I now see that a growing number of people have a different view:
Some spiritual leaders see God's hand in the destruction.
"This is an expression of God's ire with the world," Sephardic chief rabbi Shlomo Amar, one of Israel's top religious leaders, told the Reuters news agency. "The world is being punished for wrongdoing - be it people's needless hatred of each other, lack of charity, moral turpitude."
Fran Richardson, who attended Rigali's service yesterday at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, said she saw the earthquake and tsunami as a message.
"The fire and the floods are in the Bible," Richardson said. "I believe when we have the fire and the floods we really need to rethink the way we live our lives."
Others say they don't see the hand of God in the disaster but rather the face of God in people helping the victims.
While my opinion is that God didn't do it, I have to concede that these are unanswerable questions, to which the answers will never be known, and have never been known. A great deal of the time people spend worrying about unanswerable questions might be spent more productively worrying about answerable questions.
Why is it that when a natural disaster kills people, it's considered "worse" and gets more attention than when, say, a monstrous human being like Stalin, Pol Pot, or Idi Amin does the same thing?
When more than 100,000 people have been killed, and thousands of others are in danger, the international community has a moral obligation to do what it can to limit the damage and reduce the suffering of survivors.
So why is it that the international community so rarely even tries? Oh yes, an unprecedented relief effort is taking place now in the areas of South Asia struck by last month's tsunami. That's laudable.
But when, in 1987-88, more than 100,000 people were killed in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, the international community turned a blind eye.
Those Kurdish victims were overcome not by waves of water but in some cases by waves of poison gas. Why should sympathy for those drowned on a beach be so much greater than for those choked in the streets of their village? More to the point, why should an act of God elicit more empathy than an act of man?
Why indeed? Especially when, as May notes, the man was Saddam Hussein.
I took Morse code lessons from a World War II veteran Army radio man whose unit was the first to enter the Dachau concentration camp. I wish I could get him to write an account of this experience, but he says it's too painful, and I certainly understand. When he told me the story, nearly six decades later, he was still shaking with rage and emotion, so all I can do is try to recall it secondhand.
Dachau was not a single camp, but a sprawling complex of camps, and the Americans in my friend's unit stumbled upon it unexpectedly. Theirs was not one of the units which systematically went around liberating camps in the wake of the last days of the war, so none of them had seen a concentration camp before, and at first weren't quite sure what they'd found. There were individual bodies, piles of bodies, and it was hard to tell the living from the dead. Apparently, the inmates simply starved in the chaos of German collapse, what little food they'd had was gone, and no one bothered even to separate the living from the dead, much less cremate the dead. He said you'd look at a "corpse," and occasionally eyes would open and stare blankly at you. One soldier, an American of Italian descent, simply lost it and started firing a machine gun at the nearest available uniformed guards, killing several until his superiors stopped him.
What did it for my friend was when he heard a skeletal boy crying out "Wasser!" (Water.) He ran over and cradled the boy's head in his lap, opened his canteen and let the kid drink. The boy drank the water, then died right there in my friend's arms.
At that moment, the radio man ended his relationship with God. He shook his fist at the sky, and cursed God, saying, "I don't know who the hell you are, but if I ever see you, I'll get you for this!" He spent over a year in therapy after the war, but he's never gotten over it, and has called himself "an atheist" (a term he uses with anger) ever since. He's also Jewish, and while I can't speak for him, I'm not sure whether his atheism is based on a genuine conviction that there's no God (he does think there's "something out there"), or is simply grounded in hatred of God.
I'd find it easier to hate Hitler, but if I really thought God was behind such monsters, well, I guess I'd have to hate God too. I can't, because I believe in free will, and the random nature of infinity. In my view infinity makes God (or gods) inevitable, but not omniscient.
Obviously, I can no more prove my beliefs than anyone else can, but it does occur to me that no matter what anyone thinks of God, and regardless of whether there is a god, simple reality shows that God cannot be relied upon to prevent disasters, whether natural or manmade. It also seems clear that human killers like Hitler are easier to stop than natural killers like the tsunami. So, if there is to be intervention, it would seem more productive to reduce the manmade killers than to attempt to stop a tsunami.
Clearly, tsunamis are bad (certainly bad news), whether God sends them or not. And clearly, it's good to try to stop them if we can, or help victims after the fact. But if helping tsunami victims (and trying to prevent future ones) is a good thing, why is helping Saddam Hussein's victims (and trying to prevent future ones) considered such a bad thing by so many people?
posted by Eric on 01.06.05 at 08:55 AM
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/1898
Comments
This is at the heart of my thoughts for the last week--since news and the reaction to it first began.
