I removed my original posting and re-set it for publication a week from now, after things have settled down a bit (we hope and pray).
Katrina and the Story of the Continuing Creation
Comments
10 responses to “Katrina and the Story of the Continuing Creation”
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Someone wrote this:
However, even if blaming God for the hurricane makes psychological sense, I’m not sure it makes theological sense. In the Book of Genesis, we are told that following the devastation of the flood, God made a covenant to never again harm life with the waters of a flood, and sealed that covenant with a rainbow.
http://thejourney.typepad.com/the_journey/2005/09/should_we_give_.html
So why did god renege on this promise? Can we ever trust him again after this or the tsunami in Dec 04?
Oh, I forgot! Bible god is never responsible for anything bad that happens, only the good. Sorta like Dubya.
The perversity of this kind of twisted thinking boggles the mind.
Surely, a part of your mind must recognize the inconsistency here?
Let me ask you this. Suppose a man saw an approaching train as a child played on the tracks, and he chose to do nothing. The child is then killed by the train.
Is he guilty of a crime by having sat and watched instead of saving the child?
What if he used the god defense to rationalize his lack of action? Suppose he said, “God gave that child the free will which led it to the train tracks,so who am I to interfer with its decisions in life? I chose to do what god does which is to mere observe humans act upon their free will and suffer the consequences.”
Would you find him not guilty as you do the blameless bible god? -
I am pointing out that you believers give the credit for anything good that happens to your god. But when anything bad happens, you deny that he had any role.
You can’t have it both ways.
Two summers ago, I sat on the patio of a Starbucks unintentionally over-hearing two elderly women talk. One was talking about her bout with cancer. Apparently it was in remission after chemotherapy and she was thanking god and praising him for this. I sat there thinking “Well, if he is responsible for the remission than he is also responsible for you contracting it in the first place.”
Chris Rock nails this type of hypocrisy when he points out that southern football players always say, “Thank you jesus for letting me score the winning touchdown!” but never ask “Why did Jesus make me fumble and lose the game?” -
What we really need here is a phpbb discussion forum.
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RBB, the people who praise God for taking away their cancer have adopted the hypothesis that God is personally directing our lives. My own view is that there’s little or no verifiable evidence to support this hypothesis, so we shouldn’t put much if any stock in it.
But let’s assume arguendo that the hypothesis is correct. If God is in fact personally directing things, how can the existence of what we call “evil” be reconciled with the hypothesis that God is all-good? This, of course, is one facet of the classic problem of theodicy.
Perhaps — and I stress that this is pure speculation — God is doing things that we don’t like now, but the reason we don’t like them is that, in our relative ignorance, we don’t see how those “bad” things will pay off in the long run. By analogy, think of a mom taking her screaming kid to the doctor for immunization shots, or a high-school football coach making his players run still more laps despite their agonized protests.
(Such a speculation, of course, would seem to require that there be an afterlife in which suffering and even death can “pay off.”)
Thanks for stopping by, and for posting some challenging questions. -
From another site:
Re: Where Is God? (3.50 / 8)
God does not exist.
What happened to the city of New Orleans, to the city of Biloxi, what is happening to its poor, beleaguered people, is an intersection of human folly and a natural phenomenon (i.e., failure to prepare properly for Hurricane Katrina).
I find the prayer that PastorDan has offered up to be meaningless. What good will prayers do? Will God–if the Deity exists–answer them? Will God recede the flooded waters, rebuild the shattered homes, restore the dead to life, provide the necessities of life to the dispossessed, and smite the wicked men whose negligence and greed have allowed this to happen? If God is going to do those things, then the Supreme Deity had better get cracking.
What the people need now is a leader–a human being with a heart and a mind–who will make sure that they have food, water, shelter, medicine, and protection from criminal gangs.
Prayer will provide none of these. I am certain that millions have prayed for the relief of the suffering of the millions afflicted by Hurricane Katrina, and nothing has come out of those prayers except more sorrow and grief.
However, political action will provide relief. Run the Republican criminals out of Congress–and quite a few of the Democrats, too–and you’ll have yourself a nice start towards rebuilding not only the Gulf Coast cities but the whole of the United States as well, whose economy and culture have been looted by Bush and his gang of thugs.
