We know what caused the catastrophe in Haiti. It was the bumping and grinding of the Caribbean Continental Plate rubbing up against the North American Continental Plate: a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, un-premeditated, unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human misery.
The religious mind, however, restlessly seeks human meaning in the blind happenings of nature. As with the Indonesian tsunami, which was blamed on loose sexual morals in tourist bars; as with Hurricane Katrina, which was attributed to divine revenge on the entire city of New Orleans for harboring a lesbian comedian, and as with other disasters going back to the famous Lisbon earthquake and beyond, so Haiti's tragedy must be payback for human sin. The Rev. Pat Robertson sees the hand of God in the earthquake, wreaking terrible retribution for a pact that the long-dead ancestors of today's Haitians made with the devil, to help rid them of their French masters.
Ladies and gentlemen, witness the poverty of the theological mind.
A little child was pulled out from under the rubble after 7 days. 'Oh my God it's a miracle!' screamed the daily newspapers. Survivors have turned to god. One said: 'I have turned to God. He saved me. There is a god after all'. Presumably God was too busy to save the lives of the other 150,000 souls who we're not too fortunate? Maybe he could have saved us all a lot of trouble and not bothered with the earthquake in the first place? Saying that 'the ways of God are unknown to us' is a slap in the face to those who lie rotting on the streets. Say it to the 4 year old whose corpse still lies putrefying under the roof of her classroom.
Where was God in Noah's flood? He was systematically drowning the entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for 'sin'. Where was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock stock and barrel, as punishment for 'sin'. Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated religious person, your entire religion is founded on an obsession with 'sin', with punishment and with atonement. To quote the President of one theological seminary:
'The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on the globe.'
It makes me sick to the core. Ladies and gentlemen, natural disasters are not man-made. Nor do they concern themselves with human affairs. They are the result of physical forces that we now understand. They don't happen because of sins, or misdemeanours in a past life, or because of some other inexplicable reason. These explanations that earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, lightning strikes are caused by conscious divine agents such as gods and spirits and dead ancestors belong to the childhood of humanity. They were an explanation then because then man was still a child and didn't understand the working's of the world. We have now grown up. Science has lifted the veil from our eyes. But I still feel the presence of the pall. It still lies heavy over Haiti like a plague of locusts.
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