Haiti's Angry God

Haiti’s Angry God




By POOJA BHATIA
Published: January 13, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

FOR most of the past 20 hours I’ve been hiking the earthquake-rubbled streets of Port-au-Prince. Tuesday night, when we had less idea of the scope of the devastation, there was singing all over town: songs with lyrics like “O Lord, keep me close to you” and “Forgive me, Jesus.” Preachers stood atop boxes and gave impromptu sermons, reassuring their listeners in the dark: “It seems like the Good Lord is hiding, but he’s here. He’s always here.”

The day after, as the sun exposed bodies strewn everywhere, and every fourth building seemed to have fallen, Haitians were still praying in the streets. But mostly they were weeping, trying to find friends and family, searching in vain for relief and walking around in shock.

If God exists, he’s really got it in for Haiti. Haitians think so, too. Zed, a housekeeper in my apartment complex, said God was angry at sinners around the world, but especially in Haiti. Zed said the quake had fortified her faith, and that she understood it as divine retribution.

This earthquake will make the devastating storms of 2008 look like child’s play. Entire neighborhoods have vanished. The night of the earthquake, my boyfriend, who works for the American Red Cross, and I tended to hundreds of Haitians who lived in shoddily built hillside slums. The injuries we saw were too grave for the few bottles of antiseptic, gauze and waterproof tape we had: skulls shattered, bones and tendons protruding from skin, chunks of bodies missing. Some will die in the coming days, but for the most part they are the lucky ones.

No one knows where to go with their injured and dead, or where to find food and water. Relief is nowhere in sight. The hospitals that are still standing are turning away the injured. The headquarters of the United Nations peacekeeping force, which has provided the entirety of the country’s logistical support, has collapsed. Cell and satellite phones don’t work. Cars can’t get through many streets, which are blocked by fallen houses. Policemen seem to have made themselves scarce.

“If this were a serious country, there would be relief workers here, finding the children buried underneath that house,” my friend Florence told me. Florence is a paraplegic who often sits outside her house in the Bois Verna neighborhood. The house next to hers had collapsed, and Florence said that for a time she heard the children inside crying.

Why, then, turn to a God who seems to be absent at best and vindictive at worst? Haitians don’t have other options. The country has a long legacy of repression and exploitation; international peacekeepers come and go; the earth no longer provides food; jobs almost don’t exist. Perhaps a God who hides is better than nothing.

Pooja Bhatia is a fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs.

See the original here.

Haiti earthquake

The devastation in this already dirt-poor nation of Haiti is massive. Where do you take the injured when the hospitals have been smashed? Where are you going to get food and water?

I'm sure you already heard about Pat Robertson blaming the earthquake in Haiti on a pact with the devil that the leaders of Haiti struck a couple of hundred years ago, in exhange for giving Haiti independence from France. This is the kind of insanity that emerges when people are at a loss to explain the random suffering regularly encountered around the globe. Religious leaders are quick to blame "sin" as the reason why innocent people suffer. What a fucking cop-out. What a bankrupt ideology.

There is no doubt that many religious people have done many good deeds in service to the less-fortunate among us. But on balance, I'm not convinced that religion per se has been a plus for the planet. The amount of blood spilled, the number of people burned, maimed and killed in the name of God (or Allah, or any of a number of other gods) far outweighs any good that has been performed. Someday.....we as a people will collectively shake off the straitjacket that is religion.

Oops, got off on another rant.

There are some chilling pictures at the link here of the devastation in Haiti. You can give money to the Red Cross at the link here, and you should.

God is a terrorist

I am no theologian (fortunately). That will become more evident throughout this post.

God is a terrorist (IF she/he/it even exists, which is very doubtful).

Witness the recent devastation wrought in Haiti by a powerful earthquake. Schools, hospitals, houses, buildings all flattened with no regard for life. Haiti is one of the poorest nations on the planet and is ill-equipped to deal with such a catastrophe.

Some people say that God is all-powerful and controls everything. If so, then God caused this earthquake in Haiti (or at the absolute minimum allowed it to happen), and thousands of presumably innocent people have died or will die in the coming hours and days. Therefore, God is a terrorist. He caused the deaths of unsuspecting thousands. These same people will say that God works in mysterious ways. Fine. He just killed thousands without warning. That's what a terrorist would do.

Some others say that God created the world and then let it develop (the really bold will say "evolve"). Well, therefore, God created the forces that were unleashed in this earthquake in Haiti. This image of God is rather impotent in the face of events. If he created everything, then earthquakes are a part of that creation, and thousands just died in one of Gods creations. Therefore, God is a terrorist.

There is another group of people who don't really have an active faith in a God at all, but still feel like some sort of intelligent force either created the world or is lurking out there, somewhere, and he has no direct influence in the world. Again, he put all this in motion, and earthquakes are certainly part of that motion, so in effect, God just killed all those people in Haiti. God is a random terrorist.

No doubt, over the next few days or so, we will hear some heart-warming stories of people who will have survived amid the rubble in Haiti, against all odds. Some of them will probably praise God for sparing their lives. Well....what about those he didn't spare?

It is always striking (and telling) to me when someone survives a natural disaster and credits their survival to God. Just don't think about your neighbor across the street who had their house smashed by God's tornado and was killed - God was looking out for the survivor, he obviously didn't care about that jerk across the street, or their 6-month-old baby. Sounds like terrorism.