As for me? I donated $5,000 to the American Red Cross to assist in the relief effort and offered up not a single prayer.
As for prayer to an unresponsive Supreme Deity, who neither prevented the hurricane nor has lifted one single all-powerful finger to provide material relief in the aftermath…I find them to be a cruel hoax.
by Shadowthief
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/9/2/101444/8667 -
Okay, pastordan responds to Shadowthief with a comment that his contempt won’t help the people of NO, to which Shadowthief replies:
Re: Well, thank you. (2.66 / 3)
I have no contempt for the people of New Orleans or Mississippi. They have my heartfelt compassion as well as whatever material aid I can offer them.
What you have offered them is a cruel joke–show me what good your prayers have provided them.
There are people there who haven’t had food nor water for days. They are living in unsanitary conditions without medicine or proper toilets nor even the protection of police from the criminal elements among them.
And you offer them up a prayer that makes YOU feel good and does absolutely nothing for them–and then accuse ME of “contempt”?
I look to New Orleans and Mississippi and see a crisis that requires a tangible response–you look to it and see another opportunity to peddle your brand of Christianity.
Well, if we want to get down to cases, then, yes, I find your response–“let us pray”–contemptible. Prayer provides nothing for the hungry, the thirsty, the ill, the homeless, the frightened.
Let’s be honest–your prayer is all about making YOU feel good, not about comforting the people there (who don’t have electricity, and therefore no Net access, and therefore can’t read the prayer) and about making your Christianity somehow relevant and important to the material and political crisis at hand.
The people need bread, and PastorDan offers them a windy homily.
~
Ouch! -
Oh this guy is sizzling! One more from Shadowthief:
Re: Well, thank you. (4.00 / 2)
Thank you for your kind remarks, Auntie.
However, I wasn’t “blaming” anybody, but rather questioning an idea that PastorDan put forth: the idea of a loving, caring Supreme Deity who will listen to, and respond to, human prayers.
The Deity did not respond to prayers to turn the hurricane aside.
The Deity is not responding to prayers to ease the suffering of those afflicted.
The Deity is not smiting the wicked men whose negligence, greed, and arrogance have compounded the suffering of this natural disaster, and doomed many thousands who might otherwise have been saved.
My question was, and remains: what good is this prayer? I find it cruel to ask people to pray as if this will somehow solve a problem. What is needed is human compassion and human intelligence.
And that is why we are here at BoomanTribune, are we not? To discuss ideas, to refute those we find objectionable, to promote those we find worthy? -
RBB quotes Shadowthief (a decent writer, BTW) as saying that what he is questioning is “an idea that PastorDan put forth: the idea of a loving, caring Supreme Deity who will listen to, and respond to, human prayers.”
RBB, I too question the idea that God responds to prayers. I was livid the other day when the first email about Katrina from my large, wealthy Houston parish, a couple of days after landfall, proved to be an announcement that there’d be a special prayer service. Prayer isn’t going to do a damned bit of good to help the evacuees who will be showing up at the Astrodome, I thought; what are we as a parish and diocese doing? (Quite a bit, as it turned out; it just hadn’t been communicated.)
I like the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne’s take on prayer: He thinks a principal utility of prayer is that it causes us to focus on, and seriously consider, what it is we really want. (Dr. Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest and Fellow of the Royal Society, went to seminary at age 50 after a distinguished career as a professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University.)
Personally I find prayer to be quite helpful as a way of doing a mental defrag, so to speak. In particular, corporate worship is wonderful; I never feel so good during the week as just after the Sunday Eucharist.
Maybe God does actually respond to prayers. Many people smarter than I think he does, including my wife, who is not given to wishful thinking. Even so, I don’t assume that God responds to prayers. In any event, that’s not why I pray.
As to God existing, you might look at, for example, How Do We Know There’s a God? -
Friend of mine once conjectured that when we pray we may simply be communicating with our own subconcious mind and possibly directing it to bring about a certain result.
That’s slightly more plausible to me than believing some never-seen deity is listening and responding.
But we will never really know the answer. I mean 2000 years have already gone by and we still do not know anymore what is real and isn’t when it comes to Christianity. -
Don’t Call Them Acts of God
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ferguson5sep05,0,6142377.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
Good article.
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