Deluge redux

The latest country to be hit by a colossal natural disaster is Pakistan. Yesterday, every newscast, every newspaper, gave us the grim statistics -- 1600 dead, 2 million homeless, 14 million lives "disrupted", whatever that means.

And surely as the sun rises in the east, the big numbers were followed by appeals for big money. The United Nations is calling on the rest of the world to pony up $459 million (one TV report said "half a billion" -- a nice round number) in aid for the poor people of Pakistan, the victims of the month.

As an aside, no-one seems to be paying much attention to the flooding and landslides in northwestern China. There too over 1000 have been killed and hundreds of thousands have had their lives "disrupted". But the Chinese haven't held out their begging bowl.

Even if they did, we all know the Chinese are rich. They can look after themselves. And they're not our allies in the War Against Terrorism, so who cares about them.

Yesterday Haiti. Today Pakistan. Tomorrow...who knows. But there will be another disaster somewhere before the end of the year, and we will hear once again anguished pleas to help the poor people of wherever.

Perhaps we shouldn't get quite so excited about these things. Has it occurred to anyone (other than Walt) that these events, devastating though they are, are part of God's plan for this evil world? Or, for the atheists and agnostics, perhaps it's just the natural order of things.

Consider the Biblical story of the Great Flood. It surely describes an inundation such as we are now seeing in that same part of the world. Of course the writer spoke of the waters covering the entire world, because the area around him was all the world he knew. An illiterate Pakistani might describe this week's events the same way.

The Bible says there was a reason for the flood, namely God's displeasure at what we humans had done with the world He created. In modern terms, it was God's way of doing a little housecleaning, like hosing down His driveway.

Silviculturists tell us that forest fires are necessary to destroy dead and decaying vegetation so as to permit new growth. In the same way, it could be that floods, landslides, earthquakes and the like are God's way of thinning out the excess population and cleansing the land of some of the pollution -- like the slums of Port-au-Prince and Karachi -- that we wretched humans inflict on it.

Does that mean we shouldn't send aid? When the Red Cross or Oxfam ask, should we turn a deaf ear? Answer in next post.