“Jesus Really Had it in for Me Today”:

The winning lottery ticket in the Mega Millions jackpot has been turned in, and not by the woman who claimed to have lost it. The apparent real winner told the media: ”One thing I want to make clear: Luck had nothing to do with it. It was truly a blessing, truly a blessing,” she said.

I’ve noticed that Americans have a tendency to publicly attribute any success they have had–anything ranging from winning a Little League playoff game to winning the lottery–to God’s intervention on their behalf. But I haven’t noticed a countervailing tendency to blame God when things go wrong, an especially annoying defect in the sports world, where victories are freely attributed to Jesus’s blessings. If God wanted the Marlins to win the World Series, doesn’t that mean he wanted the Yankees to lose? Just once, I’d like to see the losing Super Bowl quarterback tell the media “Guess Jesus really had it in for me today.”
UPDATE: Right Coast blogger Tom Smith writes that I’ve “walked into one of the great theological debates started by St. Augustine.” And in an email beyond my theological depth, reader (and blogger) “Scipio” writes:

My personal suspicion on this is that it comes from the anti-scholastic religious revivalism America experienced in the 19th century. It reflects a wholly Augustinian appreciation of free will and human achievement that is part and parcel of modern Christianity, without any depth of understanding. This is what happens when you take On the Free Choice of the Will, make it a central doctrinal point of Christianity, and then don’t explain to people what it really means.

Of course, Augustine’s answer to the predestination vs. free will question is a kludge that is perfect from the standpoint of dogma: it applies only to Christians. If happiness comes from using your free will in accordance with God, and misery from defying God with your free will, then only Christians (or if you prefer, those who have the tools by which to properly intuit God’s will) have a shot at regular happiness. Heathens are happy by accident, essentially.

Really, the athletes should be saying, “Clearly, my free will was not in accordance with God’s providence” or “My will was in accordance with God’s providence,” rather than blindly ascribing victory to Jesus.