The tragedy in Japan has produced a grimly familiar response.
Here’s Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara:
The identity of the Japanese people is greed. This tsunami represents a good opportunity to cleanse this greed, and one we must avail ourselves of. Indeed, I think this is divine punishment.
And here’s Glenn Beck:
I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes, I’m not not saying that either.
What God does is God’s business. But I’ll tell you this, whether you call it Gaia or whether you call it Jesus, there’s a message being sent; ‘Hey, you know that stuff we’re doing. It’s not really working out. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.’ I’m just saying.
I’m at a loss to know what leads people to say this sort of stuff. Maybe they believe it, maybe it’s simple opportunism or maybe it’s an attempt to find some sort of meaning out of a hideous, random event.
It’s certainly very sad.
Omikuji, Tokyo (June 2005) (AS)
Well, if you believe that everything happens according to a divine plan, then either your deity is unjust, or the disaster was punishment for an injustice. Somehow the thought that the divine plan probably shouldn’t have included the injustice in the first place never comes up. I suppose it happened to correct a previous injustice…wait.
Interesting that while Beck’s comments are receiving much attention and criticism, I’ve not seen any angry responses to the Tokyo governer’s postulating that divine judgment was raining down upon Japan’s capitalist greed. The chattering classes pick and choose which religious references to be offended by.
‘Hey, you know that stuff we’re doing. It’s not really working out. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.’
Note that Beck is being deliberately vague on what “it” is. I will assume “it” is anything that I personally disagree with.
From what I can gather, Ishihara is bit like a Japanese Pat Buchanan.
My wife’s priest banged on this topic, too. He was teed off about a Center for Inquiry billboard that promised godless happiness (admittedly, a stupid thing to promise, as happiness depends on the individual in question), and he got into the earthquake. “What good did technology do against the earthquake and the tsunami?” Uh, well, casualties that were about a magnitude lower than we find in less technological places like Haiti and Indonesia–both of which hardly lack for faith in God. Really, it was enough to make me into a MacDonaldian sort of tub-thumper.
The chattering classes pick and choose which religious references to be offended by.
Well, obviously. You don’t get a lot of SWPL cred for knocking the Wisdom of the East(TM).