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Atheists have a much easier time understanding how stuff like this happens. No loving, compassionate God I could ever imagine would allow a tragedy of this magnitude to happen.
Haitians are piling bodies along the devastated streets of their capital after a powerful earthquake flattened the president’s palace and the main prison, the cathedral, hospitals, schools and thousands of homes. Untold numbers are still trapped.
President Rene Preval says he believes thousands of people are dead even as other officials give much higher estimates – though they were based on the extent of the destruction rather than firm counts of the dead.
His prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, tells CNN: “I believe we are well over 100,000,” while leading senator Youri Latortue tells The Associated Press that 500,000 could be dead. Both admit they have no way of knowing.
The magnitude-7 quake struck Tuesday afternoon.
___
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No one dies from a lack of God’s love, and compassion is a human judgement. God gave us free will, nothing more. Each of our paths is a unique choice, but they all lead to the same end.
All well and good, Tommy…except that earthquakes have nothing to do with free will. I simply ask how one makes peace with the fact that their god can allow a natural tragedy to wipe out hundreds of thousands of his flock.
As an atheist, I have no need to grapple with that question. I understand that earthquakes and tsunamis are natural forces which cannot be contained by man. How does a theist deal with the issue knowing that their god does indeed have the power to prevent natural tragedies of this sort?
I can’t decide if you are just being pedantic or a pedagogue. I have the same question as Mario, what do earthquakes have to do with free will?
What do the deaths from this event have to do with free will? Seems like they did die because God didn’t love them enough because if God did love them wouldn’t they still be alive?
How about if we open our minds to a different idea. Maybe God set up this earth and then warned us that this is a training place, a school, not a paradise! Problems, challenges, even devastating natural disasters are all part of this world. We were not promised a Rose Garden! Maybe, just maybe, we were shown all this before our spirits came here and perhaps, just perhaps, we all agreed to roll the dice and take our chances to enter this world and accept whatever comes and learn to deal with it. What we make of the challenges we face, whether deserved or not, are still chances to grow and to show what we are made of. I pray that every human being right now will show “the better angels of their nature”! Show that they care and that they are willing to help! These are human beings in need and they need us now more than ever before. I also pray that from this tragedy, new seeds of hope, help, and growth can come from it. Perhaps that is the school lesson to learn, that even when things happen through Nature, not because “God” didn’t prevent it but simply because this earth operates on natural principles that God knew would have to have him stand back and let it be as a natural world to honor the principles of this world’s natural function. Also consider this, God sees life from a much bigger perspective than us and death is not a fearsome spector when he sees our eternal spirits that never die! If a natural disaster occurs, he just welcomes those who die back into his presence or if you believe in reincarnation, to enter yet another life experience! I know we don’t understand ….but we are the students…not the teacher. We are human and we really don’t have to understand everything! We can just be, be grateful, and be helpful!
@Melody. I can appreciate your faith but don’t really understand it on so many levels. Why should we not strive to understand? How is it that in every matter but religion we are encouraged to ask questions and seek truth which in time leads to understanding. It is this very human trait which has allowed us to do so much in the relatively short time we have existed as a species.
What is so special about religion that we are asked to suspend rational thought and simply accept by way of faith? Why is that? And why is it that in many religion’s interpretation (as in yours) of God’s mission, life is so inconsequential. You make it sound as if it’s simply a stepping stone to death and an afterlife with God. If so, then why bother with life at all? But if God wanted us to experience life in all its glory, then why is he so cavalier about letting countless millions die by way of natural disaster and disease?
Mario, just because I don’t understand, doesn’t mean that I don’t keep questioning and learning! Also, it is not that God is cavalier! Just two quotes from the Bible show great compassion. “Jesus wept” and “How oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathers her children, and you would not.” God does hurt when we hurt. But if God constantly interfered every time there is a difficulty, we would never have full experiences and most likely, we would never grow. Never learn things from the life school. I don’t claim to know all that God has reasoned as to why he allows this earth to function without his interference. I just know that I don’t know. I will continue to ponder and think and question and I know that God welcomes that. But I get the strong feeling that if we keep on asking God to remove every difficulty and to fix every bit of pain and suffering, we don’t grow in the difficulties.
