Random Musings

Just Stop It With the Blame Thing

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060116/ap_on_re_us/katrina_nagin

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/01/05/robertson.sharon/

Let me start off by saying that I am not a particulary religious person. That is not to say that I don't have my own personal belief system despite the fact that I have come to see churches as glorified social clubs and and organized religion as political, social, and/or cultural agendas disguised as religion. But again, that's just my personal opinion, a thing to which whether you agree with me or not, I am entitled.

With that out of the way, I feel compelled to address this latest trend of blaming God for things that happen here on earth.

Now I wasn't a scholar in school by any stretch of the imagination, at least not as far it is reflected in the grades I earned, but I do remember my Bible. I attended Catholic school until the eighth grade, and if you know anything about Catholic school, students there get fed a healthy dosage of the Bible on a daily basis. At least they did in my day. After that, on my own, I studied the Bible, more for what it contained than for purely religious reasons.

One of the things that I clearly remember from those Catholic school lessons is that God promised man that he would never punish mankind on earth again. Man, God said, would recieve punishment or salvation, on an individual basis, after death. I remember that because I can recall sitting in my desk and breathing a sigh of relief that we didn't have to worry about the world flooding, killing everybody else with only one family (which with my luck probably wasn't going to be mine) being able to build an ark and save themselves (and the animals).

I remember being relieved that I didn't have to be concerned about having locusts descend upon us, and things like that because we made God mad. Even though I was a kid, I knew we did things that didn't please God, but I was happy that he wasn't going to punish all of us for the acts of some of us. After all, the stuff I did wasn't SO bad- at least not bad enough to get after everybody for it.

Am I the only one who's noticed these "leaders" getting into this line of thinking and saying it out loud to people? It's as if they've run out of things to say to get attention, so in desperation, they pull out the holy card.

Now, I'm assuming that Pat Robertson went to Theology school. Didn't they teach him that God doesn't punish man on earth? Or was he absent on that day? To me, for him to say that out loud eats away at his theological credibility. After all, he's supposed to know and believe in his Bible and its teachings.

The mayor of New Orleans, even though in reading the above article, there was a lot upon which I agreed with him, I felt, should have left God out of it. God is not punishing New Orleans. What happened to New Orleans and to the Gulf area, although it may seem like it was; was not an act of God. It was an act of nature and a failure of mankind. Maybe, in a roundabout way, the seemingly endless series of hurricanes this past year was the result of the disregard we have for nature and the earth's ecology, but it was definitely nature. And man built those levees that failed in the Gulf region, not God.

God said that he wouldn't do something like that to punish us on earth again, and I, for one, believe him.

I think we need to stop blaming God, anybody, or anything other than mankind in general for our problems. We need to look to ourselves for the reasons why bad things happen, fix what's wrong and help ourselves to get past them. Then we need to act in ways that make sure that those bad things have less of a chance of happening again.