A week ago, a landslide, mudslide, or flash flood engulfed the city of Mocoa in Colombia. The city vanished. At least 200 died instantly; 200 more were injured; another 200 were missing.
As early news reports filtered out, one despairing resident uttered the predictable explanation: “It must be God’s will.”
No, no, no, a thousand times no!
It’s too easy to attribute natural disasters to supernatural causes. Insurance companies call them “Acts of God.” When Hurricane Katrina devastated vast swaths of New Orleans in 2005, a member of Congress representing Baton Rouge declared, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans! We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
Name any natural disaster, and someone will recite the mantra of God’s will.
· Haiti, January 2010. Over 200,000 deaths, two million left homeless, three million needing aid.
· Japan. March 2011. The largest earthquake ever to hit earthquake-prone Japan causes a tsunami that destroys the Fukushima nuclear power plant, strews debris across the north Pacific, and drowns 20,000 people.
· Indonesia, Boxing Day 2004. A tsunami wipes out 280,000 lives, including some as far away as Sri Lanka and east Africa.
If God willed all those deaths, can anyone still believe in a merciful God?
Blaming the victims
Yes, there have been miraculous rescues. A woman hears a voice telling her to head for higher ground. A child is found unharmed under the rubble. A man sucked out to sea cries to his God for help, and is swept back to safety by the next wave. Another man, buried to his mouth in hardened mud, is fed from a baby bottle until rescuers can dig him out.
But if you argue that a merciful God orchestrated those miracles, then you also have to accept that the same deity was not merciful to the thousands who perished.
Why save one, and kill so many others?
Did the others deserve to die?
Atlantic magazine commented, “The idea that victims of natural disasters are to blame for their fate is common in the aftermath of any tragedy.” So after the 2011 tsunami in Japan, “Some Americans made headlines for shrugging off the enormity of the loss as karmic payback for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour” 70 years earlier.
TV evangelist Pat Robertson attributed the Haiti earthquake to rebel slaves making “a pact with the devil” in 1803, and blamed Hurricane Katrina on U.S. abortion practices.
And of course, the vast majority of victims in Indonesia were Muslims. You can’t expect a Christian God to care about Muslims, can you?
(That was sarcasm, in case you took it seriously.)
Learning from mistakes
I don’t want to deny any comfort that survivors can get from holding God responsible -- if that belief helps them cope with their shock, their loss, their grief.
But if that belief influences their future actions, I must object. Blaming God absolves humans of their own responsibility for disasters.
Pompeii built a city for 25,000 directly below Vesuvius, the most active volcano in Europe.
Developers in Calgary built subdivisions on the flood plain of the Bow River.
California’s major cities hug the San Andreas fault. Hollywood hangs expensive mansions on steep slopes forested with incendiary bushes.
In all these instances, human stupidity – or greed, much the same thing – affected the outcome. Blaming it on a distant God, out there somewhere, prevents us from learning from our mistakes.
The Mocoa disaster in Colombia may also have had some human causes. “When the basins are deforested, it is as if we remove the protection for avoiding landslides,” said Colombia’s former environment minister, Adriana Soto.
A month’s rain fell in a single night. A senior UN official, Martin Santiago, linked the storm to climate change that has affected “the intensity, frequency, and magnitude of natural events.”
Holy relationships
Are these disasters God’s will? No! I cannot, I will not, worship such a God. Such a God, I contend, is the diametric opposite of the God revealed in Jesus. I reject the idea of God as a distant puppet master, pulling strings that cause landslides and earthquakes.
Rather, I find God in our relationships, with other humans and with the rest of the natural order. God lives in our joys and sorrows, our loves and our losses. So God was there in the agony of a desperate search for a lost spouse or partner. In the joy of finding a child still alive. In the exultation of plucking a survivor from the sucking mud.
Yes, God was there in Mocoa. But as an effect, not as a cause.
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Copyright © 2017 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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YOUR TURN
I got a variety of viewpoints about last week’s column, about the Sinixt people who had been declared extinct.
