Meditation 1005
Natural Disasters and God
by: JT
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For pretty well any major natural disaster which hits the USA, you can find a cleric who is willing to claim that God was sending a message supporting whatever the cleric's pet peeve is. For Hurricane Sandy, it was John McTernan. He saw on the advance storm forecasts that the hurricane was expected to pass over his house and might be severe enough to disrupt his scheduled podcast. This ensured that the message from God was clear to him.
The President is promoting sodomite marriage and is the church repenting of this? Romney is also pro-homosexual, except for now he stops at sodomite marriage. He wants open homosexuality in the military and the Boy Scouts. Both of these candidates offend the Holy God of Israel by promoting the homosexual agenda.
And that's one of his supposed causes of Hurricane Sandy. Not the only one, for McTernan is a man of many peeves. It was also forecast to happen on the 21st anniversary (3 and 7 are very significant numbers to McTernan's God) of President George Bush Sr. initiating the Madrid Peace Conference - which McTernan saw as dividing the land of Israel. So, part of the storm was God's reminder that He is still almighty pissed about that.
Other than McTernan, the only other US based church that made the news for crediting the storm to God was Westboro Baptist because God Hates Fags. But that's really not news. It would be news if they didn't link a disaster to God Hates Fags.
To date, Pat Robertson has somehow restrained himself from making any outrageous comments publicly.
So we see that while my opening statement (For pretty well any major natural disaster which hits the USA, you can find a cleric who is willing to claim that God was sending a message supporting whatever the cleric's pet peeve is) remains true, you may have to move to the nutjob fringe of Christianity to find these clerics.
What got more press coverage than the extremists is that a number of Christian clergymen actually spoke out against linking the hurricane to God. A Jesuit priest, Father James Martin, was perhaps the most outspoken:
If any religious leaders say tomorrow that the hurricane is God's punishment against some group they're idiots. God's ways are not our ways.
Perhaps the more intelligent members of the clergy realize that promoting the image of a bloodthirsty God spreading indiscriminate revenge encourages people to reject religion and God. Particularly if the activities for which God is taking revenge are not seen as morally wrong by a significant proportion of the population. The linking of a vengeful God to natural disasters is more likely to cause people to change their ideas about God than it is to change their minds about morality.
Of course, whatever position Christian clergy take on God and disasters, more questions are unanswered / unanswerable than are actually answered.