I have suffered deeply in my past abuse history and when I asked where was God during my pain and why did he not prevent it, the answer that came was that God was right there within me, comforting me through it, not taking away agency of any person and comforting me, strengthening me during it and through it and I must admit that in spite of not liking it and hating it and all the other feelings through it, I have grown much stronger and perhaps the deepest growth has come in learning how to forgive and move on and how to release deep anger and pain and how not to let them get the better of me. How to live in peace in spite of horrific circumstances. Now, how could I have learned all that if the horror had never happened? I am who I am now because of every incident. That does not make what they did to me right….I was also answered that they too will have to live out the karma of what they did and that their time is coming to pay for what they did to me. It is no longer within my sphere to worry about that. God and the universe will deal with them.
In Haiti, the suffering was not caused either by God not caring or God not interfering to keep the earthquake from happening. It happened because that is the nature of this world. Now our choice remains. What do we do with what is? How will we choose to respond? Spend the time trying to blame a blameless God or trying to do all we can to help alleviate the suffering and being willing to grow in our service to others? Growth that will benefit us all. I hope the latter!
Well said Melody. I am in complete agreement with you on this subject.
Janine and Mario – We each have a choice of the locations we live, the type of dwellings we occupy, and our reaction to life’s circumstances. We each have complete control of these things, regardless of our belief in God, or lack of belief in God.
The people of Haiti had a choice to live in low quality dwellings that collapse easily. The people of New Orleans had a choice to live below sea level, and their leaders had a choice to not build adequate defenses to an inevitable hurricane. Hurricanes and earthquakes will happen. Knowing that, we can choose to prepare for them, or not. Such preparations will not prevent all deaths from natural disasters, but the tolls can minimalized.
And to those that say “the poor don’t have choices”, I say, why not? If you don’t believe in the influence of a supreme being, what’s stopping them from making new choices? Physics? If you do believe in God, why would he limit the choices available to one of his children?
My belief is that neither God nor physics influence our free will.
@Tommy
I believe your theory is called “Blaming the victim. Which almost always works in the courts and on the streets because there is always an inkling of truth, but not an inkling of empathy.
Tommy, one thing to consider though is that you can’t do what you don’t know. If poor people get less education in bad schools, how do you hold them as having the same free will choices as those who get to be well educated in really good schools? We all have to work with what is but we must acknowledge that in current society, there is no such thing as equality. When we all have equal access to information and jobs and money making and housing and ad nauseum then we can hold people equally accountable for the outcomes. In Katrina, the poor could not afford to live anywhere else but the low seal level area because the rich priced the housing above sea level higher than the poor could afford. When gasoline tripled in cost, the rich could afford to pay the cost far more easily than the poor who had to stop driving their cars, not because they had full options about transportation but simply because they simply had less options to pay for tripled gasoline expense! Once they had no gas for their cars, just imagine trying to take one’s family to safety from Katrina when one cannot buy the gas for the trip! Life is what it is. But we can hold the rich and greedy accountable for their greed and stop blaming God for the actions of humans who bring these conditions about to put the lives of human beings at risk.
Considering oneself a victim, is just another way to pass the buck. You can blame God, or you can blame the rich oppressor. Believing either to be true will stick you in the problem.
So we move beyond the blame, Tommy, and we simply recognize that things are as they are. No blame, just recognition that things exist as they exist. I can make some choices as a poor person, but I can only make choices within the resources I possess or that I can try to gain from others who then have their free agency to share with me or not. That is just what it is. If I never practice the piano and then I am told I can get 1 million dollars if I can play a Sonata right this minute then I am limited by what I do not possess, which is the ability to play the piano and I will miss out on 1 million dollars! My lack of knowledge and/or resources plays a part in that scenario. No blame for not knowing how to play the piano, just the natural consequence of not knowing. That is what we all face! The natural consequences of our either possessing or learning the knowledge we need to increase our range of choices. As Maya Anelou says, “When we know better we do better!”. No blame needed. It just is what it is! That is why accessing learning and wisdom and knowledge is so important. That is something that can widen our options and add to our ability to find resources. If you live in Haiti and there are no schools available to you or you are sick and there are no hospitals, you will suffer the consequences even though you did not deserve to suffer for the lack of those resources. It just is what it is. We have been very fortunate to live in America. No one of us should stand in judgment of others born in Haiti since if we had been born there ourselves, we too might have turned out just like them. Poor, uneducated, sick, malnutritioned, etc. We can count our blessings, have compassion, reach out to help out, work hard to make things better and just keep doing it. No victimization needed, just a realization of what is and the willingness to work to change it and make it better. Again, I pray that we will all choose to do this with and for Haitians and not talk like Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh!
