Rex
Founder
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The Mad, Mad World of Gods People on Earth
There is something wrong when religious faiths can be shaken to the core by natural disasters but seem able to reconcile themselves with events such as the war on Iraq which are the result of human folly
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There is something wrong when religious faiths can be shaken to the core by natural disasters but seem able to reconcile themselves with events such as the war on Iraq which are the result of human folly
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[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]by Muriel Gray [/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Only nine days in and already the first New Years resolution has slipped. I promised myself to stop droning on in this column about repressive religions and psychotic gods, and try and concern myself more with the new seasons fabrics and colors in soft furnishings. But the apocalyptic nature of 2004, from its filthy, warmongering beginning to its heart-stopping, disaster-torn end, would test any resolve to be light of heart. Curiously, all the post-tsunami talk about how a loving God could deal such a cruel blow seems particularly cockeyed. The debate, all over the press and internet, seems to rest on the testing of faith of those peculiar people who believe in a God sufficiently hands-on to respond to their personal prayers about doing well in a job interview, while at the same time being seen as responsible for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people.
One such newspaper correspondent pleaded, with unintentional black humor, that God regularly answers our prayers, including recently saving our sons marriage when it went through a rocky patch, yet He ignores the pleas of thousands who scream for their loved ones lost to the waves. We are in turmoil.
Presumably the author of the letter has never previously considered that while their God was busy divinely intervening to stop their son breaking wind under the duvet without apologizing to his wife, He must also, by implication, have been deaf to the prayers from thousands all over the world, screaming mercy for loved ones blown up by bombs, dying of famine, run down by cars, killed by robbers, fires, disease or poverty. The turmoil the letter writer should be experiencing is how he arrived at being so terminally self-centered and unutterably stupid not to have noticed pain and suffering until it came to his attention in the form of a headline-grabbing tsunami.
But if we can forgive the knuckle-dragging idiocy of a member of the public, who could, after all, quite possibly be educationally subnormal, its considerably harder to explain the reaction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, an educated theologian of some intellectual standing, when he described the tsunami as testing our faith.
The tsunami would only have been a test of faith to a person believing in the interventionist God of the Old Testament, the crazy guy who regularly smote down chaps for not paying him enough respect. The Church of England, however, is largely thought to adhere more closely to the New Testament, where a non-interventionist God sends His only son as a last effort to make His ungrateful creations see sense, and then lets mankind get the hell on with it.
How the archbishop reasons that a natural, and indeed geologically predictable, earthquake can shake his faith, when war, famine, criminality, religious hatred and the advancement of science that makes his religion look increasingly ridiculous, have never been singled out by him as having the same faith-rocking effect is mystifying.
If anything, the indifferent destructive power of the tsunami, in contrast to the malicious destructive power of mankind, is so obscenely impressive that its more likely to tempt the swithering non-believer into the fold of supernatural belief than drive them away. Puny humans, armed with all our expensive weaponry, technology and irrational loathing, take months to systematically slaughter thousands of people in Iraq, whereas the Earths crust gives one tiny shrug in its sleep and hundreds of thousands die in a matter of days.
The timing and the scale could easily be interpreted, by those of an imaginative disposition, as some deity losing patience with our year of non-stop global aggression, and deciding to show us, just 20 minutes after the close of Christmas Day, how effortlessly a god can destroy and at the same time force man to rekindle the dying embers of his humanity.
But of course I just invented that. Sadly, evidence would strongly suggest that no deity exists to care a toss whether we send $2 million missiles to blow up children in their homes while they sleep, or whether we pour money into plastic buckets in supermarkets to help those who suffered in a natural disaster.
But plenty of decent, wonderful humans do care a great deal about such things. Theyre already out in Asia, pulling bodies from wreckage, trying to administer to the sick, struggling to organize getting tankers of water to the thirsty and dying. Theyre fighting and protesting to stop war, or working inside strife-torn, volatile, dangerous countries to heal, help and build.
Its they who are the foundations of the most important faith of all, the faith in plain humanity itself, and for the Archbishop of Canterbury to have his faith tested by a natural occurrence, yet not strengthened by the magnificently compassionate reaction of ordinary people around the globe, might suggest his theology is somewhat shallow.
Meanwhile, a letter to The Herald about the tsunami from Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, claims to speak for all Muslims, and tells us that this worlds reality is of little consequence, since believers know it is nothing more than a test, and they can look forward after death to an unimaginable quality of life. He finishes by expressing bafflement as to how those of us who dont believe in this promised land manage to cope at all, as in his words, Its only the knowledge that everyone will be recompensed in the hereafter that keeps me going. If this perspective came from a deeply depressed, terminally ill person in great pain, or the lone survivor of a terrible family-destroying calamity, one might afford it some sympathy. As it comes from someone fit, healthy and hired to represent the views of a great many diverse Scottish Muslims, most of whom love this life dearly and wish to make the best of it for themselves and those who share the planet, one can only hope he gets better soon.
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