View from the North 40: Separation of church and insurance is the real issue

When I was in high school we lived in a house that had a metal-covered gambrel roof — aka barn roof — with a shallow slope from the peak to the first angle and a steeper slope to the eve which was actually an 8-foot deep porch roof that was at a very shallow slope

You could say it was built like a ski jump. The easy slope at the top to get your legs under you and your direction lined out, then a steep section to build some great speed, and finally the jump that shoots the skier out into thin air — a lot of thin air to give the skier time and space to shoot way out into the distance. In the case of our house it was easily a 30-foot drop in altitude from the roof peak to the parking space.

It was the Olympic level ski jump of roof lines.

One winter we got lots of snow, then warm weather, then freezing, then a repeat of the whole cycle until we had a foot-and-a-half to two feet of snow on the roof. I’m pretty sure you can see what’s coming, and I want to assure you that Mom parked that car ridiculously far from the house, as any cautious person with some with winter snow experience would.

The thing that none of us anticipated was just how far out from the house that tonnage of snow and ice would fly.

The whole science aspect of the snow’s trajectory made sense after the fact, of course, as hard lessons mostly do, but it was epic.

I still can hear my mom’s pained scream waking us all in the morning. She’d looked outside and saw the front of her car buried under an 8-foot tall heap of snow and ice.

That’s 8 feet even after subtracting the loss of height from the crushed car body metal.

Their home owner’s insurance refused to cover it because, the adjuster said, it was an act of god.

As non-church-goers, we had a pretty rudimentary understanding of religion and the Bible, but I think it’s safe to say that by most interpretations anything in the world, anywhere, ever, could be described as an act of god, so we were a little confused about what the insurance actually would cover if not this.

The city of West Liberty, Iowa, had a run in with their own insurance company recently that reminded me of my own family’s incident.

A squirrel tangled a transformer and the electricity that arced through the mouse-monkey’s body blew out a substation. The city’s insurance company isn’t paying for the substation because they don’t pay for non-lightning-caused arcing.

The city argued, to no avail, that they didn’t have an electrical arcing problem they had a rodent accident.

The courts agreed with the insurance company, though, the squirrel’s body was there in the spot to complete the arc, but because no one saw the little guy licking his paws and reaching out to touch the metal ends — that’s right — it was an act of god.

When I pondered the article and the whole philosophy of acts of god and their related insurance clause, it occurred to me that I had discovered the heart of all religions everywhere.

Many academics say religions were developed to meet early mankind’s need to explain the world around them, but what if religions were started by early insurance companies as a way to get out of paying claims.

Consider Christianity in these terms. Can you just imagine the payout on the flood insurance to Noah and his family? Denied. It was an act of god.

The wholesale destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? “Meh, act of god. We’re outta here.”

The real reason Jesus was born in a manger? The Bethlehem hospital was not in Mary’s coverage area.

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It makes sense now at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com/.