A Very Special Person Passed Away Monday

Amy was just cool.

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The thing with the thing?

Um, not looking very good.

More concrete news within 48 hours.

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Superstition

I just heard a story about an episode in which a mother did an adult daughter a generous kindness, and, reasonably soon thereafter, won an amount of money, playing bingo, fairly near the expense incurred.
(I heard the story from the daughter, for what it's worth.)
The mother attributed the windfall to "God's reward", considering it a literal payback for having done the kindness with no expectations.
The daughter was pleased about this, and considered it a good thing that someone would believe they had been the recipient of the favor of a invisible, benevolant, omniscient, omnipotent, supernatural being for having done a clearly selfless, benevolant thing.

Hereafter, the invisible, benevolant, omniscient, omnipotent, supernatural being will be refered to as "Dude".

I prefer not to interpret things in such a way. I'm leery of picking some two circumstances, events, occurences, whatever, that have no identifiable, provable, repeatable connection,
and claiming a supernatural causality between them.

How does she "know" that the one thing caused the other? What makes her "right"? Do I have the latitude to declare that any two such events in my own life are causally connected by means of Dude? (I invite you to invent your own absurd examples; they are surely myriad.)

Moreover, I have a distaste for taking any *singular* event and determining that the fact that the event occurred must play some meaningful role vis a vis Dude.
Something extraordinarily good happens, and people give praise to Dude, and hold it up as proof of their supernatural system of belief.
Something extraordinarily bad happens, and people explain that Dude works in mysterious ways, and Dude needed this person in his service after death.
Or, worse, they explain how Dude was punishing this person for something.

This is a recurring theme in my life, and I don't mean just observing this behavior in others and feeling superior and contemptuous.
I mean, when I encounter a foul turn, misfortune, I'm aware of a mental mechanism that tries to determine what I am being punished for, so that I don't do that again, which is not at all the same thing as examining the situation to determine what the true, provable, cause of this is. Maybe it's an native, human instinct, maybe it was "learned" in, but it's wrong.

Sometimesm things just happen, folks.

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