Those of you who are regular followers of my trials and tribulations are probably aware that I work at an insurance company. For those of you who don’t… hi, I’m Brendan. I work at an insurance company.
One of the things my company insures clients against loss from, in our standard policy, is “acts of God.” What this means is that should an insured business be destroyed or damaged by an event classified as an “act of God,” the good people at my company will reimburse the client within the pre-established limits of insurance.
I have a four-fold problem with this….
1.) Insuring against an act of god assumes the existence of a god. This is not a problem for me as I believe in God, but I don’t really think that officially endorsing a deity is something an insurance company needs to be doing.
2.) Assuming God does exist- which I and, apparently, my employers believe He does- who are we mere mortals to insure against His acts? Let’s say a fishmarket is struck by lightning and burns to the ground. This is deemed an act of God. If such is the case, why did God strike the fishmarket with lightning? He probably had a good reason. Maybe that fishmarket was an evil fishmarket. Why should we pay for the owner to rebuild his evil fishmarket?
3.) A client who is an atheist or an agnostic is immediately put into a philosophical compromise when he purchases the insurance policy. Let’s say Joe Businessman wants to insure his business, Joe’s Business, and Joe is a confirmed atheist. He is convinced that God does not exist. He purchases a policy insuring, among other things, against acts of a God in which he does not believe. Not only does my company force him to subvert his beliefs in exchange for insurance, it charges him an obscene amount of money for the privilege to do so.
4.) The policy does not specify which God. It can be assumed that it is referring to a Judeo-Christian Yahweh figure, which pretty much puts any Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. client in a similar philosophical quagmire to the one experienced by Joe Businessman in the above example. And, what if, as implausible as it may sound, the “act of God” can be attributed to another god? The Norse god Thor could have struck the evil fishmarket with lightning, or the Greek god Zeus. Not only is the coverage presumptuous, it is exceedingly vague.
And there that is.
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