RE: Tsunami reflections -- another angle of consideration

ANOTHER NOAH SCENARIO:

There had been no regular rain, just mist.

People weren't taking baths, so as a result:

They were not used to slippery bathtubs and then it happened --

8 inches of water when you get a leg cramp can cause you to drown.

The space in the ARK was for all the toys, not animals and plants.

Even that was an accident. Little boy blue was a stowaway that

brought the first toys aboard.

The ARK barely took off. NOAH was concerned about all the mud

and the new gully right there.

When the bird brought a leaf that wasn't still soaked with water,

he figured they could move about a bit and not result in overturning

into the gully.

The rain was 40 minutes, not 40 days - the 39 plus was back to mist

again and perhaps more fog than usual.

The rest of whatever amount of time was drying out - they might

not have bathed as often themselves and worried about drowning

in slippery mud.

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Randy Isaac
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 8:26 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Tsunami reflections

Although, as George noted, this tsunami brought nothing new to the
age-old problem of theodicy, yet, as Steve pointed out, this event does
focus our minds on the issue in a forceful way. In his editorial on Jan.
1 in the NY Times, David Brooks indicates what can happen if we reject
the notion of earthquakes as God's retribution/punishment and then fail
to fill that void with an alternative theistic view. His editorial is
in this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/opinion/01brooks.html?oref=login&n=Top
%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fDavid%2
0Brooks but the most essential paragraphs are excerpted here:

"Human beings have always told stories to explain deluges such as this.
Most cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great
bulk of humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and
repurify the human race. In most of these stories, God is meting out
retribution, punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood
starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than the old.

Nowadays we find these kinds of explanations repugnant. It is repugnant
to imply that the people who suffer from natural disasters somehow
deserve their fate. And yet for all the callousness of those tales, they
did at least put human beings at the center of history.

In those old flood myths, things happened because human beings behaved
in certain ways; their morality was tied to their destiny. Stories of a
wrathful God implied that at least there was an active God, who had some
plan for the human race. At the end of the tribulations there would be
salvation.

If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past week, you
receive the clear impression that the meaning of this event is that
there is no meaning. Humans are not the universe's main concern. We're
just gnats on the crust of the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats
die, victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves."

Randy
Received on Tue Jan 4 10:15:37 2005