, "Gee, God must done something to make you mad." Yes, that's what we're talking about right now. Such people couldn't seem to grasp that someone might object to the suffering of the innocent (but we are all miserable sinners, none is innocent) as a matter of principle. It's an interesting inability.
De Cruz had posted about the Problem of Evil in an earlier post I can't find now, and I was struck by people who tried to solve it by denying another of its premises, namely that the God of Christianity could stop the evils we see. These people suggested that he'd like to but he just can't. That may be, though 1) it's difficult for me to understand how a being who could create the unthinkably vast universe we inhabit is powerless to stop suffering and other evils, especially since 2) it is a pillar of Christian faith that he will do so when he establishes his kingdom on earth, which means he can do it but for some reason won't. And to some extent this argument requires me to accept 3) that he can't prevent any of the evils infesting the world now. Maybe Jesus' miracles (in one small region of the planet) used up all his strength, and he's resting until he gets it back?
I've seen some posts and videos from a recent theology Ph.D., whom I won't name yet because I want to go into his work in some detail later; but one is relevant here. He declares that the Bible never says that its god is omnipotent, which in a narrow sense may be true; but I think he's hair-splitting. The biblical authors weren't professional philosophers or theology Ph.D.'s, but they regarded Yahweh as almighty and expected him to conquer Evil in the end. If this guy is right, he's cut the Gordian knot of the Problem of Evil, but he's still saying that God is impotent to stop any of the suffering in the world, in which case the entire edifice of historical Christianity comes crashing down, and there is no hope for believers or anyone else. (Samson among the Philistines might be a better analogy than Alexander the Great.) In which case, why believe in him?
I'm not sure that abandoning belief in Yahweh's power or his goodness would faze all believers, since they so often deny either or both as they find it useful to do so. I do think that openly admitting that they do so would hinder their missionary efforts, which depend on big promises they don't have to keep. I also want to bear down heavily on their callousness to human suffering in the crunch. "Oh, you're dying of cancer? Big whoop" is bad PR, and all their works of charity don't make it look any better.