Is this type of thing, this earthquake in Haiti, just another "test of our faith?" Would God actually kill thousands of people in one part of the world just to test the faith of someone or everyone else? How cold-blooded and callous can you get? Why would anyone trust in such a God? This God will inspire terror and death just to test faith? Sounds like a terrorist.

And if God simply has no control over anything on earth, then what good is he? Why pray to that? What kind of power would a God have if all he could do would be to sit around and watch events unfold?

No matter what, people will cling to the God-belief. In the face of all evidence, they will cling to it. Even if the Muslim countries are the poorest and most sociologically backward on Earth, people will cling to Islam and consider it the "one true religion."

Even if dirt-poor Africans die of AIDS or TB or malaria or other preventable diseases, they will cling to their pantheon of Gods, sometimes animalistic Gods. Even if missionaries convert them to Christ or Muhammed, they will still die needlessly.

So what does your God look like? The mere fact that "God" can take so many forms dependent upon where you were born or what religion your parents were, or what crowd you have joined, does not speak well for the omnipotence of any God. For a million people, there will be close to a million different interpretations of what God is. Where's the sense in that?

And then we have fundamentalists, or Pentacostals, or other such splinter groups, insisting that the United States establish prayer in school or post the Ten Commandments all over everyones forehead, as if these acts will magically transform the culture. They have just as strange a formulation of God as anyone else. They must be beaten back.

Some people cannot seem to grasp (or choose not to grasp) a world without a God of some kind. I guess the reality, that we are but tiny specks on a violent world amid a violent universe is just too much for some to bear. It's too painful and random. (Plus, it would take away a lot of their power base.)

Much better to put your faith in some unseen benevolent force, even if that unseen force just slaughtered hundreds or thousands right in front of their eyes. Don't think. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Just don't try to force that feckless faith on me, ok? And we'll get along just fine.

Oh, here's yet another example of the persistence of the God-belief. Just imagine if EVERYONE had just SAT there and trusted in God.

Allan Nairn

It's still set on "KILL." (and so dies hope)

Similar incidents

The Political Animal is usually a good, solid read. Here he selects a random bit of bile coming from the right and dismantles it calmly, exposing the hypocrisy. Problem is, soon enough the rightards will produce another bit of trash. And another. And another. Truth doesn't matter to them. Only gaining advantage and trashing the opposition. How sad. How disgraceful. And it wouldn't be so bad if there were a regular counter to their bullshit, that got the same level of PR.

SIMILAR INCIDENTS, DIFFERENT RESPONSES.... To hear conservatives tell it, the White House's handling of the failed Christmas terrorist plot has been inadequate. President Obama, the Right has argued, waited too long to speak publicly about the incident, and hasn't taken the matter seriously enough.

Of course, the obvious response is probably the most effective one: Obama commented on the Abdulmutallab plot a lot faster than Bush responded to an identical attempted attack eight years ago.

But that doesn't fully capture the important and illustrative differences between the two responses.

The Abdulmutallab attempt was two weeks ago today. Over the course of these two weeks, President Obama has spoken publicly about the incident three times -- Dec. 29, Jan. 5, and Jan. 9. He also devoted his weekly address to the subject last weekend. Also, over the span of two weeks, the president's national security team prepared a relatively thorough security review of what transpired and a new directive on corrective actions.

Now let's compare the previous administration's response to a nearly identical terrorist plot -- Richard Reid's failed shoe-bomb attack (the same chemical, the same target, the same intended consequence, in same month of the year, with the same twisted ideology). Consider these two weeks, from eight years ago:

Dec. 22: Reid's attempt fails.

Dec. 28: Bush hosts a press conference from his Texas ranch. In his opening statement, the president makes no reference to the terrorist attempt. Reporters ask Bush 15 questions, zero about the Reid incident. The president references the failed attack anyway, saying a total of 89 words on the subject.

Dec. 29: The president reads his weekly radio address. He makes no reference to the attempted terrorism.

Dec. 31: Bush again chats with reporters at a media availability in Crawford. Reporters ask Bush 10 questions, zero about the Reid incident. Again, Bush referenced the matter briefly, saying 53 words on the subject.

Jan. 4: Karen Hughes hosts a briefing for reporters. There were no questions about the Reid incident, and the subject wasn't addressed.

Jan. 5: The president reads another weekly radio address, and makes no reference to the attempted terrorism. Later that day, Bush appears at two public events, one in California, the other in Oregon. The shoe-bombing incident doesn't come up at all at either event.

Do you notice a difference between the two weeks after the Abdulmutallab plot and the two weeks after the Reid plot? Tell me -- which of these two presidents seemed to respond to the attempted attacks more forcefully, more seriously, and with more depth? Which of the two seems more engaged when it comes to counter-terrorism?

Keep in mind, Bush faced literally no criticism for hardly responding at all to an attempt to blow up an airplane over the United States. There was no media pushback, no complaints from Congress, nothing. And this was just four months after 9/11, when presumably the terrorist threat was foremost on the nation's mind.

Rudy Giuliani said on CNN this week, "I think [Obama] has to make a major correction in the way he is dealing with terrorism because I think he has mishandled the situation. First of all, it was 10 days too late. This is something you react to immediately, not 10 days later after your vacation. The president of the United States, when there is a potential massive attack on this country, which is what this guy was going to do, should have been on top of this immediately, not 10 days later, 11 days later, 12 days later."

Bush pretty much ignored, at least publicly, the nearly identical "potential massive attack on this country," and no one seemed to care.

If I didn't know better, I might think there was a double-standard here, and a "controversy" has been manufactured by petty partisans hoping to undermine the Obama White House without cause.*

* edited