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A Pre-ordained Meeting

September 9, 2005 by

I was just interrupted in my writing by a couple of Christians of some stripe or another come to the door to hand me some inspirational literature, much as I was brainwashed into doing as a teenager. One of them brought up the inevitable subject of Hurricane Katrina, and asked if I believed that God intentionally allowed such massive suffering. I told him that I didn’t know about God, but that an awful lot of suffering was allowed by the human beings in charge that they should have prevented. He looked genuinely surprised, as though gripped by a quasi-Islamic fatalism convinced that all suffering is God’s will, and that there’s nothing the Hand of Man can or should do to ameliorate it.

I wonder what he would have done if I had knocked him down my porch steps with a good punch in the nose and said, sorry, that was God’s will. Reporting me to the police would have been a little inconsistent, wouldn’t it?

09/9/05 10:57 AM | filed under: main |

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