One of the things that is endlessly amusing about those who invoke the wrath of God as an explanation for every bad thing that happens is their total lack of historical perspective. Each new calamity requires a new explanation, fresh attempts by those who seek to speak on behalf of God to discern the message being sent by the latest disaster facing us. We are forever on the brink, it seems, of God's final judgment of our apostasy, a final unleashing of His famously hot temper that we seem to provoke so easily.
It's similar in dynamic to the constant claims that the end is near. One would think that after a few times of hearing such a claim and seeing it fail to materialize, others would take the hint and stop making it. But each apocalyptic prediction seems to exist in a vacuum, as though none had tried the same tortured reasoning before and come up snake eyes. This is what I thought as I read this column by Alan Keyes.
Like past false prophets of God's anger, he takes whatever bad things are happening to us in our economy and our political system and says God is behind it all, evidence of his "awakening" anger over abortion:
Just as the supposed right to property in another's body could not supersede the rights of human nature, so the woman's supposed right to property in her own body cannot supersede her natural human obligation to respect the unalienable right to life. From its founding through all its years of growing unity, increase and success, the United States of America drew strength from its declared commitment to respect the rights and obligations entailed by God's authority upon the existence of our humanity. Now there has suddenly come a upon us a period that threatens on every front our consistent history of progress. Our economy trembles on the brink of disaster; our political institutions tremble at the brink of factional dictatorship; our unity and sovereignty as a people tremble at the brink of dissolution and surrender.
Are these the birth pangs of expectant "hope" and "change," or the justice of God, awakening?
Are those the only two choices? How about a third one: These are the normal cycles of an economy in transition. Or a fourth one: These are the results of purely human flaws, the operation of greed and a lust for power, with no supernatural intervention necessary to bring them about. Both of those things seem far more likely to me than Keyes' explanation, which strikes me as the equivalent of blaming it on leprechauns who are angry because we won't let them have our Lucky Charms.
Keyes' message is simple and can be boiled down to this: My god is getting angry. You wouldn't like my god when he gets angry. Well frankly, Alan, I don't much like your god no matter what emotions he may be feeling at any given moment - though I do recognize that his non-existence offers a compelling excuse for his behavior.
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/06/alan_keyes_historical_blindnes.php
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