That picture made me weep like a baby when I first saw it. My boss is Haitian and had no word on his family. I went through videos & tweets, trying to find out where to get information. It was hard to know whether to email him the more graphic videos or not. Thankfully, his family is safe but a good friend died after a building collapsed on him. My family lives in New Orleans & when Katrina hit, I couldn’t get in touch with my lil’ ol’ lady mother for 24 hours. I saw people on their rooftops with signs & completely lost my mind. This earthquake is like Katrina a thousand fold. Can you imagine how dark Rush Limbaugh’s heart must be to ask people *not* to donate money! It’s mind boggling.
“Atheists understand how stuff like this
happens. No loving, compassionate God
would allow a tragedy like Haiti to happen.”
— Mario Piperni, Link http://bartcop.com
Sorry Melody and Tom but you play with the meaning of words like children with shovels in a sandbox and, as a result, your sentiments become incoherent, indecipherable, even objectionable. Tommy, you equate blaming God with blaming the rich oppressor – huh? Melody, you say you know that you don’t know – sounds like an agnostic to me. But then you say with such confidence that you know there is a god. Don’t be afraid, you can question the existence of god, too. You won’t get struck by lightning as you’ve probably been led to believe.
Barry, you show your own arrogance by presuming what I know about God and by presuming that what I know is the result of other people’s manipulations. I have had my own experiences that have led to my own knowledge of what I know. It is too sacred to share here but, believe me, I do know what I know. I speak from personal experience. I did go through a personal questioning time and I have come through that with the knowledge I gained. What I also said was that I am humble enough to know that I am not perfect and so my current knowledge is not the end of my educational process nor is it the end of my life experience learning. I am simply at peace in knowing that there is yet much to learn and many questions about life yet to be learned. I can be at peace while living through the process of learning!
“Sorry Melody and Tom but you play with the meaning of words like children with shovels in a sandbox and, as a result, your sentiments become incoherent, indecipherable, even objectionable.”
So in Barry’s world, if you don’t understand what someone says, it’s objectionable. Instead of encouraging others to question God, maybe you should start questioning yourself.
TP,
If there is a Creator God, he made the earth a dynamic place with earthquakes, volcanos, etc., and he never “told” anyone to live along faultlines…besides, the animals DID get a warning (instinct perhaps) and split, just like they did in the tsunami a few years ago, but that’s hardly the point. The point is:
Haiti was devastated before the earthquake with poverty & corrupt government policies – that’s human error.
New Orleans’ 9th was devastated BEFORE Katrina hit with poverty, broken levees, indifference, etc. – again, human error.
God or no god, we as humans failed…but after the fact, we are pretty good a putting a band-aid on such tragedies…
kudos on your blog and thanx for allowing my $0.02
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
-Epicurus
Why is it necessary for man to prove his worthiness to your god. It seems to me that your God should prove himself worthy of man’s worship. Disease, famine, pestilence, natural disasters, is this the act of a wise god, a just god? Were there not men and women who were worthy of his “grace”? What of the children? Could they not be spared? This is a country that is 80% Catholic, why was their faith not rewarded? According to Pat Robertson, they made a pact with the Devil to overthrow the French. So your god is upset with a people who made a “pact” 200 years ago to deliver them from slavery when your god could not do so? Then he seems to me to be impotent and vindictive, just like humans. Which by the way he “created in his own image”.
@mario @melody
Very big difference between religion and god. God is the positive energy of the world and within us. It is “goodness” at its maximum potential. Religion is a manmade business, some with good intentions, but mostly to secure revenues to run the business. The bible… a book of analogies and stories written by men. Nothing saintly or divine about that!
Was Christ (as they depict hime of course) a good prophet? It certainly does look as if he was if we believe in the stories of the bible. But so are many and we don’t pray to them… Kalib Gibran, Ghandi, etc. etc. etc.
It seems that some insist on demanding that God meet only human expectations. We have finite minds. We cannot fathom an infinite power. Scary to think that we cannot demand and threaten God with the smallness of our minds.
