Standing During an Earthquake

Tangent right off the bat: I'd like to begin by thanking the group that rallied on 17th street in support of convicted Cop Killer and former black panther Mumia Abu-Jamal: You guys really gave me perspective on what "pathetic" really looks like. Sure I'm in my 132nd year of school with no girlfriend and no exact career path, but it could be worse. I could be pissing on the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. on the national holiday meant to be a tribute to his legacy while simultaneously wasting a beautiful day off to excrete liberal propaganda on a city street. I can't believe three decades after the fact there are still people out there who celebrate the death of a servant of the law. It's absolutely despicable. But that rant aside, I have to get to the real issue of this entry...

On Sunday afternoon, I was talking with friends about the tragic earthquake in Haiti. I brought up the fact that Voodoo was very commonly practiced amongst the Haitian people. I also brought up the fact that Pat Robertson, a well known and controversial evangelical christian conservative, drew connections between natural disasters and behavior by cultures that was in direct disobedience of Biblical Law. To me, I said, it's not out of the realm of possibilities that these things are connected. Boy, did that get people fired up. Everyone scoffed, wrote the idea off as complete idiocy, and joked about it sporadically throughout the rest of the afternoon. I faked chuckles to avoid a fiery religious/political debate that might ruin the group's chemistry on what had been a relaxing day to that point. But here's my forum to address it and clarify anything I said that may have sounded wrong at the time...

First of all, I do not believe that God caused the earthquake in Haiti because of spiritually immoral citizens. But the bottom line is, I do not know why it happened. If you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient god, you believe that all things are controlled by that divine being. Even if you believe that evil caused the earthquake to happen, it would still be an act of God, because God reigns over all things, including evil, so he would have had to allow it to happen for a reason. Period.

Secondly, the same people who instantly say that Pat Robertson is wrong are just as big of fools as he is. Why? Because last I checked, no earthly being knows God's plan in its entirety. Blatantly denying one person's perspective on why something bad happens is indirectly claiming that you have some sort of divine insight on the matter. You may have a theory on why bad things happen, but that's all it is. It's not fact and no one should present it as such, no matter who they're affiliated with or what side of the argument they happen to fall on.

If your spiritual/life compass is the Christian Bible, you've seen the precedent God sets for immoral societies. They at some point will end in destruction. The fact is that although the Christian God is a God of Love, he also is a God of divine justice. It's difficult to think that God allows (or makes) bad things to happen because we don't want to view that side of Him. But God's wrath does exist, and all will be judged.

My prayers are with the Haitian people as they deal with the devastation surrounding them. I know believers from the country, and missionaries currently serving there, and have no doubt that God can bring unimaginable good out of disaster. I really have no idea why this happened to the people in and around Port-au-Prince. And I don't support Pat Robertson. I just think making claims on what God is and isn't doing is as ignorant as saying that the practice of Voodoo is theologically upright.

It's sad to me that a lot of times the christian viewpoint and the right-wing one seem so easily interchangeable. There's no political party that truly has a holy cause or Christ-centered goals, just individuals in different arenas of government who share the faith. I don't ever want to be a card carrying member of the fill-in-the-blank party, in fact I think political fights are often for those who have little else of importance to debate about. Issues of the soul, religion, and salvation, however, constitute subjects that an individual has to stand their ground on.

Even in an earthquake.