New York’s Union Theological Seminary began the academic year with an explosive speech by Bill Moyers, late of PBS and CBS television, who was introduced as “the most respected journalist in America.”
“The country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is,” Moyers charged. “Democracy is in peril.”
He compared conservative Christian activists with Muslim terrorists who can cite “many verses in the Quran” as grounds “for waging war for God’s sake.”
Moyers cited the incredible devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and linked this with the Genesis flood. He said millions of conservatives believe the biblical teaching that God brought the deluge to punish human sin and also accept “God-ordered genocide” elsewhere in the Old Testament.
His point: It’s dangerous to “read the Bible as literally true” and liberals must resist those holding that belief.
Others also used Katrina to level religious criticism of President Bush’s administration, among them the leader of America’s National Council of Churches and a bishop in Bush’s own United Methodist Church.
However, the politicking was less religiously intriguing than an issue Moyers raised: Does God ever use nature to judge sin?
Intense Internet discussion about God’s purposes ensued among the type of Christian conservatives Moyers fears, for instance on World magazine’s “Theologica” Web log.
Theologica regular Mike Russell, a former newspaperman with a counseling practice in College Station, Texas, provoked many responses. He attacked the claim that Katrina was God’s judgment upon New Orleans for its “debauchery and ribald behavior.”
Citing the Genesis flood in just the manner Moyers disdained, Russell said when God enacts judgment in the Bible “he doesn’t seem to allow the unrighteous to escape or the righteous to perish.” Moreover God gives a warning and opportunity for repentance beforehand. Katrina didn’t fit that pattern, Russell contended.
Russell believes nature is mysteriously flawed due to humanity’s fall into original sin, so “Katrina was the result of sin, but it was not a judgment on sins.”
Citing the Book of Job, theologians often say humanity can never understand the ways God uses nature.
Other bloggers included the president of the Affiliation of Christian Engineers, who thought that “instead of blaming God” we should blame the “engineering design deficiencies in the New Orleans levee system.”
The dominant religious reactions, of course, weren’t Bush-bashing or speculation about divine retribution but prayers for victims and overwhelming responses to calls for volunteers and contributions.
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