Monday, March 14, 2011

Japanese Disaster and Christian superstition

Over the last few days I've noticed all too many (ignorant) connections between recent (term used liberally) disasters and the idea of a zombie Jesus coming back to Earth. The passage is from Luke 21:10-11. It says, "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines, and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven." There are so many things I could say about this...first of all this INCREDIBLY VAGUE passage could refer to any random snippet of time throughout human history. There have always been disasters, tragedies, etc. as long as there have been people for them to happen to.

The human brain is wired for pattern detection. It's how we've survived and evolved to the top of the food chain. Because of this we have a propensity to make ridiculous assumptions based on faulty evidence, or no evidence at all.  Sure, 9/11, the Haitian earthquake, and the Japanese earthquake/tsunami have all occurred on the 11th day of each respective month (the reason for these various posts/tweets). But 9/11 was a decade ago. If there world were ending and zombie Jesus was coming back then why wait ten years in between to wreck more peoples' lives?

To say these events are connected is Glenn Beck style conspiracy theorizing. I know people love their religions and such but this book (written by random dudes and pieced together by other random dudes in order to serve their political agenda) is not a reasonable way to predict or interpret world events. Not to mention the incredible amount of insensitivity it brings to such a horrific situation. Thousands of people have died, to this day no one is sure exactly how many, and my American friends come off as insensitive and overly dogmatic to my Japanese friends/roommates as well as the rest of the international community when instead of showing concern or trying to help in some way, they use this as an opportunity to jump on their pulpits and assert their superstitious beliefs and in some cases espouse the reason these things happen to these people (not living their lives the right way, i.e. the Christian way.)

This makes me angry in so many ways that I cannot describe nor am I able to fully explain them here. The point is, think before you decide to ram your religious beliefs and opinions down other peoples' throats. Your book also speaks of bashing babies against rocks, raping women, promoting slavery, and picking up sticks on a Saturday as a crime punishable by death. Not to mention the multiple headed monsters and warrior angels. Sounds more like a demented comic book than something to devote my life to. But hey, that's just my opinion.

1 comment:

  1. Samson you are awesome human being. I admire your blog posts. Please post more often :) that would be great

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