Lately I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with God. And having no luck at all.
If you’ve been paying attention, by now you’ve figured out that natural calamities are God’s judgment on America. Preachers preach it and Christians believe it. When a hurricane hits, for example, it’s usually because we’re being unholy in some way or another. Drinking, fornicating, gambling, etc. But mainly the queers.
Katrina was God’s judgment. And it’s just beginning. Because of the Pride Parade. (A Google search on “Katrina God’s judgment” returns 129,000 hits, by the way.) Sandy? God’s judgment.
Tornadoes are God’s judgment. Earthquakes are God’s judgment. Forest fires, famine, volcanos – God’s judgment. You get the point.
Fine. God isn’t happy and he’s sending us a message. A warning shot across the bow, as it were. But…you can’t help wondering. Is God stupid? Does he have a bad aim? And what does his recent spate of angry warnings say about history? There have always been natural disasters, even back in the ’50s when there weren’t any homosexuals. There were volcanos during the late Cretaceous. Who the hell was he mad at then?
Let’s take a closer look.
Oddly, most hurricanes target our godliest states. Yes, Louisiana has the modern-day Gomorrah that is New Orleans, but if you recall Katrina mostly missed the Big Easy. The front side – the big overhanded haymaker – hit the Mississipi Gulf Coast and the damage there was massive. Had God aimed further west busted NO in the lips the way he did Biloxi, Bourbon Street and everything else within 20 miles would be gone. So – what the heck did Mississippi do? They’re one of the best-behaved Christian states in the country.
Another state that gets stomped by hurricanes a lot is Florida. Now, the Sunshine State is a mixed bag. You have some wickedness down around South Beach, but you also have a bunch of old people who haven’t done anything wrong. Not in the last 50 years, anyway. And yet, God judges them like they were one big Frankie Goes to Hollywood video. Makes no sense at all. He even threatened last year’s Republican National Convention, and the GOP is HIS OWN POLITICAL PARTY.
W. T. F?
Among recent hurricanes, Sandy is the only one that sort of makes sense. NYC is a godless wasteland, for sure, home to every kind of decadence known to man, as well as a few others that are still in the development phase. But God, in judging NYC, blasted the shit out of New Jersey, which has a Republican governor, and some of the hardest hit areas of NYC are in Congressional District 11, home of Rep. Michael Grimm, a Republican.
Apparently God can’t afford a laser and has to use a shotgun instead.
What about tornadoes? Ever heard of “Tornado Alley“?
The core of Tornado Alley consists of northern Texas (including the Panhandle), Oklahoma and Kansas. However, Tornado Alley can also be defined as an area reaching from central Texas to the Canadian prairies and from eastern Colorado to western Pennsylvania. It can also be disputed that there are numerous Tornado Alleys. In addition to the Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas core, such areas also include the Upper Midwest, the Ohio Valley, the Tennessee Valley and the lower Mississippi valley.
Overlay a map of Tornado Alley with an election results schematic. They might as well be the same thing. Bright red, Republican, God-fearing and prone to swirling black judgment from one end to the other.
If it weren’t for tornado activity you’d have never heard of Moore, Oklahoma. Only 11 F5s (the highest and worst rating) have struck the US since 1999, and two of them hit Moore. Two more pounded nearby El Reno, which means that God has aimed one-third of the most devastating twisters in the last 15 years or so at the Oklahoma City suburbs. That’s Oklahoma, which is about as close to Sodom as Peoria is to Proxima Centauri.
Clearly, something is amiss with the God’s Judgment Hypothesis. Even the sort of … umm … intellect prone to believing that God judges us this way … even that guy has to be a little confused. I know, I know – the whole Lord worketh in mysterious ways thing. Mysterious, sure. But barking batshit crazy?
Think about it this way. Say that you’re a) God, b) pissed off about the gays, c) determined to send a message, and d) wanting to make sure it’s understood. Duh. A lot of your followers aren’t exactly rocket surgeons, so you need to avoid as much ambiguity here as possible, right?
Do you spin hurricanes at states that vote exclusively according to their understanding of the Bible or do you, you know, smite the guilty? If I’m God, I’m going to dial up a 9.4 on the Richter Scale and epicenter that sumbitch under the manhole cover at Castro Street and Market. I’m going to point three or four category fives directly at South Beach. And the greater OKC metropolitan area is safe, because the new Tornado Alley is going to start in Seattle, wind its way down the coast, make several passes back and forth through Hollywood, skip across to Vegas, then skip again to the Upper Midwest where we’ll thump Minneapolis and then draw a bead on Taxachusetts. Just to show off, I’d drop a hurricane on Ann Arbor. And don’t even try to tell me that isn’t possible. With God, all things are possible.
Hammer down, bitches. But that’s just me, and I ain’t God.
Meanwhile, I can’t help noting that my own state is ramping up another epic summer of wildfires. The Black Forest Fire, the worst in Colorado history, has so far killed two, destroyed 379 homes and forced 38,000 people to evacuate. And it’s nowhere near contained. The God’s Judgment Hypothesis predicts that such a fire ought to be looming over Boulder or perhaps creeping down Highway 36 toward Denver.
