{"id":4783,"date":"2004-01-06T13:13:07","date_gmt":"2004-01-06T20:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/?p=4783"},"modified":"2004-01-06T13:13:07","modified_gmt":"2004-01-06T20:13:07","slug":"count_your_bles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/01\/06\/count_your_bles.html","title":{"rendered":"Count your blessings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>David Bernstein notes differences in <a title=\"The Volokh Conspiracy\" href=\"http:\/\/volokh.com\/2004_01_04_volokh_archive.html#107341160117678477\">how we attribute success or failure<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p class=\"block\">I&#8217;ve noticed that Americans have a tendency to publicly attribute any success they have had&#8211;anything ranging from winning a Little League playoff game to winning the lottery&#8211;to God&#8217;s intervention on their behalf. But I haven&#8217;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&#8217;s blessings. If God wanted the Marlins to win the World Series, doesn&#8217;t that mean he wanted the Yankees to lose? Just once, I&#8217;d like to see the losing Super Bowl quarterback tell the media &#8220;Guess Jesus really had it in for me today.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It may be an overgeneralization, but there&#8217;s some truth to it.  A couple ideas of why.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s prideful to attribute success to one&#8217;s own merits.  It comes across as bragging.  That said, there are plenty of people who say, &#8220;Yeah, we really all played hard today, and that&#8217;s why we won.&#8221;\n<li>It&#8217;s nice to think that God is blessing you materially and with success.  It&#8217;s scary to think that God is punishing you materially or with failure.  On the other hand, while I&#8217;ve found folks who thank Jesus (etc.) for the good things in their life to often be pleasant and, well, thankful, folks who attribute their failures to God&#8217;s displeasure usually react by becoming puritanical and fundamentalist (very OT), which is often not all that good a thing.\n<li>Blaming God, especially over something like a football game or the lottery, seems improper and\/or asking for further trouble.  If we are going to lament, Job-like, we tend to do so in private, in the dark of night.\n<li>Some folks do say things like, &#8220;I guess it just wasn&#8217;t meant to be,&#8221; or, &#8220;I guess God had other plans in mind.&#8221;  But, particularly in the arena of sports, that sort of attitude would sound fatalistic; sports is a &#8220;can-do&#8221; field, and while it&#8217;s nice to appreciate God doing something nice for you, &#8220;God helps he who makes TDs himself,&#8221; so to speak.<\/ul>\n<p>While not being willing to discount by any means divine intervention in human affairs, reading it into fortune (or failure) is an iffy proposition at best. It gets into a very tangled thicket of free will vs predestination, why God lets bad things happen to good people, and other thorny conundra that are uncomfortable to examine, let alone assert.<\/p>\n<p>Still, an interesting observation.<\/p>\n<p>(On a related topic, pre- rather than post-event, consider Mark Twain&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.midwinter.com\/lurk\/making\/warprayer.html\">The War Prayer<\/a>,&#8221; too.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Bernstein notes differences in how we attribute success or failure: I&#8217;ve noticed that Americans have a tendency to publicly attribute any success they have had&#8211;anything ranging from winning a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5834,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/07\/12\/tool_tips.html","url_meta":{"origin":4783,"position":0},"title":"Tool Tips","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 12-Jul-04 11:28am","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's a minor annoyance in Firefox The A and ACRONYM and IMG tags in HTML all can take a TITLE attribute. This attribute gives you a \"tooltip\" popup when you...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blogging &amp; Internet&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Blogging &amp; Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1844,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/04\/21\/dave_pretty_hot.html","url_meta":{"origin":4783,"position":1},"title":"Dave, pretty hot.  Marjorie &#8230; not so much.","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 21-Apr-02 9:09pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Track name popularity over the last century with The Name-O-Meter. (Note that the analysis implied by the title is only meant to refer to names, not any other attribute. Indeed,...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Potpourri&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Potpourri","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/potpourri"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4134,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/02\/01\/the_blame_game.html","url_meta":{"origin":4783,"position":2},"title":"The Blame Game","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 1-Feb-03 3:45pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been considering, most of my on-line day, what to say about folks who take a disaster and attribute it to the Wrath of God, such as Mr. Mohammed Jaber...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Religion&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7676,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/19\/hmmmm_what_does.html","url_meta":{"origin":4783,"position":3},"title":"Hmmmm &#8230; what does nofollow actually do?","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 19-Jan-05 9:41am","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's what Google says: From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=\"nofollow\") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. Here's...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blogging &amp; Internet&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Blogging &amp; Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":19553,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2010\/12\/14\/nicer-twitter-archive-links.html","url_meta":{"origin":4783,"position":4},"title":"Nicer Twitter archive links","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 14-Dec-10 6:43am","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been using Twitter Tools for quite some time to daily archive my Twitter feed to this blog (which, reviewing the last year, is how I handled most stuff that was personal in nature). \u00a0\u00a0That's worked out pretty well, aside from TT's tendency to sometimes be a little ... enthusiastic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blogging - Technical&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/secret_code.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":206,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/05\/29\/so_uncool.html","url_meta":{"origin":4783,"position":5},"title":"So uncool","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 29-May-03 6:31pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Katherine insists that she is not cool. Boys are cool. Girls are pretty. Explanations that the two are not mutually exclusive, and that she can indeed be both cool and...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Parenting&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Parenting","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/personal\/parenting"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}