A tragedy like this i guess could be a wonderful time to evangalize aetheism. However the existence of misfortune, even on a grand scale, does not offer a negative proof of god’s existence any more than a perceived miracle is proof that their is a god. Even if there is a god, why must we be so self-absorbed as to imagine that he is concerned with every humans welfare? Imagine; if god is to man, as man is to ant, do you go outside to save ants in a rainstorm? They do drown and suffer terrible ant deaths you know…I’m agnostic, it seems the only logical choice in this world. But i do occassionally pray, if only in hope, that if there is a god, and if he does give some rat’s ass, that perhaps he’ll divert his attention towards us.
Tommy, When I say that I find the incoherent and indecipherable nature of your statements to be objectionable I mean that in the same way that I find the incoherent, indeciperable mutterings of a drunk to be objectionable – that’s all. Melody, your meditative ramblings are more reminiscent of some Catholic priest or nun – not so objectionable, just very old and tired and very unconvincing. Sorry.
Barry, when someone says they are bored, the reality is…they are boring! When you say things sound tired and unconvincing….that shows more about who and what you are! You sound tired, bored, unconvinced, like all the joy has left your life! Also, you show an astounding lack of recognition of types of spiritual thought. I’m wondering if you grew up Catholic and are just doing subjective projection. The thought process I am involved with is much more in the Buddhist line of thought which I am currently studying. Your writing also seems to give off an air of ultimate supposed superiority for yourself. Perhaps some self-enquiry and introspection on yourself would be beneficial before you use projection to throw your issues on others. I am quite comfortable admitting that there is much I don’t know and I will continue to search for answers and I choose to open myself to seeing life as being full of both wonder and pain. Fully open to experiencing both realities and doing what I can to alleviate the pain and experience the wonder with gratitude. That is just who and what I am about and will continue to choose to live within the boundaries of. I will wish for you an enlightening journey of self-exploration.
Well, Melody, let me try to understand your take on this; if I am boring you and you are bored as a result, it’s not because of me that you are bored but because of your own boring nature – this is circular reasoning at its best. By the way, I didn’t say you were boring, only that the sentiments you expressed sounded very tired and unoriginal. As to your comment on my supposed superiority, I can only state that not all opinions are equal. Good luck with your spiritual journey.
It is what it is. God, the goodness within us, does not create these catastrophes. But so it does not go to waste, someone should learn from it.
No one dies from a lack of God’s love, and compassion is a human judgement. God gave us free will, nothing more. Each of our paths is a unique choice, but they all lead to the same end.
All well and good, Tommy…except that earthquakes have nothing to do with free will. I simply ask how one makes peace with the fact that their god can allow a natural tragedy to wipe out hundreds of thousands of his flock.
As an atheist, I have no need to grapple with that question. I understand that earthquakes and tsunamis are natural forces which cannot be contained by man. How does a theist deal with the issue knowing that their god does indeed have the power to prevent natural tragedies of this sort?
@Tommy,
I can’t decide if you are just being pedantic or a pedagogue. I have the same question as Mario, what do earthquakes have to do with free will?
What do the deaths from this event have to do with free will? Seems like they did die because God didn’t love them enough because if God did love them wouldn’t they still be alive?
How about if we open our minds to a different idea. Maybe God set up this earth and then warned us that this is a training place, a school, not a paradise! Problems, challenges, even devastating natural disasters are all part of this world. We were not promised a Rose Garden! Maybe, just maybe, we were shown all this before our spirits came here and perhaps, just perhaps, we all agreed to roll the dice and take our chances to enter this world and accept whatever comes and learn to deal with it. What we make of the challenges we face, whether deserved or not, are still chances to grow and to show what we are made of. I pray that every human being right now will show “the better angels of their nature”! Show that they care and that they are willing to help! These are human beings in need and they need us now more than ever before. I also pray that from this tragedy, new seeds of hope, help, and growth can come from it. Perhaps that is the school lesson to learn, that even when things happen through Nature, not because “God” didn’t prevent it but simply because this earth operates on natural principles that God knew would have to have him stand back and let it be as a natural world to honor the principles of this world’s natural function. Also consider this, God sees life from a much bigger perspective than us and death is not a fearsome spector when he sees our eternal spirits that never die! If a natural disaster occurs, he just welcomes those who die back into his presence or if you believe in reincarnation, to enter yet another life experience! I know we don’t understand ….but we are the students…not the teacher. We are human and we really don’t have to understand everything! We can just be, be grateful, and be helpful!
