After the Trump assassination attempt at Butler, I’m having an unexpected crisis of faith. What’s unusual is...I’m an atheist. Not just an atheist, but you know, the insufferable kind, the kind that insists on being sworn in without that “so help me God” nonsense.
From a young age, I wanted things to make sense with reason my guiding principle. The idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing being whose address—Heaven—doesn’t even come up on Google Maps seemed more preposterous than Santa. At least we knew we could find Santa at the North Pole.
Look, I searched for answers, but they were always the same: “You have to have faith.” Yeah, right. Believing things without evidence because you want to believe is anathema to reason and downright dangerous if you’re trying to build a bridge.
Yet, experience has a nasty habit of throwing a curveball when you expect a slider. And in this case, reason doesn’t always explain things, no matter how hard we atheists wish it would.
The image is Grok’s best effort at showing Trump under Heaven’s protection.
Has anyone else ever noticed the unfailing price paid for hubris? Among my friends, even the slightest boast draws the immediate retort, “That’s it, God’s looking for his smite button.” And like clockwork, you can count on your luck turning south. That kind of regularity doesn’t seem...reasonable.
Just look at ridiculously improbable events that never should have happened but somehow did, completely altering the course of history. Here are two historical examples, one foreign and one domestic.
Consider Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. During his highly publicized visit to Sarajevo, in a show of national unity, Ferdinand’s motorcade made its way through narrow streets lined with cheering crowds when a Serbian conspirator tossed a grenade into his open convertible.
Miraculously, it bounced back out and exploded under the following car. Twenty people were injured, but the Archduke survived. He continued to City Hall, where he made a speech, while the conspirators, having come so close, left dejected.
However, one conspirator, Gavrilo Princip, made his way to Schiller’s Deli to drown his disappointment in a pastrami sandwich. Meanwhile, Ferdinand, instead of meeting with dignitaries, decided to get back on the road to visit those injured by the blast in the hospital.
On the way, the motorcade made a wrong turn and stopped to turn around. Unbelievably, that stop put Ferdinand directly in front of Schiller’s with Princip standing outside. A stunned Princip barely had to move. He fired two shots, killing both Ferdinand and his wife, thereby igniting the Great War that would leave 20 million dead, bring down the Russian monarchy, and pave the way for World War Two.
Come on, what were the odds? The grenade bouncing out of Ferdinand’s car. His coming to a full stop mere feet from his assassin, on a road he never should have been on while carrying out an action he never planned?
You can run Monte Carlo simulations, employ Bayesian game theory, use multivariate statistics, and you’ll find there’s no way this can happen—that is, unless you turn from reason towards “la forza del destino,” from above or below, who can tell?
Here in North America, just as destiny was determined that the Archduke needed to die, it seemed equally committed to ensuring that George Washington lived, no matter how implausibly.
During the French-Indian War, when General Braddock, with Washington as his aid, was marching with 1,300 men to capture the French Fort Duquesne, the heavily armed French and Indians ambushed the line.
It was a massacre. Lethal volleys of lead musket balls rained down on the Brits. In the midst of the hailstorm, Washington rode his horse, crisscrossing the field to deliver Braddock’s orders. When Braddock was cut down, Washington assumed command and continued to rally his men. One horse was shot from under him. He remounted and continued until that second horse went down, when he grabbed a third. He could hear the deadly lead zipping by and feel the gust of wind as they cut through the air, but still, he carried on.
After the battle that would leave three-quarters of his men dead or wounded, Washington was unscathed despite four separate musket holes in his uniform. One soldier recalled:
I expected every moment to see him fall. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him.
Washington himself was in disbelief:
By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side.
Years later, Washington returned to the site of the battle where the Shawnee Chief, who had led his tribe at the Battle of the Monongahela reminisced:
It was on the day when the white man’s blood mixed with the streams of our forests that I first beheld this chief. I called to my young men and said, mark yon tall and daring warrior…let your aim be certain and he dies. Our rifles were leveled…all in vain, a power mightier far than we shielded you… I had seventeen fair fires at him [none] could bring him to the ground! Seeing you were under the special guardianship of the Great Spirit… The Great Spirit protects that man and guides his destinies -- he will become the chief of nations, and a people yet unborn will hail him as the founder of a mighty empire. I am come to pay homage to the man who is the particular favorite of Heaven, and who can never die in battle.
Providence? Perhaps for a superstitious 18th-century Indian chief, but for men of the 21st century, secure in their reason, logic, and technology, hardly. It was just plain luck. Doesn’t someone win Powerball every week? Same thing, right?
Sure, except over the next 30 years, just as improbably, Washington would somehow survive battle after battle against the world’s superpower. At the Battle of Princeton, he rode out into a maelstrom of musket fire, disappearing into a cloud of gunpowder, thought dead, only to reappear minutes later to continue the fight. At the Battle of Long Island, Washington and his Continental Army were penned in, vastly outnumbered, all but lost, until miraculously, a heavy fog rolled in to cover their escape.
That is not luck. The same person doesn’t win Powerball every week, and he doesn’t go on to found a “mighty empire.” Washington’s life simply defies reason.
Even so, despite this evidence that there’s more out there than reason can account for, I could still cling to my faithless rational world without crisis—until Butler. In what universe does an assassin’s bullet, from just 100m away, merely graze the ear of the most controversial, most vilified, and ironically, for many, the most beloved president in history, drawing just enough blood to give it authenticity, rather than the story-ending horror of a direct hit, while being live-streamed to the world? Answer: none.
There is no universe where this can happen. Whether it was Zeus himself who guided that bullet or God who had Trump turn his head, it seems undeniable that there are forces at work we don’t understand. These forces have plans for Trump, just as they had plans for Washington.
Should he do the impossible and win this November, well, I will have found a new faith.
Huck Davenport is a pseudonym.
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