I was horrified by this image, which a Christian friend shared on Facebook. It came with a post declaring that it "touched me in a powerful way, as it shows the precious girls running through water, to get to JESUS." Not to quibble, but it looks to me like the girls are running on water, and why not? They're dead, and no longer bound by the limitations of the flesh. The flash floods that killed them rose far above their heads. I'm sure this person wouldn't want to deny the supernatural elements that the picture takes for granted.
"People around the world need to see the joy on the girls faces and the warm, excited embrace of Christ." Eeeuuw. Just eeeuuw. Christians never stop to think what they're revealing about their psyches when they write stuff like this.
I clicked on the original poster's profile, and something symptomatic was going on. He was distraught over the lost girls, praying in tears. Didn't he have faith that an excited Jesus would take them to his, erm, bosom? That they weren't dead, but sleeping? Someone commented that seven girls had been rescued, praise God! Doesn't that mean that those precious girls didn't get to go straight to the Pearly Gates and be with Jesus forever? Do they want them to be separated from their Heavenly Father?
C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere that deep in our hearts, we all believe that we are immortal. But if that were so, why would we see death as a bad thing, instead of a portal to a higher existence? By Lewis's reasoning, it would seem that deep in our hearts, we don't believe we're immortal. In an excellent book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon, 2019), the philosopher Martin Hägglund showed that in traditional orthodox Christianity, mourning the beloved dead shows a dangerous, even sinful lack of faith. He quoted St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and C. S. Lewis berating themselves for feeling sorrow when someone dear to them went to be with God. In general Christians have a great deal of difficulty reconciling their lively faith with their humanity. As Sappho wrote, we know that death is an evil, or the gods would be mortal. (Lest someone try to claim that the Christian God became mortal through the incarnation, let me point out that he was only mostly dead, and rose again. He knew that mortality was an evil - but then according to Christian mythology, death is a curse he laid on us.)
In the case of the Kerr County flash floods, which killed far more people than just the children at Camp Mystic, we're looking at what used to be called an act of God. I've noticed that many Christians are squeamish nowadays about that kind of language, but it belongs to them and they shouldn't be allowed to distance themselves from it. Not all Christians feel that way, of course, but they're still inconsistent about it. By the time they get around to praying for the victims of this or that disaster, the damage is already done; it wouldn't occur to them to ask God not to make the disaster happen in the first place. But after all, Jesus needs more angels to help him make rainbows. God made the floods, and the Lamb reaps the harvest.
Once again I'm struck by how exactly the 18th-century philosopher David Hume described the ordinary believer's conception of God and his providence:
He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it.
The Facebook friend who shared the image is the same person who lost her car keys and didn't find them until she'd spent a couple hundred dollars replacing them. Meanwhile her friends prayed that they would turn up. They also exhibited the understanding of their god that Hume described.
The poster on Facebook identified the artist behind the image as Afton Burkard, which I mention because artists should get due credit for their work, no matter how creepy it is. But on the original post someone added a community note that the image is AI-generated, which seems more likely.
