To be fair, he wasn't making fun of God; he was making fun of you. (I think I'm going to sit this one out other than this clarification, though.)
How do you figure? If Jim was a believer in God, he would not have found anything worthy of mocking in what I said. He's clearly mocking the idea of a God that's personally involved in our lives.
Yes. Mocking the idea. Which is making fun of
you for your belief in God, not making fun of God. If a believer had said, heh, how dumb of God to "watch over you" by arranging for a whole city full of car mechanics etc. to exist, when He could have just not had the clutch fail in the first place, then
that would have been making fun of God. I don't think it's possible to "make fun of God" if you don't believe God exists.
And really even the "how dumb of God" remark, if made by a non-believer, would be fairly clearly intended as sarcasm, as a sort of
reductio ad absurdum argument intended as a criticism of the practice of systematically attributing random
beneficial happenstances to God's intervention, while systematically
not doing so for unwelcome happenstances. Either He's got His finger on the scales of chance, or He hasn't.
Peter
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