Skip to main content

God in Hurricane



Religious leaders in America have never lost an opportunity to cash in on natural disasters.  Hurricane Irma was no exception.  Televangelist Jim Bakker declared that the hurricane was God’s judgment on America.  Interestingly, Bakker was forced to resign from his religious post following a sex scandal.  He was also involved in many financial scams and scandals and even served a prison term.

Bakker’s friend Pastor Rick Joyner was quick to lend support by stating that storms don’t “happen by accident.”  Another religious leader Pastor Kevin Swanson asserted that Hurricane Irma would have been altered by God if the American Supreme Court had made abortion and gay marriage illegal.  In other words, the hurricane was a punishment for abortions and gay marriages. 

Preacher Rick Wiles argued that Houston was battered by the storm because of the city’s “devotion” to LGBT.  Another religious leader Ann Coulter suggested that the storm was caused by the lesbianism of the former mayor of the city.

These are just a few examples.  There were many, many more religious verdicts on God.  It’s funny how these religious leaders make God dance to their tunes.  It’s funnier if people really believe all this balderdash and imagine their God as a silly old man sitting up there and punishing entire populations with storms and other such things for the "crimes" of a few people.

I have often wondered why the God of Christianity is such a weird character who is interested in showering fire and brimstone on his own people instead of making them good using his omnipotence.  God is a mystery, answers Christianity.  “Who the hell are you to question God’s ways?” A religious leader asked me once when I raised such questions.  “Do you think you are greater than God?  More intelligent?  More wise?”  Well, I confess to total ignorance in matters related to God.  Especially the God of Christianity.


Comments

  1. In India also saints and babas are doing same .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No doubt. They are the same all over the world, I guess. Religion is a way of subjugating people by instilling fear in them this way.

      Delete
  2. Very funny logic behind natural phenomenon.
    Nicely penned.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 3

Street leading to St Francis Church, Fort Kochi There were Christians in Kerala long before the Brahmins, who came to be known as Namboothiris, landed in the state from North India some time after 6 th century CE. Tradition has it that Thomas, disciple of Jesus, brought Christianity to Kerala in the first century. That is quite possible, given the trade relationships that Kerala had with the Roman Empire in those days. Pliny the Elder, Roman author, chastised in his encyclopaedic work, Natural History (published around 77 CE), the Romans’ greed for pepper from India. He was displeased with his country spending “no less than fifty million sesterces” on a commodity which had no value other than its “certain pungency.” Did Thomas sail on one of the many ships that came to Kerala to purchase “pungency”? Possible.   Even if Thomas did not come, the advent of Christianity in Kerala precedes the arrival of the Namboothiris. The Persians established trade links with Kerala in 4 ...