@Melody. I can appreciate your faith but don’t really understand it on so many levels. Why should we not strive to understand? How is it that in every matter but religion we are encouraged to ask questions and seek truth which in time leads to understanding. It is this very human trait which has allowed us to do so much in the relatively short time we have existed as a species.
What is so special about religion that we are asked to suspend rational thought and simply accept by way of faith? Why is that? And why is it that in many religion’s interpretation (as in yours) of God’s mission, life is so inconsequential. You make it sound as if it’s simply a stepping stone to death and an afterlife with God. If so, then why bother with life at all? But if God wanted us to experience life in all its glory, then why is he so cavalier about letting countless millions die by way of natural disaster and disease?
I only ask.
Mario, just because I don’t understand, doesn’t mean that I don’t keep questioning and learning! Also, it is not that God is cavalier! Just two quotes from the Bible show great compassion. “Jesus wept” and “How oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathers her children, and you would not.” God does hurt when we hurt. But if God constantly interfered every time there is a difficulty, we would never have full experiences and most likely, we would never grow. Never learn things from the life school. I don’t claim to know all that God has reasoned as to why he allows this earth to function without his interference. I just know that I don’t know. I will continue to ponder and think and question and I know that God welcomes that. But I get the strong feeling that if we keep on asking God to remove every difficulty and to fix every bit of pain and suffering, we don’t grow in the difficulties.
I have suffered deeply in my past abuse history and when I asked where was God during my pain and why did he not prevent it, the answer that came was that God was right there within me, comforting me through it, not taking away agency of any person and comforting me, strengthening me during it and through it and I must admit that in spite of not liking it and hating it and all the other feelings through it, I have grown much stronger and perhaps the deepest growth has come in learning how to forgive and move on and how to release deep anger and pain and how not to let them get the better of me. How to live in peace in spite of horrific circumstances. Now, how could I have learned all that if the horror had never happened? I am who I am now because of every incident. That does not make what they did to me right….I was also answered that they too will have to live out the karma of what they did and that their time is coming to pay for what they did to me. It is no longer within my sphere to worry about that. God and the universe will deal with them.
In Haiti, the suffering was not caused either by God not caring or God not interfering to keep the earthquake from happening. It happened because that is the nature of this world. Now our choice remains. What do we do with what is? How will we choose to respond? Spend the time trying to blame a blameless God or trying to do all we can to help alleviate the suffering and being willing to grow in our service to others? Growth that will benefit us all. I hope the latter!
Well said Melody. I am in complete agreement with you on this subject.
Janine and Mario – We each have a choice of the locations we live, the type of dwellings we occupy, and our reaction to life’s circumstances. We each have complete control of these things, regardless of our belief in God, or lack of belief in God.
The people of Haiti had a choice to live in low quality dwellings that collapse easily. The people of New Orleans had a choice to live below sea level, and their leaders had a choice to not build adequate defenses to an inevitable hurricane. Hurricanes and earthquakes will happen. Knowing that, we can choose to prepare for them, or not. Such preparations will not prevent all deaths from natural disasters, but the tolls can minimalized.
And to those that say “the poor don’t have choices”, I say, why not? If you don’t believe in the influence of a supreme being, what’s stopping them from making new choices? Physics? If you do believe in God, why would he limit the choices available to one of his children?
My belief is that neither God nor physics influence our free will.
@Tommy
I believe your theory is called “Blaming the victim. Which almost always works in the courts and on the streets because there is always an inkling of truth, but not an inkling of empathy.
Tommy, one thing to consider though is that you can’t do what you don’t know. If poor people get less education in bad schools, how do you hold them as having the same free will choices as those who get to be well educated in really good schools? We all have to work with what is but we must acknowledge that in current society, there is no such thing as equality. When we all have equal access to information and jobs and money making and housing and ad nauseum then we can hold people equally accountable for the outcomes. In Katrina, the poor could not afford to live anywhere else but the low seal level area because the rich priced the housing above sea level higher than the poor could afford. When gasoline tripled in cost, the rich could afford to pay the cost far more easily than the poor who had to stop driving their cars, not because they had full options about transportation but simply because they simply had less options to pay for tripled gasoline expense! Once they had no gas for their cars, just imagine trying to take one’s family to safety from Katrina when one cannot buy the gas for the trip! Life is what it is. But we can hold the rich and greedy accountable for their greed and stop blaming God for the actions of humans who bring these conditions about to put the lives of human beings at risk.
