I heard that Pope Benedict was to say a prayer for the victims of the earthquake in Indonesia. I started to wonder what, would the Pope say. Something like this, I guess:
Dear God, you have messed up again. You in your playful or vengeful mood have caused another earthquake. More than 3,000 persons, including many children, have died. We beseech thee to stop your destructive behavior and to be merciful to those who were victimized by this most recent outrage.
I know I’m going to sound humorless here, but why is this in Great Debates? Do you really want to discuss the likely prayer? Do you want to discuss why God lets tragedy happen? Do you want to Pit the church for not getting more involved in earthquake relief? Or are you just playing in clever-clever land?
There is no debate in the OP. It is not witnessing, (under which guise it could remain in GD). It is not much of a rant, ruling out The BB Pit. It is certainly not (as presented) a General Question with a factual answer. Between IMHO and MPSIMS, IMHO lost the coin toss, so off to IMHO it goes.
I’m sure that when the next bing seismic event sucks the SF basin into a large hole that there will be gnashing of teeth, but, the fault lines are common knowledge now, and yet people continue to develop and grow cities on or near these fault lines.
What choice do people have ? Stable places are also dead places; you don’t see such things as balancing stones in fertile farmland. It may be earthquakes here, volcanos there and flooding somewhere else, but habitable places tend to be places prone to disaster.
I am sorry that any reader thought that I was trying to be cute. (I gave up on that a long time ago.) I am serious. I confess to using sarcasm. I truly do not know what the prayer would be. I suppose that it would not refer to cause but only to effect.
The last time I was a church going person, I had a Minister whose every sermon could be titled “How Odd of God”. That was his explanation for everything. God moves in strange ways. God does not wish us to know the reasons for his various acts. Etc. etc. etc. I have grown weary of that. God can move in strange ways. But a God that visits upon us one disaster after another is not a benificent God and his Ministers should not be permitted to pretend that it is all just too mysterious for us to understand.
I would welcome help from readers–members-- who would like to educate me.
Well, if you’re serious, the answer (IMHO, but I’m quite sure) is that it’s a series of random events that God is not responsible for. I believe further that there is no God to be behind these events, but an impotent or asshole God fits this set of data too.
It seems pretty likely to me, though, that the current God concept is as fictional as the previous thousands or millions of God concepts that man has believed in over the millenia. The “mysterious ways” canard is obvious handwaving and smokeblowing to my eyes.
If you’re willing to believe in a single intelligent Demiurge who rules the world, what’s so unbelievable about Tectonic Animism? The tectonic plates have their own problems. Your relationship to them is like the relation of your own hairmites to you–or perhaps more to the point, your shampoo.
Man is not really the center of the Universe, nor measure of all things.
Yes and no. There’s nothing stopping you from taking steps to lessen the force of the disaster; one reason there are so many high-casualty disasters in the Third World is that they are either too poor or too corrupt to take the proper precautions. Something to keep in mind whenever some rightwinger goes on a tirade about the Evils of Regulations, by the way. Lax building codes are a good way to have a high casualty rate from earthquakes, for example.
We said prayers yesterday morning at mass for the victims of the Indonesian earthquake. It’s a standard Catholic thing to pray for the repose of the souls of those who have died. It was the usual prayer:
Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.
