God and Hurricanes

I am amused by the thought that hurricanes are God's way of asserting his property rights - kind of a supernatural Eminent domain thing. It's the absurdity of it all that cracks me up, but, as usual, most folks don't see things as I do. A couple of nights ago on Fox News, which is increasingly demonstrating its Christian bias, some news guy (a Shephard Smith look alike - I forget his name) was talking to a man who barely survived Ivan last year and who decided to move a little further inland this time. Here's what he asked him: "Do you think that God was looking out for you and the people of the panhandle when Hurricane Dennis was coming ashore? I mean, this was a big storm and yet only a handful of people lost their lives."

The guy: "Oh yes sir. Definitely. And I can say for sure that God saved me and my wife last year during Ivan. If it hadn't been for Him, I wouldn't be here right now."

Uh, what? It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which people insist on painting God as this benevolent force looking down on us helpless humans. Apparently, it never occurs to these people to ask if God had it in for the panhandle by slamming it twice in less than a year with caregory 4 hurricanes. That's a legitimate question, is it not? After all, if God is all-powerful, (which of course, He is), then why have hurricanes at all? I'm perplexed about this.

The only conclusion I can come to is that religious people start all thought with the assumption that God is their friend, and that any questions related to Him must be couched in that context. Indeed, natural disasters, so it seems, are clear evidence of God's love. That is, so long as they happen to Christian folks. When a natural disaster, such as say a massive tsunami, hits distant shores, there are always those Christians who want to claim that God is handing out punishment for forgetting him. This has all the intellectual rigor of a tic tac toe strategy.

In my view, if God really likes us, then he should do away with any sort of natural calamity at all. Therefore, the sheer existence of these terrible events is evidence that God either does not exist or at least that he doesn't like us nearly as much as many would like to believe. The fact is that every natural disaster brings with it some good and some bad, and God (suspending disbelief for a moment) doesn't have a thing to do with it.

Two of my best friends were impacted seriously by Dennis - one in a very good way, one in a very bad way. My one friend owns condo right on Navarre Beach, which is just east of Pensacola. It was severely water damaged after Ivan, and he has only just recently completed the repairs and replaced all the damaged furniture. Now Dennis comes along and wrecks it all over again. Ain't that a bitch? But he's having a hard time getting too down about it. As it turns out, Dennis probably saved my other friend's life.

This other friend was set to travel by boat from West Palm Beach to the Bahamas on Sunday for a fishing tournament this week. Alas, the organizers postponed the tourney for a couple of days to let the waters die down after the hurricane passed through. So the crew modified their plans, deciding to leave on Tuesday, and it's a damned good thing. Shortly after sitting down to dinner Sunday evening, my buddy started feeling a little weird. He excused himself and retreated to the bathroom. A while later, his wife found him sitting there looking pale as a ghost. His arm was numb and his condition was getting worse and worse. They rushed him to the emergency room and learned that he was having a heart attack. Two hours later, he was in the ICU with three stints in his artery. This guy is 34 years old! Anyhow, he's doing well and the doctors say he'll make a full recovery (thanks to those evil pharmaceutical companies that make cholesterol-lowering drugs). The part that I can't stop thinking about is that he was supposed to be on a boat on Sunday evening way out in the ocean. Had his heart attack come on the open seas, it is highly likely that he'd be dead right now. Score one for Hurricane Dennis.

Now it would be easy to say that God was looking out for my friend. In fact, it would be easy to say that Hurricane Dennis was spun up just to save him. But what about the twenty-something people who died as a result of the storm? Where was God for them? Oh, that's right. Their passing was part of his plan. He has a plan, you know. In the end, it's obvious that religious people will rationalize events in any way they can to hold onto the fantasy of a loving God. And it is simply bad form to point to out the logical inconsistency of this kind of thinking. Nevertheless, someone has to do it. Might as well be me.

In closing, let's ponder one last strange thing about Hurrican Dennis - the name. Some of you may recall that there was a hurricane named Dennis in 1999 that hit the outer banks of North Carolina. So it's curious to me that we're already reusing that name. Are the folks at the National Hurricane Centers so uncreative that they've exhausted all male names and are now forced to start recycling them? If so, they are truly remiss. There's one male name that seems oh so fitting for a hurricane - Jesus. Maybe they're saving that for the big doozie, the category five hurricane that wipes out thousands of miles of coastline and kills hundreds and hundreds. That must be it.

The Rational Morality Debate

A recent post led to a fairly extensive thread that wandered into the subject of morality. At issue is whether morality can be rationally conceived, and whether it really makes that big of a difference. I think it can be and that it makes all the difference. Our welcoming wench, Alice, however, has finally got my number. Or does she...

Alice: Chris. You believe that there is a right way to proceed. You believe that free markets are always better than collective schemes. You believe that the only reason Hitler emerged is because of the Treaty of Versailles. You think the only way to insure having a good marriage is to move in together and have a trial run at it. You have a much clearer vision than I do.

I believe in the ebb and flow method, that there is rarely a clear path to anywhere and it is all of the myriad influences which are present which will produce the outcome.I believe in accidents. I think when things work out well, such as the formation of the United States, it's an accident. Something which happened because of a confluence of events, not because of one or even a few men.

