January 7, 2005
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Tsunami brings flood of religious bullshit
Not surprisingly, the professional religious nuts–the pastrs and priests and boohoos and gurus and imams and lamas and pedophiles (oops, I said priests already, didn’t I?)–are jumping on the bandwagon, making their little pronouncements about why the flood and stuff happened. Some Muslim muckymuck is saying the flood and all happened because God was upset that more people were not reading the Koran and heeding its message. My reasoned, rational, and highly evolved response to that is, fuck you and fuck the camel you rode in on.
Cal Thomas, a syndicated columnist, has written a thing headlined “Liberal clergy offer little help in time of questions.” I don’t know exactly what he means by “liberal clergy”–maybe he means pastors who do NOT preach that gays are all going to hell, and who do NOT keep a well-thumbed copy of the Malleus Maleficarum on their bed stands. I can’t help wondering if he even knows exactly what he means by the term–religion seems to bring out some pretty fuzzy thinking, even among otherwise intelligent people.
The column bothered the hell out of me, so to speak, and I couldn’t figure out why. Then it hit me–it is a wondrous blend of sense and nonsense. He says “Human tragedy is bad enough, but listening to some theologians trying to explain it is doubly irritating.” That makes a lot of sense to me, I could not agree more. Then he goes on to say “Theologians should offer hope and truth. The pagans serve up enough doubt.” What the fuck? Why this slur on pagans? Does he not know what a pagan is, does he think “pagan” is synonymous with “atheist” or what? As a pagan, and a heathen and a gnostic Christian of sorts (by some definitions), I am deeply offended. As a lover of precision in language, I am really annoyed. Does this clown not own a dictionary? But I digress.
He sort of quotes unspecified folks asking, how could a “loving” God allow such as thing to happen? Well, duh, the question itself is so ignorant and arrogant in the first place it makes my hair hurt. And I have a lot of hair. Granted, the flood caused a lot of destruction, and a lot on expense and inconvenience. But still, everyone who died would have died anyway. And everyone who died, only died on the physical plane; their spirits endure. Cal comes close to getting this, when he writes “Shouldn’t a ‘good God’ provide a way to escape the grave? He has, but that requires faith. . . .” WRONG, communion wafer-breath? I assume he means that you have to be washed in the blood of the Lamb or whatever, in order to get eternal life. That is bullshit, pure and simple.
God gave us all some great gifts, including life on this plane, free will, and eternal life in spirit. There were no fucking strings attached. You don’t have to believe anything, or know the secret handshake or have the special decoder ring or anything. God is just not that stingy or that petty.
Ironically, Cal says “. . . many sceptics try to bring God down to man’s level.” He is doing exactly the same thing himself, as do all those nitwits who describe themselves as “God-fearing.” No one has anything to fear from God. God is always on our side, even if we are not always on His.
Comments (5)
You make some good points. At the moment, my brain just wants to go to bed, though… otherwise, I’d leave a more comprehensive comment.
It’s obvious the flood happened because we’ve got so much goddamned water! You’re right, Paganism is not much taught nowadays; I’ll admit I’m not clear on it myself; maybe I am it.
As for the phrase God-fearing (or whatever nomenclature covers the definition of this bifurcated word) – hell, I’m not even sure of the word nomenclature but it sounds good in that spot – I have for long suspected that the originators of that idea probably meant something like fearing to offend God (our idea of God?), ie. our own higher sensibilities, lest we lose (dim?) the light whereby we tread hopefully upward. How about -mind you, this is just off the tippy-top of my pointed head – religion is where we build our fence.?
Wait a minute. I DON’T need my secret decoder ring?
HAH! I’m back. I was so stunned by the news that I didn’t need my SDR that I’d forgotten my orignal observation. That being I was certain the tsunami was caused by an earthquake.
As such, everyone is wrong. God didn’t cause the tsunami because we aren’t reading the Koran, God caused the earthquake that caused the tsunami because … (drum roll) people like you are telling us we don’t need our SDR’s.
So there.
Oops, my bad.