Today Rainey Rants While Oversimplifying the Development of Human Thinking

Long, long ago when time was still misty and the world was newer than now; before the dawn of written knowledge, refrigeration and "Battlestar Galactica", the people of the earth were pagans.
They had tools, skills, liturgies and music but there were things they just didn't get. Volcanoes, for example. Because the unexpected eruption of same had a tendency to put a serious crimp in their plans, the pagans did the only thing they could think to do. They'd make a nice meal, beat on some drums and toss a virgin into the smoking maw of the angry volcano. The virgin died.

The volcano erupted anyway.

The pagans were a little slow. It took them a while, for example, to figure out that they needn't freak whenever it got dark. Happily, they eventually realized that the bright orb in the sky would come back up after a while. They learned to relax.

Pagans would sometimes offer up songs, dances and fruit salad in order to secure a good crop. Over time, they started to figure out that things like weeding, watering and mulching went a long way toward achieving a successful harvest. But they were still pagans after all, so if there was a killing frost or infestation of locusts they figured they must have ticked off what came to be called "the gods" (or karma or kismet, depended on where you were being pagan at the time). This scenario usually resulted in another virgin sacrifice.

Over time, things like logic and science came along and most people began to understand that there were basic principles which guided the forces in the world: seasons, day and night, gravity...like that. This understanding didn't necessarily prevent erupting volcanoes, locusts and floods but it went a long way toward diminishing virgin sacrifices.

As understanding grew, there were fewer pagans of the sort I described, with most people coming to realize that sometimes stuff just happens.

There are, however, still pagans among us. Not the happy-go-lucky-naked-fire-dance-pie-eating-"religion-seems-silly-to-me-but-you-do-as-you-like" pagans. I refer to those pagans who don't realize that they are pagans but seems to think that every natural disaster (or even human caused ones resulting from war or bad lifestyle choices) are somehow the act of a vengeful god.

Certainly, sometimes things happen as a result of poor choices. Wrecking your car while drunk for example. After such an event, however, the question isn't "Why am I being punished?" The correct phrasing is "Why was I such a stupid jackass?" But more to my point (and I do have one), being a stupid jackass isn't the only thing that will visit trouble upon you. Truth is, you could do everything right your whole life - abstain from cigarettes and booze and bacon, exercise 30 minutes a day, give to charity, smile at everyone you meet and drive the speed limit but you still won't be exempt. Something, sometime is going to take you out. It's not a punishment. It just is.

And natural disasters? You can abandon your trailer home in Tornado Alley, move to a seismically retrofitted house on high ground but stuff, my friend, is still going to happen. It will happen because some things are just plain out of your control. When bad things happen it's not because anyone is being punished. It's because bad things sometimes happen. Period.

I am fed to the teeth with the arrogance of actors, preachers and pontificatiors of all stripes who declare that horrible events are God's judgement on a select few (and I mean select as in I-don't-much-like-em-so-God-must-not-either sort of way) . That's not how He/She rolls. It's simply not logical. If it were true that bad things are a punishment, then only bad people would suffer. The rest of us would live in blissful joy.

Nope. As Jesus once said, "The rain falls on the just and unjust alike". So do the earthqauakes, plagues, pestilence, reality television and cancer. Which is why I wish people like
Sharon Stone, Pat Robertson, and John Hagee would shut their ignorant, superstitious, pagan mouths.