Tuesday, August 30, 2005

God and Katrina

The word of the Lord, God, to Jonah his prophet:
And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?
He cares for cattle, our Lord, but not for Cajuns. That, at least, is the nuanced view of Lazer Brody and Sultan Knish, two bloggers who are dead certain that the very same God who treasured the sinners of Ninveh sent Hurricane Katrina to devastate the Gulf Coast in retribution for the US's role in the recent evacuation of Gaza.

The arrogance of these bloggers is mind-boggling. Though God has not spoken to a mortal in over 2000 years, these bloggers imagine themselves capable of divining His true intentions. No better than a fortune teller with his tea leaves, these bloggers have concluded from a hurricane that God is a Likudnik, and that President Bush has provoked His wrath. And the fact that the God they imagine embraces politics identical to their own is for these bloggers, I suppose, further proof that there are no coincidences.

OrthoMom and her commenters have more.

Clarifications
Yes, God might send a hurricane. But unless He tells us His reason, it is presumptuous to guess. There are lots of possibilities. Perhaps Katrina was sent to punish the French Quarter for tolerating debauchery and gambling. And that's just one of thousands of plausible explanations. To insist that Katrina was sent to punish Bush for provoking the Gaza evacuation, as Knish and Brody did, is to wear your politics on your sleeve.