I caught a few minutes of “Terms of Endearment” the other day (it’s one of those movies where I think I’ve seen the entire movie, but never all in one sitting, and certainly not in order). Watching Shirley MacLaine reminded me of a couple of morning DJs (if you can actually call them that; they don’t typically play much in the way of music on these morning shows) who were making fun of her belief in reincarnation and past lives.

Funny how anybody who believes in past lives, ghosts, and anything even vaguely “supernatural” is a nut job, but nobody thinks twice about those who believe in an invisible man in the sky who is all-powerful and loves us, yet allows horrible things to happen to good people because he’s opted for a “hands-off” management style. Hell, you can even spend millions of dollars to build elaborate “houses” for him (or should I say, “Him?”) to hang out in, while so many of his “children” go homeless and unfed.

I started thinking about this when I read this story on last week’s “Binghamton Massacre.”

The wounded receptionist who feigned her death during the massacre at the American Civic Association in Binghamton told her priests that God gave her the strength to call 911 after being shot in the abdomen.

Isn’t that always the way with God? Too little, too late. Now, god bless (so to speak) this woman (I have no desire to disparage her faith or her courage; who knows how many more people this guy would’ve killed if she hadn’t gotten the cops there), and all the victims and survivors and their families, but, really. If god is going to intervene, why the hell not give this disturbed gunman the “strength” to kill himself (or at least check in to a mental facility) before going in and murdering 13 innocent people? Or how about giving him lousy aim, so he misses everybody? Or, hey, I know: why not keep companies like Shop-Vac and IBM from shipping jobs overseas and pushing guys like this over the edge?

Just sayin’. I don’t think you can have it both ways, true believers. Either god is pretty much indifferent to all the pain and suffering that goes on down here on Earth, or he’s actually behind it all (working, of course, in “mysterious ways”).

Oh, I know, there’s always the “free will” argument, but I’ve always thought that was a cop out. Yeah, I suppose if you drop a hundred dollar bill on the floor, I have the free will to either pick it up and hand it to you, or put it in my pocket. But, thankfully, I’ve never had (and hopefully will never develop) the compulsion to perpetrate any heinous acts of violence. It isn’t moral superiority overriding my aberrant “free will” desires that’s kept me from killing young boys, cutting them up, and then keeping their parts in the refrigerator for when I get a case of the late night munchies, or climbing to the top of a bell tower with a high-powered rifle and starting to shoot, or kidnapping women and keeping them in an underground bunker all these years.

Someone (or some thing) has to put those kinds of notions into your head, and give you the desire to act upon them. And if you’re going to give that invisible guy in the sky credit for the good stuff that happens in the world, then I think you need to assign at least a little bit of responsibility for the bad shit to him, too.

Or maybe it’s just Monday.