It has to happen sooner or later! After the devastating trail of Hurricane Katrina, I had thought it would be the Islamists claiming Allah was punishing the Americans for their brutalities and atrocities towards the Muslims, but I was wrong (unless of course there have been such articles in the Middle Eastern press that I haven’t come across).
In America, President Bush’s allies, the Christian fundamentalists averred that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to punish a sinful nation. The nature of the sin? There are two schools of thoughts.
The first school claimed that God has been pissed off with New Orleans because of its gay Mardi Gras and other naughty festivals. The director of Repent America (do I really have to explain to you readers who Repent America is, with such a name?) said:
"We must not forget that the citizens of New Orleans tolerated and welcomed the wickedness in their city for so long. May this act of God cause us all to think about what we tolerate in our city limits."
Hallelujah, it’s all Sodom and Gomorrah again. But this time it’s rain, wind and flood water rather than fire and brimstones. God is really tricky.
OK, Sodom & Gomorrah, was it then? If that has been the case, then Sydneysiders in Australia should watch out, for they too have their Mardi Gras, a celebration of gay-ness. Homosexuals, lesbians and whatever one may wish to term them, they flaunt their sexual preferences during the festival. There are even gay police floats – hey man, this is Australia. Everyone enjoys it especially the business people because gays from all over the world congregate in Sydney during that week, which has been bloody good for business.
Yes, some Christians are pissed off, especially one bloke by the name of Reverend Fred Niles. Now, Freddy is well known in Sydney for his very right wing Christian views. Some years ago he proposed that the chador be banned because those Middle Eastern women could hide various weapons underneath their flocks, stuff like a Russian T-72 tank, Chinese PL-12 missile or the American nuclear powered aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan.
Back to Hurricane Katrina. The other school of thought as to why Yahweh has been pissed off with the Americans warns that the disaster was revenge for the US' support of the removal of Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip.
Yesirree, those Christians believed that God punished them, by killing more than 10,000 people in the states of Louisiana and Mississipi, because Ariel Sharon decided that withdrawing from Gaza enhances Israel’s ability to defend itself and as a unilateral tradeoff for better West Bank land. Some American Christians believe that the US must support Israel in order to bring about the return of Christ.
One of those believers stated, "Whenever this country encourages Israel to give up any part of their rightful God-given land we have suffered the consequences."
It seems that 50% of Americans believe that God has a hand in natural disasters, and that the sufferings through such disasters is a sign of divine judgement. These are of course the same people who believe that the biblical patriarch Noah had cute little dinasaurs on board his Ark. Read my earlier post Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark?
Perhaps they are right in God wanting to punish America. Perhaps they have merely provided the wrong reason for God’s anger. Perhaps God or Yahweh or Jehovah wants the USA to stop attacking or killing people in strange faraway lands. Perhaps ........
God's Punishment? Very unlikely!
ReplyDeleteWhat is the plausible explanation for the causes?
”There's lots of evidence, even scientific, that the earth is a living organism. Is it possible that our consciousness and the turbulence in our consciousness have anything to do with the turbulence in nature?” - By Deepak Chopra in the Jan 7 2005 interview with CNN’s Larry King
(http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0501/07/lkl.01.html)
“If we quiet the turbulence in our collective minds and we heal the rift in our collective -- if nature has a mind.”
It seems those in the path of hurricane Katrina are attracted to such spots because of their innate understanding of the astonishing relationship between exterior circumstances and their own private mental and emotional patterns.
Here you can find individuals of great energy; of unstable, ‘excessively’ temperamental natures.
They need a strong stimulus or impact with reality against which to pit themselves. However there is often a great impatience with social situations and unusual vitality. Such individuals operate at a high pitch, and en masse emit inordinate amounts of emotional non-physical qualities which being unstable affect the deep electromagnetic integrity of the earth's structure.
No event is predestined. Hurricanes, earthquakes and their resulting tsunamis are often associated with periods of great social change and unrest. The New Orleans and surrounding areas have been in turmoil for years.
Here you can find individuals of great energy; of unstable, ‘excessively’ temperamental natures and with intense capacities for creativity and innovation.
If we believe that the earth is a ‘living organism’ then our planet has a body as much as we have. Our blood follows certain prescribed patterns - so does the wind. We are inside the body of the earth in those terms.
As your body is in a state of constant flux and chemical interaction, so is the atmosphere, which reflects on another level all of the psychic, chemical, and electromagnetic properties that exist within the body.
There is little difference between the currents of blood that flow through your veins, and the wind current, except that the one seems to be within you -and the other without. Both are manifestations of the same interrelationship and motion, however.
Your planet has a body as much as you have. Your blood follows certain prescribed patterns and so does the wind. You are inside the body of the earth in those terms.
As cells within your body influence it, so too does our individual body affect the larger body of the earth.
The weather faithfully reflects the feelings of individuals in any given local territory. Overall weather patterns follow deeper inner rhythms of emotion. We do not simply react to the weather, we also help to form it
In the same interview, the Muslim scholar Maher Hathout agreed that the tsunami was NOT a punishment thrown down by God. He said: ‘It was an accident.’
If we accept the possibility of the slightest, smallest, most insignificant accident, then indeed we must believe in a universe in which accidents are not the exceptions but the rule?
Once we accept that idea, then we must accept the idea of a random accidental universe, in which we are at the mercy of any accident in which mind or purpose have little meaning. In which we are at the mercy of all random happenings.
In such a universe, the individual has little hope for he will return to the non-existence that he came from. He has no control over his destiny and can be swept aside at any point by random fate over which he has no recourse.
The only answer to this is to realize that we form physical events - individually and en masse. We form and create the physical reality – including the Katrina.