It had to happen, I suppose. Following a natural disaster such as the one last week in Pakistan, someone comes up with the punishment from God explanation. This time it is the Mullah of Battal.
”Allah has sent this great punishment on account of our misdeeds," he said, jabbing a finger at the open sky. "We must now end our rebellion against the orders of Allah and submit ourselves again to his ways."
In the 21st Century we have an advantage over primitive societies that blamed natural disasters on supernatural beings. We know how the Earth works. It is a matter of scientific fact that the tectonic plate upon which the Indian sub continent sits is moving against the Himalaya mountain range, gradually pushing it skywards. This is because it in turn is being pushed by the Pacific plate. It is perfectly natural. There are no mythical supernatural deities manipulating this in order to punish people for imagined misdeeds.
The people who tragically died last week did not die because they strayed from the path of Allah, they died because they lived on a fault line. It is as simple as that. It is insensitive and crass to then try to blame it on the victims in an attempt to coerce them into subservient obedience. Outrageous it may be, but this is the politics of fear. Fear is a powerful tool with which these people maintain a grip of iron on the obedience of their followers, for without followers, they are nothing.
But then, religious leaders have been doing it for millennia, so why expect a change? Evidence and proof mean nothing when compared against faith. Their grip on reality may be weak, but the grip with which they maintain control over their acolytes remains as strong as ever.
This isof course very much in line with the horseshit that has come out of the American rabid Christian right after the recent hurricanes.
If we attempted to make political capital of this nature from such disasters we would be lambasted and yet religious zealots seem unabashed. But then there are always many that would attempt to put some explanation other than the fact that we do not control everything and never will.
[http://www.crisissearch.com/ http://www.CrisisSearch.com] is a disaster related search engine (niche portal). It is basically a web based software application that stores and searches through an online protected database (storing cached pages and links to manmade and natural disaster related websites) that is available anywhere the internet is (even in major disaster areas they can set up a satellite ISP relay). It is basically a web based software application that stores and searches through an online protected database (storing cached pages and links to man-made and natural disaster related websites).
Hi Mark. This reminds me of a post I wrote early this year when two elderly ladies in a bus queue I was standing in said “God sure works in mysterious ways” just days after the Tsunami. I worry about people when they say things like this and especially so as often-times people listen to those who spout such drivel and wind up believing that there is in fact some supernatural component to all of these perfectly natural tragedies.