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January 3, 2005
The fundamentalists are now openly saying that the tsunami disaster is the will of God sitting in judgement on the sinfulness of humanity.
So says Phillip Jensen, the Anglican Dean of Sydney,who holds that a sovereign God rules all things. He said disasters were part of God's warning that judgement was coming. When asked if the tsunami was the will of God, he replied:
"Yes. The will of God in this world involved his creation of the world, but it also involves his judgment upon the sinfulness of humanity and it also involves his salvation of people through the death and resurrection of his son. And so all the beautiful things we see in this world are an expression of his creative goodness to us and all the disasters of this world are part of his warning the judgment is coming, and both these things should focus our mind on the death and resurrection of his son and how he saved us."
Judgement is coming? Were those living on the shore of the Indian ocean punished because they were more sinful than those in he West?
Similar sentiments were expressed by Amjad Mehboob, the chief executive of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils:
"We believe that whatever happens in the world, it happens with the sanction of God, and nothing can happen without his sanction. No one could say whether the victims had brought the disaster on themselves, only God could know that."
God sanctioned the tsunami!
And Rabbi Mordechai Gutnick, president of the Organisation of Rabbis of Australia, said to question God was to question with our finite minds His infinite wisdom. "What we consider tragedies are part of His plan, and the final result is what counts." The world runs to God's plan.
Presumably,the reasoning is this. God rules the world. If God is warning us, then it is either because human beings have stayed from God's teaching, or they are wicked and done evil. Evil ones need to be punished. Therefore, they need to be punished by a wrathful God.
So God send the tsumani. That is the inference. Hence there is no benevolent God guiding human affairs.It is Lisbon all over again. The Christian fundamentalists have a credibility problem because Christians believe that God is all-loving and that his compassion and love reach out to all, especially to the most helpless and abandoned.
Jason South
Their views are really the counter enlightenment, and it should be treated as such. The values they express are fundamentally at odds with the education in our universities.
The explanation given there is that the tectonic plates off Sumatra, collided, causing an earthquake and then the tsunami.There was compression between the Indian and Burmese tectonic plates. Scientists would argue that one plate that comprised the landmass from India to Australia has broken up into two. The initial eruption happened near the location of the meeting point of the Australian, Indian and Burmese tectonic plates.
That is the explanation for the suffering caused by settlements being swamped by then giant waves of the tsunami, and then turned into a nightmarish landscape of sludge, flattened homes and tangled corpses.
So what do we do about the clash of biblical values with the values of our universities? You can imagine the religious fundamentalists setting out to remodel our universities to "balance" college courses with the religiously correct rightwing views based on biblical values.
Christians are being evasive about tackling the fundamentalists. Barney Zwartz, the religious editor of The Age, says:
"Theodicy discusses suffering as a theoretical abstraction to be justified by logical inference from an abstract philosophical deity who is reduced to a set of attributes: perfect goodness, perfect knowledge, perfect power. This philosopher's god is a metaphysical creation of the Enlightenment for purposes of argument - the person and teaching of Jesus, for example, does not enter the discussion."
This is a reference back to Voltaire and the Lisbon earthquake.
Barney misses the problem.It is the fundamentalists who are talking in terms of the judgement of an powerful, wrathful God, and who forget about the compassionate ethics of Jesus.
Update
Rowan Williams talks more sense. A post on theodicy by Mark Bahnisch over at Troppo Armadillo.
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i think that god was souly responsible for this disaster - he clearly wanted all the aisians dead and so he sent a tidal wave. simple as pie