'God is having a hell of a year.' Poultry being culled
Photo: Gil Yohanan
Is bird flu God's wrath?
Or are claims that it is the height of human hubris?
God is having a hell of a year - pardon the expression - according to the people who claim to have a direct line to him/her.
Not worn out from creating Hurricane Katrina and causing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's debilitating stroke, God has apparently decided to send bird flu to Israel and cause the government to kill thousands of chickens and turkeys.
All this, according to the self-appointed confidantes of the Heavenly Being, is because Israel pulled settlers out of Gaza, or because New Orleans was a city rife with sexual decadence. Or was it because my son failed to do his homework?
I don't want to minimize the seriousness of these events. The tsunami was a full-blown catastrophe, and the effects of it are still being felt throughout Asia. Hurricane Katrina also is still causing problems, as you all know.
But I find it difficult, if not impossible, to accept the linear cause and effect relationship of certain earthbound phenomena to godly wrath and anger.
I didn't know the Divine Being has a fading orange ribbon wrapped around his celestial "robes," or is one of the hard-right remnants of the Likud Party.
Or that he (Sorry, ladies, the English language doesn't offer a good, non-gender third-person pronoun, and I refuse to use s/he. How would you pronounce that "word," anyway?) is a member of the anti-gay rights Christian Coalition.
‘God could have prevented Gaza disengagement’
I suspect God is not a card-carrying member of any political party. If anything, the evidence would suggest God changes parties on a regular basis, at least if it can be assumed that God generally backs winners.
How else to explain the seesawing between right and left we have seen in many Western countries in the last few turbulent decades.
For a while it seemed as if God had allied himself with the political right in America. During the rise of conservative, evangelical Republican leadership beginning with Richard Nixon and reaching its apogee in Ronald Reagan it certainly seemed as if God had begun contributing to Moral Majority's Political Action Committee.
But then God seemed to veer left and back Bill Clinton in 1992, for if we see the hand of God in things like hurricanes and elections, surely we must see God's hand in all the results. Has he swung back, again?
So, judging by God's voting in Israel (somehow God can cast an absentee ballot, unlike the rest of us), God has been a leftist, a rightist, a leftist, a rightist, a lapsed rightist and now....well, we'll see next week, won't we.
If God can send a hurricane to devastate the U.S. Gulf Coast for the evacuation from Gaza, where was he in the days of the disengagement? Surely, he could have prevented it.
‘God is alive and in the world’
If bird flu is the result of God's continuing displeasure over the disengagement, what do we have to say to the innocent victims in Turkey, Egypt, and elsewhere who have succumbed to the deadly disease? Sorry, God is angry at Israel, so you are the collateral damage? That is not a compassionate God.
Nonetheless, I am thankful to these individuals and groups for bringing the Supreme Being back into daily discourse, especially if we can blame him whenever things don't go our way.
Instead of being able to say, “The dog ate my homework,” students (I'm sure my son will be among them), will be able to say, “God, in His wrath over (fill in the blank with the latest political action with which you don't agree), destroyed it in a burst of flame.”
Instead of telling clients why their projects are not coming in on deadline, I will just say, “God, in His wrath at the latest outrageous action by Israel's left-leaning government, sent a bolt of electricity to my computer and destroyed the files I was just about to send to you.”
It takes away a great deal of responsibility from us when we can just say events such as earthquakes, tsunamis or hurricanes are the way God communicates with the world.
For what do we have to say about a God who can destroy a city but can't – or won't - save the life of a seriously ill child, or who permits a horrific traffic accident?
God is alive and in the world. I don't doubt that for a minute, but I certainly don't have the wisdom to understand His actions, nor am I sufficiently tapped into the Divine to draw cause and effect between earthly actions and heavenly will. It's true hubris in the classic sense of the word to claim otherwise.
Alan D. Abbey is Founding Editor of Ynetnews. His website is www.abbeycontent.com, and his email is alan@abbeycontent.com
