Some follow up on Friday’s blog about God (and assorted evils against religion) causing the tsunamis…
Theodicy: the attempt to justify belief in the goodness of God in the midst of evil and suffering. Based on the points I found in yesterday’s Globe and Mail article regarding this issue, I’d be more willing to call it Theo-Idiocy!
*41 per cent of respondents to a poll on the popular Internet religious website belief.net say God sent the Asian tsunamis;
*Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, calls it “an expression of God’s great ire with the world — the world is being punished for wrongdoing.”
*Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, told the BBC: “This is the will of God Almighty.”
*The Anglican dean of Sydney, Australia, Very Rev. Phillip Jensen, said of the tsunamis, “Disasters are part of [God’s] warning that judgment is coming.”
*Bill Koenig, a popular U.S. Christian fundamentalist, also endorsed judgment, but from a more exceptionalist point of view: he reported on his website, watch.org, stories of supernatural tsunami survivals by Christians in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Somalia, Maldives, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia which, he says, “are among the top 50 nations who persecute Christians.”
I almost wish people were making this stuff up, because the more I hear it, the less I want to belong to any sort of organized religion. It makes it seem like less than 250 years since priests searched the streets of Lisbon for heretics, hoping to hang them and appease God’s wrath for causing the devastating earthquake of 1755.
The search for scapegoats goes on…
I’m with Voltaire — the man who stated that if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. In the aftermath of the Lisbon quake, he asked what universal good could be seen in “infants crushed upon their mothers’ breasts” and the dying “sad inhabitants of desolate shores.”
Stop blaming God for natural disasters, fools of the Earth! If you haven’t realized by now that God left this planet for us to either save OR run into the ground, then free will is definitely an illusion.
However, I believe that the only illusory thing here is the so-called intelligence of people who believe in this divine punishment rubbish!
