Last week, while reading the enjoyable blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I discovered the latest in really asinine talk about God’s judgment – via natural disasters – courtesy of a Mr. Jason Werner of Ohio. Werner has written a piece on his web site that would definitely have been worthy of at least a (dis)honorable mention in my first annual “People Who Should Stop Talking Awards” earlier in the year.

Werner is one that is absolutely certain Hurricane Katrina was brought upon New Orleans by God as punishment for the city’s sinfulness. So, now that severe flooding has ravaged many states in the upper-midwestern U.S., he, trying to make sense of it within the same framework, stopped to think, hmm, what have these people done wrong to anger God so? His main concern was Iowa as he seemed to think the state was especially some exceptional example of goodness amidst what he thought was generally God-approved territory, as he writes,

I’ve been blaming the atrocity that occurred to New Orleans by a storm called Katrina on the area’s sin…

So I began wondering about Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s innocent Iowa. What could possibly be wrong with an area in “God’s country”.

Well, I guess, just as it is said, people see what they want to see. So just as Werner once saw this mythic region of godliness, he now has dug up all sorts of reasons why Cedar Rapids alone must have deserved such “punishment”: everything from how many casinos and bars there are to funding for embryonic stem-cell research and the people’s apparent willingness to coexist with homosexuals. The list goes on, but none of it is really worth mentioning, because it is just ridiculous.

I know that people have been attributing the weather and other natural events to the moods and whims of deities for millennia now, but the continual insistence these days of claiming to somehow know (I won’t even bother mentioning the much more widely known figures that regularly say the same kind of things) that God selectively – and quite inconsistently I might add – doles out punishment in certain areas of the country through natural disasters, and then, trying to attribute that punishment to some key formula of sin, e.g., “there was a huge gay pride parade scheduled and there were X number of abortion clinics and casinos…”, etc., is remarkably dumb.

Can’t these sorts of “disasters” be seen as, oh, I don’t know, natural events that, you know, just happen? While maybe the idea of God’s judgment helps some people deal (in a very strange way) with what otherwise seem like harsh, random acts of nature, it still seems silly to think of certain kinds of natural events as merely acts of judgment that wouldn’t come about if the people in a given area were simply godly enough. Haven’t these things happened for ages in accordance with natural patterns of weather and geography regardless of where people were? And aren’t they only really considered disasters, because there just happens to be people there to call it such as it is disastrous for them? And isn’t that a price that has long been paid by mankind in exchange for sedentary civilization, as people, time and time again have chosen to live near rivers that are prone to flooding, by seashores that are potential targets for hurricanes or typhoons, or on fault lines that are prone to earthquakes, and so on, all while they even anticipate such events, making preparatory attempts to withstand them?

And if mankind’s actions have any part to play in such occurrences at all, I would assume it is far more likely due to the severe impact we have on our natural environments than to the incurring of random judgment by severe weather from God. Oh, but talk like that, I’m sure that just sounds too much like some radical, wacko-environmentalist crazy-talk. How could I expect that to be taken seriously?