Just A Thought ~ REGARDING TSUNAMIS, ETC.

"What presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, at the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate) might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little ‘sins’ to the level of cosmic significance!

When I interviewed for television the Reverend Michael Bray, a prominent antiabortion activist, I asked him why evangelical Christians were so obsessed with private sexual inclinations such as homosexuality, which didn’t interfere with anyone else’s life. His reply invoked something like self-defense. Innocent citizens are at risk of becoming collateral damage when God chooses to strike a city with a natural disaster because it houses sinners. In 2005, the fine city of New Orleans was catastrophically flooded in the aftermath of a hurricane, Katrina.

The Reverend Pat Robertson, one of America’s best-known televangelists and a former presidential candidate, was reported as blaming the hurricane on a lesbian comedian who happened to live in New Orleans. You’d think an omnipotent God would adopt a slightly more targeted approach to zapping sinners: a judicious heart-attack, perhaps, rather than the wholesale destruction of an entire city just because it happened to be the domicile of one lesbian comedian.”

~ Extract from “The God Delusion”, by British atheist Professor Richard Dawkins ~