I do not get it. I really don't.
The only thing I can think of, which your screed tended to support and make more clear, is that what some people really want to do is to "defy G-d" or control nature. When the huge hand of nature shows itself, human beings cower before the ultimate power. And they are frightened.
Perhaps this isn't as much about charity and helping as it is in trying to regain the falsity of feeling powerful in the face of a greater power.
Even though it is seems obvious, I have a hard time accepting that this is the oldest and most basic battle of all: the battle of humanity vs humility. Occam's Razor doesn't give me many other options.
Mrs. du Toit · January 6, 2005 10:43 AM
You can't have free will without having bad things happen. If you don't want something then Pray it away. If you do want something then Pray it to you. Seek, Knock, Ask
Huggy · January 6, 2005 03:58 PM
"Evil" is not a term you can apply to natural events, only to human ones.
God certainly did not cause the disaster. It is matter of physics, not theodicy.
Dachau and the other camps were truly an evil, one that was unleashed by an evil empire, who took advantage of the free will we are created with (I might say, part of "in His image") to turn away from good. God lets us all do what we will, and our only hope of understanding any of it is to believe that the bad guys get their reward in the hereafter - or, if we're lucky, in places like Nurnberg (where the Nazi trials were held).
One might even say that God has spared the Earth from being annihilated by a giant asteroid for the last billion years or so. Occasionally, He lets one through (as in the mass extinctions of 65 million years ago - and many before that) in order to start over.
When people try to ascribe to God the causes of disasters, they're just being human, like we've been these last many thousand years. Primitive religions believed in many gods, each responsible for one or another facet of the world as they saw it. Gods of the harvest, gods of fertility, &c.
It's our nature to ask "Why?", and in cases like this there is no answer. I like the thought that we don't see God's hand in the destruction, but we do in the response.
Mrs. du Toit, thanks for coming and welcome! I agree with your comment completely. I've also been thinking that there may be a split between those who believe God is infinite, and those who believe God is finite but won't admit it. (But that's a whole 'nother post!)
Mike's right too; there really aren't answers. That doesn't stop people from needing them -- nor does it stop people from catering to such needs.
I've been seeing this pop up all over the blogosphere. The classic What, When, Where, Who, Why. What happened, when did it, where is that, who got it, why did God do it? Seems to happen a lot when more than a handfull of ppl die. Since many people asking the question dont like the answer, it resurfaces.
Thank you. But I've been coming for a long, long time. I'd just never felt compelled to comment before. I didn't realize I'd never commented until my "Personal Info" didn't display. I guess that most of the time I agree with you or have nothing to add. Today you helped me resolve an issue that had been troubling me for a while and I thank you for that. (It had been driving me nuts.)
Mrs. du Toit · January 6, 2005 09:51 PM
I'm very glad to see you reading and commenting here in Classical Values, Mrs. du Toit. Profound thoughts here. Mike pretty well said everything I was thinking in this connection theologically. Your description of Dachau reminds me once again why I can never forgive the Nazis, or the Communists. I agree with you completely that man-made horrors are worse from a moral perspective than are natural disasters.
Do you seriously think the Saddam Hussein's "people" are being helped? Over 100,000 dead and a massive resistance. Wouldn't you resist too?
As for the gassing of the Kurds, it's unclear whether is was Iraq or Iran who did it. It's certainly a good question as to why there was little response from the West. Ask the media why they didn't cover it. Probably because the US was supplying Saddam Hussein with weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.
While we're talking about international outrage regarding genocide, let's talk about Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Kosovo. Who was responsible for all those deaths?
Why is ... considered such a bad thing by so many people?
Because people, myself included, are idiots. They get some idea stuck in their head (e.g. "War is bad" or "Bush is stupid") and all reality filters through that idea - regardless of what reality might actually be.
Rather than re-examining the premises, biases, framing, etc..., they know they're right and inconvenient facts are just ignored as if they do not exist.
It has nothing to do with Left or Right. It's the fatal flaw in human understanding. Oh well.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
This is at the heart of my thoughts for the last week--since news and the reaction to it first began.
I do not get it. I really don't.
The only thing I can think of, which your screed tended to support and make more clear, is that what some people really want to do is to "defy G-d" or control nature. When the huge hand of nature shows itself, human beings cower before the ultimate power. And they are frightened.
Perhaps this isn't as much about charity and helping as it is in trying to regain the falsity of feeling powerful in the face of a greater power.
Even though it is seems obvious, I have a hard time accepting that this is the oldest and most basic battle of all: the battle of humanity vs humility. Occam's Razor doesn't give me many other options.