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Can God Intervene?: How Religion Explains Natural Disasters

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Though the basic idea of this book was to examine how theologians from various disciplines explain and understand the role of God in natural disasters, it is so much more than that. It is a study of the difference in theological thought and why so many people can look at the same situation and see so many different things. It goes a long way toward explaining why we are like we are when it comes to religious and theological divisiveness.

As a Catholic, I turned to the section on Roman Catholicism first and was not disappointed to find what I personally believe --- God is mysterious and unknowable and the world is constructed by a divine plan that has rules (such as the rules of physics) that sometimes seem to negate our desire for an all-powerful and all-loving God. The Evangelical Christian responses were also what I expected, Biblically based and focused on man's sinfulness. But I was equally fascinated by the Jewish perspective, particularly the very popular Rabbi Harold Kuschner's comments about an all-loving vs. an all-powerful God.

The Hindu and Buddhist theologians spoke more of human perception of disaster than of God's actual role in allowing disaster to happen and, throughout many of the responses there was the thought that the occurence of disaster is less important than the opportunity it provides for us to respond to one another's suffering. Some of the perspectives I could not relate to and others I found very accessible and sympathetic even though they are not what I believe.

This is an admirable work that takes 2 situations we can all relate to --- the 2004 tsunami and Hurrican Katrina --- and offers perspectives that not only enlighten but help us to understand our differences if we open up our minds to the diverse ways of seeing the same thing.

This is a must! The very best book on this difficult subject that I have ever read. Mr. Stern is an engaging and lively writer and plumbs this subject like no other, opening for the reader how a myriad of religions answers this age old question. I believe that this book will find a permanent place on shelves for reference. It is a great read and opens the subject up for serious exploration. First rate! Charles R. Colwell-President: The Center For Jewish-Christian-Muslim Understanding, Irnington, New York

Gary Stern has interviewed thinkers and non-thinkers from every major religious viewpoint concerning the problem of so-called "natural" disasters.

The virtue of Stern's book is NOT that one single religious interpretation emerges victorious. Rather, its brilliance lies Mr. Stern's discovery of a consensus, a common mode of thought that links all religious viewpoints, to wit: When bad things happen, it is because of badness in humanity, not because of badness in God.

That idealism is, of course, flatly contradicted by our daily experience: most human beings are much more compassionate than most gods. It is contradicted as well by the Holy Bible, which Christians of every denomination claim to believe but do not actually *read*.

Our heavenly Father freely admits that He performs "evil" deeds when jealous or angry (in Hebrew, ra, applied dozens of times to God's enraged behavior, including earthquakes, floods, plagues, and homicides; and elsewhere in Scripture, to such human "ra" as arson, cannibalism, fratricide, incest, infanticide, matricide, patricide, sister-rape, slander, theft, treachery, adultery, homosexuality, murder, and tree-worship.

God's "evil" ("ra") has lately been euphemised, in the New Age New International Version, in order to sell more Bibles, under the less unpleasant word, "trouble"; thereby to conform with modern, extrabiblical English (as, say, in the phrase, "Almighty God in the 1930s and early 40s permitted German Jews to suffer ra --a little bit of trouble.)

Gary Stern, in his interviews and commentary, has given special coverage to some of God's "ra" in the calendar years, 2004-5: That's when Yahveh steered "Hurricane Katrina" to the party-city of New Orleans, with a local flood that killed 1,500 people. That is also the year when Yahveh sent (to the mostly Buddhist and Hindu population of south Asia) a tsunami that killed 285,000.

Many of the religious leaders interviewed by Stern remark that there is a reason for everything. And that is so true! For example: The Lord blasted New Orleans with Katrina in order to disrupt the 34th Annual gay, lesbian, transgender, transsexual, transvestite, and misc. transgressor "Southern Decadence" festival. New Orleans' infamous "Gay Mardi Gras" was to be held from August 31 to September 5, 2005. More than one hundred thousand happy-go-lucky homosexual men and women had planned to converge on the city to do together whatever it is that homosexuals like to do when they get together in New Orleans (which does not usually include worshiping Christ).

Heterosexuals also died, of course. But there were no innocent victims, because in God's eyes, no one is innocent! ("All have sinned and failed to glorify God" and "The wages of sin is death").

(If you are one of those who think that Hurricane Katrina's August 29 arrival was "a coincidence," or a "natural" disaster, you don't know God: for more information, visit www.repentamerica.com/index.htm, [8/31/05])

And here's another reason, a "good" one, for natural disasters: they are God's hint concerning more of the same, a warning that God intends even worse disasters, down the road a stretch.

Take Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami. These were divine warmups for the second "Great Flood." (God once promised Noah that He and Jesus would never flood the Earth again, but He later changed His mind.) Two thousand years after Noah, Yahveh confided in the prophet Jeremiah, saying:

Thus saith the LORD: "Behold, waters shall rise up out of the north, and there shall be another Great Flood after all, and it shall inundate the Earth and all that is therein, the cities and who dwell therein. Then shall humans weep. All the inhabitants of the Earth shall howl!" (Jeremiah 47:2).

The second Great Flood will make Noah's storm look like a tempest in a teapot. Jeremiah's prophecy is also why so many Bible-believing Christians, and many readers of Gary Stern's book, now keep an inflatable rubber raft under their beds - because God has promised to drown the entire human race with a second global inundation, arising from the North; and because He may not change His mind, for once.

My advice: stop using fossil fuels. The polar ice cap has already begun to melt.

- L.