A True Tragedy

Filmmaker Roman Safiullan (sp?) was in Haiti when the earthquake hit and he immediately ran out and began filming the aftermath of the tragedy. What he caught on film were, as he described, images of people "Screaming and praising Jesus." Screaming and praising Jesus? Tens of thousands of people die in a natural disaster and the survivors are praising Jesus? Praising him for what? For killing their neighbors, family members, and loved ones instead of them?

On FOX News they ran a few seconds of his film showing grief-stricken Haitians falling to their knees and collapsing into one another's arms, crying out for their dead loved ones even as they praised Jesus for his goodness and mercy. My stomach turned. How can anyone praise God in the aftermath of such an atrocity? This is not something that even the most skillful religious apologist could blame on man. You can't blame this on freewill. You can't say that the death of nearly a hundred thousand men, women, and innocent children, babies, was anything but an evil of staggering magnitude or the random act of a random universe adrift in the cosmos with no intelligent hand guiding its course. You could not claim that this was anything but "an act of God" if you are a believer. And so, if this was an act of God, what possible justification could God have for killing tens of thousands of little babies, innocent children, that would still allow a sane and rational person to call this being good by any sensible meaningful definition of the word? What possible spin could anyone place on this tragedy that would lead any sane and rational person to praise God? It is absurd. It is disgusting in fact.

Pat Robertson's claim that God was punishing Haiti for making a pact with Satan was the best they could do. It was the only answer that would make sense if you accept the Christian belief system as true. Either God is evil and his destruction of Haiti and murder of countless innocents is to be condemned or the Haitians were evil right down to the smallest child and even the unborn children crushed by falling rubble in their mother's womb and God's punishment of them was just. There is no other way to look at this tragedy. And if you take the position that even those tiny babies crushed beneath collapsing buildings were evil and deserving of God's wrath than you are neither sane nor rational nor moral in any meaningful sense of the word.

The true tragedy here is that the survivors in Haiti who have been left to cope with the aftermath of the earthquake are in many cases blaming themselves. They believe that God's wrath has come upon them. Some even believe Pat Robertson's idiotic claim that their political leaders made a pact with Satan. Some blame other perceived sins, drinking, gambling, fornication, taking the Lord's name in vain, adultery, promiscuity, homosexuality, idolatry, worshipping false gods, witchcraft. According to Fox News, many religious Haitians see the disaster as "God asking for change." Now, I'm not all-knowing but I know that there are better ways of asking for change than slaughtering thousands of innocent people. What would you think of me were I to murder half of my wife's friends and family in order to ask her to change her ways? You'd think me a lunatic. What would my justification be?

"Well, you wouldn't return any of my phone calls."

The news also quoted Rev. Eric Toussaint telling a congregation gathered outside a ruined cathedral that the earthquake "is a sign from God, saying that we must recognize his power." Haitians, he said, "need to reinvent themselves, to find a new path to God."

Religious idiocy. If God was just flexing his muscles so that we would recognize his power than God is a tyrant and a bully and the faithful are all fools and cowards for worshipping him. Others in Haiti's religious community believe the quake was the result of God's anger toward the corruption of the mostly light-skinned political leaders of Haiti. They site the destruction of numerous government buildings as proof of this. Voodoo practitioners believe it was the corruption of the Catholic Church that caused this and point to the numerous churches destroyed by the quake as evidence. But of course it was not just Catholics and light-skinned Haitians who suffered in the quake which, had that been the case, might have given these theories some credibility. All of Haiti suffered, the religious and non-religious, light and dark skinned, Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, Agnostic, and Voodun. This was an unpredictable act of nature not some cosmic judgement brought down by a celestial being. But the religious apologists would rather the Haitians believe that this disaster was somehow their fault. That is the only way they can rectify this terrible tragedy with their misguided beliefs. They would blame anything but God. They would do anything but admit the obvious reality that there is no God. That everything about their existence, about all of our existence here on this planet, including this tragedy, is evidence of God's non-existence. That is the tragedy. This is why I call religion an embarrassment. This is why I am embarrassed to see my people blinded and brainwashed by this idiocy. That is why this blog exists.