thorswitch wrote:
TollandRCR wrote:
I would frankly hate a god who even thought of doing such a thing.
I've always just assumed that it's not so much that there are more earthquakes or other such disasters, but rather that we are more aware of them because there are more people, covering more of the surface of the Earth, we're better able to detect things like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis even when they're in areas with minimal population and news of such happenings is sent almost instantaneously around the world. Plus, nowadays, we gots pictures, too! So the disasters are more real - we can see the devastation, the people's whose lives have been disrupted, destroyed or ended.
Theologically, I see the Earth - Jord - as a living being, and things like earthquakes, fires, volcanoes and storms are not things that she does to humans, but are just functions of her body whose purpose we may not fully understand. But just like how when we have an infection, our bodies develop a fever as part of our immune response to fight off whatever bug we've got, we know that periodically, large forests like Yellowstone will have large scale fires that clear out the underbrush, renew the soil and allow the forest to continue growing - healthier than it was before. She's not ATTACKING us, we just happen to be living there.
James Lovelock would come pretty close to agreeing with you, in the "strong form" of the Gaia Hypothesis. In even a somewhat weaker form of the hypothesis, it could be pointed out that a lot of the destruction and death that we see caused by the Earth's various convulsions is attributable to our being where we really ought not to be -- "She's not ATTACKING us, we just happen to be living there." The reinsurance companies have a strong financial and scientific interest in where the human population has chosen to put itself and its wealth, which is disproportionately along the coasts of oceans and freshwater lakes. So hurricanes tend to do more damage than they otherwise would have. It never made sense to build expensive houses on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, even if you put them on stilts: the seaward side of the Outer Banks is eroding, and the bay side is approaching the mainland. It makes no sense to insure those houses. That is why Allstate will no longer write homeowner's insurance policies in Connecticut: they wanted to stop writing policies for coastal communities; the state insisted that their coverage be all or nothing; and they withdrew. Multimillion dollar houses are still being built on the Connecticut shore, often around the shells of much older, much more modest houses. California permitted the building of houses on cliffs that were eroding before construction began. Those houses and cliffs are "secured" by enormous "nails" driven into the cliffs through concrete and rebar.
It makes no sense to live and farm on the very slopes of active volcanoes. It makes no sense to site a nuclear power plant directly over a fault line. And it never made sense to prevent the forest fires that are essential to the regeneration and health of forests (unless you were a logging company). Somebody should have long ago acted upon the fact that suppressed fires result in fires that destroy forests rather than regenerate them. But we had put our houses and our park buildings in those forests; we could not let them naturally burn.
New Orleans is sometimes used as
the classic example of where a city should never have been located. That is a false example. The real problem is how the Mississippi has been constrained and its natural flood plain built up with factories and settlements, all the way to the Canadian border and beyond (on its tributaries). It was the Corps of Engineers that caused the series of floods of New Orleans. Due to their projects, New Orleans is now more than 20 miles
closer to the Gulf of Mexico than it was when founded, and the city has sunken more than a few feet. (And the Gulf has a huge and growing "dead zone.") The city was originally built on high ground well above the level of the Mississippi. (The famous old elevated tombs are there because of groundwater, not because of floods.)
There is geological evidence that the Earth was
much more seismically active in its first one or two billion years than it is today. Hurricanes are a cyclical phenomenon, and it is not at all certain that climate change will lead to more hurricanes or to more destructive hurricanes. There is speculation that climate change might be related to earthquakes, but I suspect (from a lay point of view) that that is reaching for a too-distant straw.
I really do find it impossible to grasp that people would worship a god that they believe would cause the death of more than 200,000 people in Haiti -- or permit that to happen by withholding his powerful hand. Or a god that would bomb the cities of the plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah, or would order the destruction and looting of Jericho.
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