Thy Will Be Done ... well duh.

I read a story about a priest in Joplin who lived through the May 24th, killer tornado there. Naturally, he prayed, since that's the only tool he's got in his box, and he thinks that this is what saved him. His prayer, according to his hero in the mirror version of the story, was to constantly repeat the phrase "thy will be done" as he took cover in the bathtub. Well duh, if there is an all-powerful god then he doesn't need this priest's permission to do what he is going to do anyway. Therefore to pray to god telling him to do what he is already doing right now, and presumably planned to do is beyond ridiculous.

Now I know some people will say, "you missed the point". This guy humbly resigned himself to his fate and that's what God wants us to do. Well it hardly matters whether people resign or not. God could kill people who resigned themselves or spare them, just as he can kill or spare people who do not resign themselves. If it is your fate then it is going to happen and there is really no resigning to even do because it would still happen, even if you protest that you don't want it to.

Besides, I can't be the only one who suspects that this priest is trying to compare himself to Jesus in the Gethsemane. Recall that he also resigns himself to be crucified (which was the whole point of him coming to Earth, according to Christian doctrine). Do you still think the priest was being oh so humble by comparing himself favorably to Jesus?

Why the Bible can't predict tornados in 2011

If you do web searches, you will find people wondering if the bible predicted that there will be tornados in Missouri in the month of May, 2011 AD. Of course, common sense would tell you people in the Ancient Near East, writing three thousand years ago had no clue that was a land half way around the globe called Missouri, much less having blow-by-blow details on how many people might be killed by a particular storm on a particular day, or the dollar amount of the property damage, etc. It should be obvious that there are billions of people today and therefore billions of large and small events happen to them every single day, month, and year all over the globe. The bible cannot possibly predict them all, and it's not much of a "prediction" anyway when it doesn't actually tell you any specifics and you can only fill in the details after the event has happened.

Other Harold Camping style religious nutters take the view these storms were send as a "message" from the Almighty, expressing his displeasure with this or that, for there is always something to claim that God is displeased about. Strangely, it seems that god is always displeased around the same time each year in these same states where tornados are known to be frequent, as opposed to Vermont or Washington state, where they seldom ever occur.

It's a curious way for god to "send a message". It's about like god trying to "tell us something" by making it hot and dry in the desert, or rainy in the tropics. More importantly, it makes god culpable for the deaths, rather than being able to blame it on "nature" or "randomness" or the "free will" of people who happened to be in its path. People who believe that god steered the exact course of the storm, destroy this building and sparing that one, or killing this person and only maiming that person must really think the God they worship is a monster.

Indeed, if anyone else decided that he was just going to start randomly killing people to "send a message" and "express displeasure", we would judge this person a psychopath. The case in point today is Jared Loughner. He killed people in his qust to send his insane, nonsensical message to the rest of the world. Even many right-wingers (who are overwhelmingly religious fanatics) had to grudgingly admit that Loughner was without any kind of justification for his actions. Yet when something even more destructive, like a tornado strikes, and there is nobody to arrest, they attribute it to God and say that it was good?

Joplin Tornado called "The Beast" after book of Revelation?

In keeping with the doomsday theme over the past couple days, apparently there was a major tornado in Joplin, MO, and apparently it is being called "The Beast", which sounds like a reference to the Book of Revelation. If that were true, however, one would expect it to kill either 666 or 616 people, depending upon the variant translations which give those number. Most people are not aware that the oldest versions of this rather questionable book of the bible quote a figure of 616.

More interesting is that, according to news stories, plenty of people in Joplin think that God and prayer saved them. The same God who sent the tornado and killed others who were likely devout and busy mumbling the same scared prayers into their hands, decided that certain people were more worthy to save than others.

In any event, if this tornado was the long awaited "Beast" of the Book of Revelation, then it is certainly underwhelming. The Beast was supposed to kill way more people than that, and not just in a modest size down.

In any event my sympathies do go out to the people of Joplin. Nobody deserves such senseless tragedy. If there were an all-good, all-powerful god pulling the strings, then such things would most assuredly never happen. The fact that they do tells us that humans will have to learn to help our fellow man to cope and recover as best we can. That doesn't require belonging to any particular religion. None of them have a monopoly on compassion. Humanism is arguably a better approach, because it is a secular philosophy that doesn't waste time with imaginary dieties and prayers to supernatural forces. Instead it dispenses with the prayers, rolls up its sleeves, and gets to work.

Thanks to the secular miracles of science and modern technology, we have radars, and other forecasting systems which can help us reduce the dangers of these kinds of storms, and then more quickly and effectively respond in the aftermath.

Joplin Tornado. Any gay people targetted?

Religious looneys, from Harold Camping to Pat Robertson, and Bradlee Dean, the homophobic preacher in Minnesota who attacked President Obama's faith today, all love to blame gays for all kinds of dark and sinister things. Camping said that his apparently falsely predicted apocalypse this weekend was partly due to the fact that our society tolerated gay people. Others like Robertson and the late Falwell tried to blame 911 on gay people and later claimed that hurricanes or the devastation in New Orleans was also due to, you guessed it, gay people.

The interesting thing is that, if God hates gay people so much, and sends these natural disasters to try to kill them, he sure does seem to have bad aim. He usually ends up killing all kinds of people who aren't gay at all. Recent strings of tornados across the Southern US and flooding along the Mississippi seem to have inordinately targeted the Bible Belt and people who tend to be fanatic christians. If God really wanted to get gay people, it would seem that he could target the gay pride parade with lightning bolts and tornados and spare the rest of us. I know that the ancient Hebrews had a philosophy that God would punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty, perhaps to make the innocent survivors angry and willing to lynch the evil doers. However, this seems both inefficient and morally unjustifiable. In any event, I suspect that Joplin was far from a hot-bed of Sodom and Gomorrah activity.