Considering oneself a victim, is just another way to pass the buck. You can blame God, or you can blame the rich oppressor. Believing either to be true will stick you in the problem.
So we move beyond the blame, Tommy, and we simply recognize that things are as they are. No blame, just recognition that things exist as they exist. I can make some choices as a poor person, but I can only make choices within the resources I possess or that I can try to gain from others who then have their free agency to share with me or not. That is just what it is. If I never practice the piano and then I am told I can get 1 million dollars if I can play a Sonata right this minute then I am limited by what I do not possess, which is the ability to play the piano and I will miss out on 1 million dollars! My lack of knowledge and/or resources plays a part in that scenario. No blame for not knowing how to play the piano, just the natural consequence of not knowing. That is what we all face! The natural consequences of our either possessing or learning the knowledge we need to increase our range of choices. As Maya Anelou says, “When we know better we do better!”. No blame needed. It just is what it is! That is why accessing learning and wisdom and knowledge is so important. That is something that can widen our options and add to our ability to find resources. If you live in Haiti and there are no schools available to you or you are sick and there are no hospitals, you will suffer the consequences even though you did not deserve to suffer for the lack of those resources. It just is what it is. We have been very fortunate to live in America. No one of us should stand in judgment of others born in Haiti since if we had been born there ourselves, we too might have turned out just like them. Poor, uneducated, sick, malnutritioned, etc. We can count our blessings, have compassion, reach out to help out, work hard to make things better and just keep doing it. No victimization needed, just a realization of what is and the willingness to work to change it and make it better. Again, I pray that we will all choose to do this with and for Haitians and not talk like Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh!
That picture made me weep like a baby when I first saw it. My boss is Haitian and had no word on his family. I went through videos & tweets, trying to find out where to get information. It was hard to know whether to email him the more graphic videos or not. Thankfully, his family is safe but a good friend died after a building collapsed on him. My family lives in New Orleans & when Katrina hit, I couldn’t get in touch with my lil’ ol’ lady mother for 24 hours. I saw people on their rooftops with signs & completely lost my mind. This earthquake is like Katrina a thousand fold. Can you imagine how dark Rush Limbaugh’s heart must be to ask people *not* to donate money! It’s mind boggling.
Bartcop just posted a quote from you.
Quote of the Day
“Atheists understand how stuff like this
happens. No loving, compassionate God
would allow a tragedy like Haiti to happen.”
— Mario Piperni, Link
http://bartcop.com
God is fiction. Any questions?
Sorry Melody and Tom but you play with the meaning of words like children with shovels in a sandbox and, as a result, your sentiments become incoherent, indecipherable, even objectionable. Tommy, you equate blaming God with blaming the rich oppressor – huh? Melody, you say you know that you don’t know – sounds like an agnostic to me. But then you say with such confidence that you know there is a god. Don’t be afraid, you can question the existence of god, too. You won’t get struck by lightning as you’ve probably been led to believe.
Barry, you show your own arrogance by presuming what I know about God and by presuming that what I know is the result of other people’s manipulations. I have had my own experiences that have led to my own knowledge of what I know. It is too sacred to share here but, believe me, I do know what I know. I speak from personal experience. I did go through a personal questioning time and I have come through that with the knowledge I gained. What I also said was that I am humble enough to know that I am not perfect and so my current knowledge is not the end of my educational process nor is it the end of my life experience learning. I am simply at peace in knowing that there is yet much to learn and many questions about life yet to be learned. I can be at peace while living through the process of learning!
“Sorry Melody and Tom but you play with the meaning of words like children with shovels in a sandbox and, as a result, your sentiments become incoherent, indecipherable, even objectionable.”
So in Barry’s world, if you don’t understand what someone says, it’s objectionable. Instead of encouraging others to question God, maybe you should start questioning yourself.
Thanks Tommy! Well said!
