Apres le deluge, Ou est-que Dieu?

In my predictions for this year, I migh have said some facetious things about the Tsunami disaster in South-East Asia and the responses of some western governments.
I really didn't think that the US were going to try to pin the blame on Iran, though they had just as much to do with it as Sadamm did with 9/11.
The truth is that the US government has pledged $350,000,000; an increase on it's original pledge of $10,000,000, which sounds like a lot until you realise that they've already spent $200,000,000,000 on the war in Iraq, though they claim, after finding no WMD that the war was for huminatarian reasons.
George Monbiot has already pointed out how hypocritical this is. John Pilger has had his two cents as well

Meanwhile people of various faiths are grappling with the question of how an Omnipotent God would allow such a thing to happen with various degrees of intellect and logic. See here,
here , here , and here.
One woman on Sky News argued that we shouldn't blame the big man upstairs for this as we don't blame him when something wonderful happens (sic).
It's hard to muster up any contempt for a woman who can't formulate a coherent sentence or and has probably never had an orgasam (think about it) but she does represent the views of a large number of people.

I think she was probably an Anglican, which I've always thought of as a form of bet-hedging rather than a faith. One Church of Ireland minister in Today's Irish Times argued that God didn't have anything to do with the Tsunami but had everything to do with the relief efforts, which is a totally anglican way of looking at it.It's nice to know that when I donated money to world vision and all those collection boxes around town I wasn't acting of my own free will but being pushed to do it by the same deity who allowed the earthquake to happen in the first place.

The response by Muslims is a bit more sinister. Again on Sky News, a young boy of about 15 years from Aceh thought that Allah was punishing Muslims for not being fanatical enough, which only made me wish that an Earthquake had hit Mohammad when he was counting how many odours women have. Then in Today's Times, a Muslim cleric says that it's not for us to question the ways of God, which again is just what you'd expect him to say.

On the other hand, I saw a Businessman in Sri lanka, who'd be either Hindu or Buddhist, taking a more philosphical view and saying that though all his shops were destroyed he still had his health.

What this seems to demonstrate is that the debate about where God is after this disaster takes place mainly in newspapers and on the net and not so much in the minds of believers, who're all able to rationalise this to fit whatever beliefs they have.

Religous people are pretty good at rationalising stuff. In the Bible the plagues that hit Egypt are a punishment for the shitty way they treated the Jews, whose bad fortunes are always a test of faith. It's depressing to me that this sort of thing still goes on when we have such a better understanding of how the Earth works. The best thing that could have come out of this tragedy is a weakening of Religous fundamentalism in The US and the Muslim World, but I don't think this is going to happen. When a big Earthquake hit Lisbon in 1755, it accentuated a trend towards secular humanism that led to the enlightement and the French and American Republics. Today the trend is away from secularism and towards fundamentalism, and I'm afraid the Tsunami isn't going to have mcuh effect on this.

I'm a bit annoyed that some people are pointing out that people need things to believe in, as if secularists believed in nothing. We believe in reason, in understanding, in tolerance and in respect for the environment, when the only thing many religous people believe in is how much better they are than people who don't believe the same things as themselves.

I'm also annoyed to hear tourists described as "modern rapists of Paradise" as this tars babckpackers like myself with the sort of people who stay in $1000 a night hotels with air-con and swimming pools. When I went travelling I stayed in the most basic accomadation and went trekking in nature parks and snorkelling, all of which provide the locals with an incentive to maintain the existing ecosystems, which are under threat from farming and fishing. This is the case because so many people have been kicked off their land to make way for industrialised agriculture, which feeds the West's (and China's) insatiable desire for meat products. In Asia, as in Latin America, it's the likes of McDonalds that are responsible for the destuction of paradise. But I don't expect to hear any clerics pointing the finger at them