John Hatchard suggested that the Canadian treatment of aboriginal peoples has been replicated wherever the British Empire has dominated. He sent a link -- http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/perfidious-albion-an-introduction-to-the-secret-history-of-the-british-empire.
“Identical situations arise for aboriginals in all countries who were settled by the British -- Australia, New Zealand, many countries in Africa and Asia and in Washington and Wall Street where it has been taken to new depths of perfidy.
“As you explained, the judge who handed down that decision about hunting could only work within the parameter allocated to her role. At least your judiciary seems to retain some semblance of integrity, unlike the situation existing south of the border! The Sinixt people still have a long way to go to achieve the justice they require. This is where ‘Perfidious Albion’ comes in. Because the British gained control in Canada, the perfidious characteristic has become securely embedded. Self-interest of the core elements in government will use all the tricks at its disposal to prevent, or hinder any extension of that judge's decision. There is too much at stake economically.”
Steve Roney weighed in on the role of courts: “There are some, it is true, who think it is proper for judges to rule on the supposed right and wrong of a case, instead of interpreting the law as written. Some of the questions posed to Justice Gorsuch (in the U.S.) make clear that he is being faulted by some Senators for applying the law instead of changing it to arrive at a judgment they find fairer.
“The larger question is not whether judges should legislate, but whether they are doing so. They can’t, constitutionally. But as a practical matter, of course they can, since it is up to them to interpret what the constitution allows. Much depends on the personal integrity of the judge — especially at the Supreme Court level.
“In practice, there is a way to prevent this -- the executive branch could simply choose not to enforce an overreaching court directive. They could simply refuse to vote the necessary funds to meet their demands. And this has actually happened in the US.
“Is the Canadian Supreme Court currently guilty of legislating from the bench? I think they are. It ought not to be up to them, for example, to define who is an ‘aboriginal’.”
Peter Scott found a larger message in that column: “Through the death of that elk the Sinixt First Nation was reborn. Sounds like a resurrection story to me, and it's nearly Easter too. Almost makes me wish I was still preaching.”
Laurna Tallman tied the last two columns together: “I'm glad to see the debate about last week's column [on Senator Lynn Beyek’s defence of residential schools].
“You make a valuable point about good people in bad places. But in dealing with the masses, which is what politicians primarily are called to do, you are speaking for the masses and must be aware of issues of political correctness, which means keeping the rights and values of the minorities in mind, too. This wider view is where Senator Beyek fails. Beyek cannot afford to be ‘surgical’ on Aboriginal issues in the present climate. Despite her time of living in the Far North, the tone of her rhetoric lacks empathy. She thinks she knows more than she does. She is speaking only for the Aboriginal survivors of the residential schools and for individuals such Jessie Oliver who did good things in a bad situation. She is not speaking for those who suffered irreparable losses. She is not speaking to those who caused the suffering and she is not speaking to those who still suffer or to those who continue to try to bring healing. Beyek's message to the Aboriginals as a whole and to Canada as a whole smacks of arrogance and a limited point of view. Conservatives characterize themselves by those attitudes, which are fundamentally cruel, as we are seeing demonstrated in the US these days.
“I have no glib answers because I am up against the legal issues you address in today’s column. I have to deal with existing laws even when they are unconstitutional, not with obviously preferable alternatives that have not yet been made law.”
Laurna continued, presenting some insights into the effects of confinement and imprisonment. She ended, “Inmates and guards alike try to drug the prisoners to allow them to ‘sleep through it.’ Something like that happened to the Aboriginal peoples when their lands were taken away from them and they were virtually imprisoned on small reservations and prevented from following their semi-nomadic traditional ways of life. They still use alcohol and drugs to ‘sleep through it.’”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
Ralph Milton ’s latest project is called “Sing Hallelujah” -- the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca
Ralph’s HymnSight webpage is still up, http://www.hymnsight.ca, with a vast gallery of photos you can use to enhance the appearance of the visual images you project for liturgical use (prayers, responses, hymn verses, etc.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town -- not particularly religious, but fun; alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatso@gmail.com or twatson@sentex.net