5 Spooky Lawsuits Against Supernatural Entities
Sometimes, it can start to feel like God is personally harassing you. You lose your job, your girlfriend breaks up with you, you develop a medical problem that’s both embarrassing and expensive, and you generally start to feel all Fight Club about things. If you’re American, your first instinct is probably to sue, and lucky for you, that has a legal precedent.
Pavel Mircea v. God
According to a child’s understanding of religion, all you have to do is pray a lot and God will provide for you. It turns out it’s not quite that simple, but that doesn’t stop people like Pavel Mircea from feeling kind of cheated by God. He felt in 2007 that his baptism as a child constituted a binding contract with God to protect him from evil, but God breached that contract by allowing him to do murder. Luckily for Him, God is not a person under Romanian law.
Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff
Gerald Mayo, on the other hand, placed the blame farther south when he sued Satan and his servants in 1971, claiming that “Satan has on numerous occasions caused (him) misery and unwarranted threats,” “placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused (his) downfall,” and “deprived him of his constitutional rights.” The suit was dismissed mostly because Mayo couldn’t provide instructions for serving Satan but also because, as a foreign prince, there was some question about Satan’s sovereign immunity. Judges are fun sometimes.
Ernie Chambers v. God
In 2008, Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers sued God for inflicting “widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants,” which is fair enough. Technically, he only did it to make a point that no lawsuit should be dismissed as frivolous, and his wasn’t — it was because God doesn’t have an address and can’t be served.
Chandan Kumar Singh v. Ram
In 2016, Indian lawyer Chandan Kumar Singh sued the Hindu god Ram for essentially being a dick to his wife. Not Singh’s wife, which would be pretty impressive Wife Guy behavior, but Ram’s wife, Sita. That might not seem like any of his business, but he wants the courts, who rejected his motion, to “acknowledge that Ram mistreated Sita," which we didn’t know you could sue for. Hang on, we’ve got some brothers-in-law to serve.
Betty Penrose v. God
Betty Penrose’s lawsuit against God in 1969 actually began with someone else’s legal actions. A California hippie commune tried to evade county fines by signing their land over to God, and theoretically, if God could own property, He could be sued. Penrose’s house had been struck by lightning nine years earlier, so she sued for damages and nearly won when it was expected that God would be a no-show. It became a media circus, with a San Quentin prisoner who thought she was God offering to show up and some random non-lawyer offering to defend God. Unfortunately, the hippies lost their case, so Penrose did, too, denying all of us a really fun chapter of the history books.