When you say it that way, my position sounds so Type A. More explanation is apparently needed. Perhaps a story.

I know a guy who has a brother. In his house growing up, parental discipline was pretty much non-existent. Nevertheless, both he and his brother have turned out fine - good jobs, family, stability, etc.. But it turns out that his two sisters are majorly messed up. There were never any consequences for doing stupid things when they grew up, and they are both now literally incapable of living responsible lives. They sign leases and break them. They buy cars on credit and end up having to have their parents pay for them. One even has two kids that are now being raised by my friend's brother. It's tragic.

There's no question as to the cause of these girls' misfortunes. Their parents simply failed them. They should have recognized that, though successful, well-adjusted people *sometimes* emerge from consequenceless homes, too often they do not. They ebbed when they should have flowed.

My position is not about some delusional prediction about what happens every time you do this or that - that would be quite contrary to my Kantian view of the universe - uncertainty is the starting point of all thought. It's about probabilities and the stakes of mistakes.

I do happen to believe that free markets are always better than collective ones, but only because there has never been an example of a collective one that led to prosperity without coercion. I believe there are lots of Hitlers lying around this planet, and that the Treaty of Versailles created the conditions necessary for one to obtain absolute power. I don't think the only way to have a good marriage is to move in together first. I believe that moving in together ahead of time dramatically increases the chances of the couple, should they end up marrying, going the distance happily. It's an extended interview process - how is that interpersonal due diligence is so anathema to you? Is that rational?

In all of these areas, I believe the actions that are taken, based upon the prevailing morality - the person in questions' measure of right and wrong - have important ramifications on how things unfold later on.

This is no different than wearing a helmet when riding a motorcycle - if the goal (the moral) is to stay healthy, and you can assume there's a reasonable chance you'll wreck (your fault or not), and you can assume that hitting your head at speed will be disastrous to your health, then a helmet is the obvious choice. It's not about a clear vision. It's about being informed and having an idea where you want to go in life.

So my point in all of this is to say it is possible to rationally conceive of our view of right and wrong, and that this is extremely necessary because our choices and actions have larger consequences than we often imagine. And in a society increasingly obsessed with instant gratification, awareness of this is that much more critical.

And lest I ignore an important historical sidebar, Alice also has this to say:
Take the Treaty of Versailles for instance. That begot the Marshall plan. It wasn't invented out of the blue, it came about because people saw that punishing the loser didn't work too well.

This is what I mean by ebb and flow. People are only smart in retrospect. We ain't psychic.

More proof to my point. The aspects of the Treaty of Versailles that caused the problems that created WW2 were the punitive ones - the ones that forced Germany to accept full responsibility for the war, the ones that forced Germany to pay exhorbitant reparations, the ones that forced Germany to relinquish colonies and territories. None of these were present in Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, which was the US model for the Treaty.

In fact, Clemenceau (the French guy, for the historically challenged) and Wilson were quite at odds through the entire process of establishing the Treaty, heatedly so. The French, having been severely ravaged by the war, and because Clemenceau was a bulldog of magnificent proportions, won out in the end. Nevertheless, someone did know better than to do the Germans as they were done, and that someone was the leader of what has become the greatest nation on this planet. He was enlightened, in a sense, which means he understood enough about humans to know that the French need for revenge would end up coming back to bite them, and maybe everyone else. His morality and his knowledge of his species were the guide to his vision. Several million people would be alive today were it not for an ebb when there should have been a flow.

Lastly, in response to my assertion that individual human action has been one of the most dramatic forces that have shaped human history, specifically my statement that without George Washington, there would be no USA, Alice comes back with this:
...to that I would say, no King George, no USA. If England had acted differently and had been in a different financial position and had not imposed such heavy taxation, it is unlikely the colonists would have agreed to revolt against the mother country.

See, it was the confluence of events. AKA, an accident.

No, it was not an accident. You're quite right that King George's oppression of the colonies was the catalyst for the revolutionary war, but his attitudes and actions were not accidental, not by a long shot. They were a direct result of his morality, which was based upon inherent absolute power of the monarchy and the obligation of all English peoples to bow to it. It is well known that there were those in Britain who recommended just cutting us loose. George would have nothing of it - his pride and his vision of how things should have been (his morality) were being challenged. He, too, ebbed when he should have flowed. It was the widespread dissemanation of enlightenment ideas by people like Thomas Paine and John Locke that alerted the masses to his error. Just as Thomas Paine risked death by writing Common Sense, so did the colonial army in defying and clashing with the British, and both because of their morality, the one that was rationally conceived by a new generation of intellectuals.

At every step of the way through life, there are choices to be made, forks in the road. Each path corresponds to a ripple through the future - some are big, some are small. It is our morality that guides us in choosing a path, which means it is incumbent upon us to conceive of our morality methodically through the use of reason. More importantly, it is incumbent upon us to reject moralistic ideals that do not stand up to rationally scrutiny (read, religious morality). This is a lynchpin in the enlightened modern mind.

(Sorry for picking on you, Alice, but we simply outgrew the comments area. This is an important and clarifying difference of opinion, and if anyone can take it, I know you can.)