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.