TP,
If there is a Creator God, he made the earth a dynamic place with earthquakes, volcanos, etc., and he never “told” anyone to live along faultlines…besides, the animals DID get a warning (instinct perhaps) and split, just like they did in the tsunami a few years ago, but that’s hardly the point. The point is:
Haiti was devastated before the earthquake with poverty & corrupt government policies – that’s human error.
New Orleans’ 9th was devastated BEFORE Katrina hit with poverty, broken levees, indifference, etc. – again, human error.
God or no god, we as humans failed…but after the fact, we are pretty good a putting a band-aid on such tragedies…
kudos on your blog and thanx for allowing my $0.02
I’ve been espousing Marios point since I was 12 years old and nothing has happened in the ensuing 59 years to change my mind.
For Melody and Tommy:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
-Epicurus
Why is it necessary for man to prove his worthiness to your god. It seems to me that your God should prove himself worthy of man’s worship. Disease, famine, pestilence, natural disasters, is this the act of a wise god, a just god? Were there not men and women who were worthy of his “grace”? What of the children? Could they not be spared? This is a country that is 80% Catholic, why was their faith not rewarded? According to Pat Robertson, they made a pact with the Devil to overthrow the French. So your god is upset with a people who made a “pact” 200 years ago to deliver them from slavery when your god could not do so? Then he seems to me to be impotent and vindictive, just like humans. Which by the way he “created in his own image”.
@mario @melody
Very big difference between religion and god. God is the positive energy of the world and within us. It is “goodness” at its maximum potential. Religion is a manmade business, some with good intentions, but mostly to secure revenues to run the business. The bible… a book of analogies and stories written by men. Nothing saintly or divine about that!
Was Christ (as they depict hime of course) a good prophet? It certainly does look as if he was if we believe in the stories of the bible. But so are many and we don’t pray to them… Kalib Gibran, Ghandi, etc. etc. etc.
It seems that some insist on demanding that God meet only human expectations. We have finite minds. We cannot fathom an infinite power. Scary to think that we cannot demand and threaten God with the smallness of our minds.
A tragedy like this i guess could be a wonderful time to evangalize aetheism. However the existence of misfortune, even on a grand scale, does not offer a negative proof of god’s existence any more than a perceived miracle is proof that their is a god. Even if there is a god, why must we be so self-absorbed as to imagine that he is concerned with every humans welfare? Imagine; if god is to man, as man is to ant, do you go outside to save ants in a rainstorm? They do drown and suffer terrible ant deaths you know…I’m agnostic, it seems the only logical choice in this world. But i do occassionally pray, if only in hope, that if there is a god, and if he does give some rat’s ass, that perhaps he’ll divert his attention towards us.
Tommy, When I say that I find the incoherent and indecipherable nature of your statements to be objectionable I mean that in the same way that I find the incoherent, indeciperable mutterings of a drunk to be objectionable – that’s all. Melody, your meditative ramblings are more reminiscent of some Catholic priest or nun – not so objectionable, just very old and tired and very unconvincing. Sorry.
Barry, when someone says they are bored, the reality is…they are boring! When you say things sound tired and unconvincing….that shows more about who and what you are! You sound tired, bored, unconvinced, like all the joy has left your life! Also, you show an astounding lack of recognition of types of spiritual thought. I’m wondering if you grew up Catholic and are just doing subjective projection. The thought process I am involved with is much more in the Buddhist line of thought which I am currently studying. Your writing also seems to give off an air of ultimate supposed superiority for yourself. Perhaps some self-enquiry and introspection on yourself would be beneficial before you use projection to throw your issues on others. I am quite comfortable admitting that there is much I don’t know and I will continue to search for answers and I choose to open myself to seeing life as being full of both wonder and pain. Fully open to experiencing both realities and doing what I can to alleviate the pain and experience the wonder with gratitude. That is just who and what I am about and will continue to choose to live within the boundaries of. I will wish for you an enlightening journey of self-exploration.
Well, Melody, let me try to understand your take on this; if I am boring you and you are bored as a result, it’s not because of me that you are bored but because of your own boring nature – this is circular reasoning at its best. By the way, I didn’t say you were boring, only that the sentiments you expressed sounded very tired and unoriginal. As to your comment on my supposed superiority, I can only state that not all opinions are equal. Good luck with your spiritual journey.