The way the world works?

Abu Bakar Bashir has shown himself time and time again to be a despicable human being with his message of hatred. Not being an Islamic scholar or having read the Koran I can't say exactly what it says about how Allah deals with sin in the here and now. There is certainly precedence in the Old Testament that events in history speak of God's judgment. The biblical accounts always claim that the statement comes first, the event afterwards.

In what sense then can the recent Java landslides and floods be due to "immoral acts"? Floods are a regular part of monsoonal rainfall. Since many meteorological phenomena are self-organizing or scale invariant, which is exactly to say that there is no preferred scale. A lot of rain is no more or less significant from a physical point of view than a little rain, it just doesn't occur as frequently.

This means that floods are part of life; how can one tell when a particular flood is specifically an act of judgment - as opposed to any general idea of punishment. Perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds with regards weather? Landslides are also a natural result of flooding, but exacerbated by deforestation. You might call deforestation immoral or simply stupid - but people like Bashir probably don't have a doctrine of creation that allows one to speak of the issue at all.

No doubt he means behaviour that doesn't follow his narrow interpretation of Islam. Beware a simple mechanistic understanding of the way the universe operates in a moral sense. I don't know if the book of Job is read by Muslims, but Bashir could certainly learn from it. Whatever your belief, perhaps some well wishing to those currently suffering from these events is far more spiritual and religious than this kind of finger pointing.

Cancer: A gift from God?

Today I heard a sermon on Jonah, chapters 2 and 3. It is a well known tail (pardon the pun) of Jonah being swallowed by a giant fish, and the themes/sections of the sermon were on the character of crisis, the character of Jonah, the character of Nineveh and the character of God.

One of the points being made was that crises are times to cast off the peripherals of life and focus on what matters. The preacher quoted a friend who likes to say that canver can be (of was it is, I can't remember) a gift from God. My response is to say a few things.

Firstly, this seems to me to be perverse. James tells us that God is the source of all good gifts - how can cancer be a good gift? Yes, such crises can be opportunities for us to learn many things, but terminal cancer is for humans an evil thing, a painful, life ending, relationship severing disease. Even the Christian emphasis on life after death cannot fully rescue it - since there us a much stronger NT emphasis on life after, life after death (i.e. resurrection). Let's not confuse ends with means.

So what place for cancer. If you believe in meticuluous providence, then God gives you cancer. If the creation has the potential to develop - the cancer arises out of the process of evolution, and is part of it without being a good thing. Does that mean that the best of all possible worlds is one where cancer exists? Is it a soul making universe wher conscious beings get cancer? Perhaps so. However, I think a realistic view of the way God works means that sometimes things happen that we can learn from and grow from, even when it kills us or the ones we love, without that suffering, illness and death being a gift as such.

It is not a "gift" I want, I just hope and pray that if I ever had it, the gifts I would receive would be patience, peace, hope, the love of friends and family.