But it isn’t. It’s in Colorado Springs, ground zero for America’s aggressive new evangelical Christian movement. Specifically, the fire is roughly six miles, as the crow flies, from the headquarters of Focus on the Family. Where it’s currently 90° with humidity in the low 20% range.
I wonder if God is judging someone.
Categories: Environment/Nature, Religion & Philosophy
Progressive Culture | Scholars & Rogues 
And I wonder if we have no clue what God is or is not. As the Pascal Wager states, …”God is infinitely in comprehensible.”
Reblogged this on Adventures and Musings of a Hedgewitch.
See, I think the believers just have it backwards. They do tend to misinterpret quite a bit, even when it’s ridiculously obvious. Case in point: “Judge not” and “love your neighbor.” What better premises on which to base “hate fags” can there be?
God, for whatever inscrutable reason, could go on a precision smiting spree any old time, but where’s the justice in that? Those who carry out his will are clearly just being too damned tolerant. When Leviticus says to put a variety of evildoers to death, he’s not kidding around. And he’s got quite the grocery list (cf Leviticus 20, it’s a real rib-tickler).
Note especially what he thinks about people who *see* others giving up their seed to Molech and who do nothing, like killing the seed-givers, about it.
Lev 20:5 “Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from among their people.”
Tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, etc. seem like a rather efficient means for cutting folks off, no? GOP targeted? See that as cut off, and the pattern becomes clear, I think. Hurricane hits Biloxi? That’s not a miss. That’s a direct hit! Tornado in Moore? God sank their battleship. Wildfire in Colorado Springs? That’s like the Almighty knocking directly on FotF’s door personally.
When the true believers wake up to this, we should be afraid, very afraid. Yeah, the true believers are going to want to be up in arms about all those abominable fags they can finally kill. And the government can’t stop them without oppressing them for their religion, right? But I’ll hazard the guess that there are far, far more adulterers than those horrible, awful, really bad ho-mo-seckshuls, and hey, if God says kill ’em, he means kill ’em.
So look out you unfaithful pastors and GOP politicians. When your useful idiots finally clue in, they’re coming for you first.
*wakes up from fantasy land*
Who am I kidding? If there’s any group more daft than the true believers most likely to jump on God’s sanctioned killing spree, it’s the GOP.
😉
If you’re looking for more examples of right-wing extremists, you should check out conservapedia.com
It’s insane. I usually read it if I need a good laugh.
Sincerely,
Julien Haller
Reblogged this on Crooked Crosses and commented:
Brilliant Observations from a very talented writer!
there’s no point in wasting tornadoes, hurricanes or earthquakes on us chicago folks. god’s spending where it will do some good, where there are people who can be saved, e.g., the one gay person in oklahoma who’s not already an evangelical minister.
Polk County, Florida was hit by three different hurricanes in one year less than a decade ago. This area is strongly “Religious Right”… McCain carried this county by something like 60%, and everywhere you go you will encounter a church (and in some parts, even stepping outside your front door means you might catch a sermon or anti-“librul” rant from some jackass). I might add that the county is referred to as “Bigot Central USA” by some people who study racism and racial issues.
Hurricanes regularly (and frequently) clobber the Florida Panhandle, and as a proxy for how bad it is up there (a couple of LGBT friends of mine won’t even stop in that area because it’s too likely they will experience discrimination and bigotry), McCain carried some counties by over 90%.
Yeah, God rewards the good with wealth and good things, and punishes the wicked with poverty and suffering – NOT.
(Of course, you’ll also find that the same areas are notorious for punishing the poor for their poverty and making life harder on the disabled and ill, while mollycoddling the rich and powerful and parading “how GOOD we are!”.)
See, I don’t think it’s God’s judgement, it’s Satan acting as “Prince of this world” trying to take out Christians. But, California does get hit occasionally with fires and earthquakes and mud slides and whatnot.
And I usually hear that it’s abortion that will bring about God’s judgement, not gays, but that’s just the people I run with. I don’t watch TV, so I miss a lot of the Media Christians and their “interpretations.”
Then Satan must care more about justice and truth than God.
The “Good Christians” have been the bane of our existence and are the terror of a lot of decent people I know… for doing things to non-Christians and people who don’t go along with their politics – like arson (they torched my workshop), poisoning pets (at least three of our kitties – and this is a common practice), blocking employment (or getting innocent people fired for things they didn’t do), slander, libel, you name it. Even attempted murder isn’t above them… a woman we know had her house shot up a few weeks ago just because she’s a pagan and there are plenty of examples of them committing crimes against the people they hate or who resist their attempts to force their ersatz “Christianity” on others (plenty of evidence that the Christianity practiced isn’t what he intended).
I don’t think Jesus would agree with punishing the poor, or ranting at the sick and suffering (e.g. “YOU BROUGHT IT ON YOURSELF BY YOUR SINS!”).
The “Good Christians” insist that their lies are truth and that everyone else is lying… even when faced with the evidence of the evil they’ve done or the evidence that others are telling truth, they still insist they’re doing God’s will and have “deh TROOF!”
God doesn’t punish people by bringing disasters on everyone. A “God” who punishes the innocent isn’t fit to be called by that name.