Quaking With Hatred

THE EARTHQUAKE, if nothing else, affords conservative evangalical Christians a blessed opportunity to turn up the volume on their usual inflamatory, lunatic, hateful rhetoric. The twisted reasoning goes something like this: Turkey and Syria, areas stricken by a powerful beyond seven point three quake on the Richter scale, in which more than eleven thousand people have so far been found dead, with thousands more dead yet to be discovered, was chosen by the Christian God, who is the only true God, for holy retribution. The obviously true cause of the earthquake, the same cause as always, intercontinental geo-physical forces, remain unmentioned by these hateful, vengeful people. The holy retribution by earthquake, so they insanely say, was inspired by Almighty God's utter contempt for the Islamic religion, which is practiced by nearly everyone who lives in this infidelic part of the world. The creator of the cosmos is, they would have you understand, a Christian, probably a Pentecostal. God the one true Almighty God who speaks in tongues and handles snakes, or chooses to inspire others to so do in His (not her) Holy Name. All the other thousands of religions on Earth are false, mere inventions of the sometimes wayward human mind, but one, and only one is reliably true. And if there is religious life elsewhere in the universe, if indeed the universe is replete with religious forms of life, (life which but for religion might be accurately described as "intelligent"), then all these millions and billions of religions are false, merely made up, while the one true religion, the one religion which describes reality, blessedly happens to be centered on little ole planet Earth. As they say: "go figure". And so, it came to pass that an enormous earthquake smote Turkey, killed tens of thousands of religiously misguided people, for the sole purpose of punishing them for having the audacity to practice a religion of their choice, alas, the wrong one. This, the same biblical Christian God who destoryed fifty thousand and seventy Philistines because a single person had the audacity to be curious, and to take a quick peek inide an ornate box in which was hidden from view the most importnat document in the world, a document not very useful when hidden by divine dceree from the very people who most need to see it and read it and know it, the covenant of the Lord. But God loves you! HE loves you because and only because, and only if you embrace his true religion, and have no other Gods before him. How anyone could have any other Gods before God is a msytery, since other Gods, scripture has it, do not even exist. This is the twisted logic, essentially, the "pretzel logic", to borrow an album title from the band "Steely Dan". And also, the people in New Orleans, particularly those in the ninth ward of the city, were also punished by the compassionate loving biblical God by being visited by hurricane Katrina, in retribution for the "Big Easy" allowing itself to be, as evangelical Christians might say, a "den of iniquity". Those who embrace this psychotic nonsense are welcome to it, and may they experience the consequences of it, whatever they may, by God, be.