An e-mail exchange between my brother (True Ancestor) and me:
DG: Is there a . . .
God? Does this God direct a tsunami onto several shores at once, having sorted out which of the 40,000 lives should be ended? [UPDATE, 1/7: 140,000, now, and counting.]
And how does one detect a God -- or the God of which we've conceived and (sometimes) convinced ourselves, in the trajectory of a life like I. F.'s [our parents' close friend who just died], born in a U.S. shtetl, not learning English til the age of 8, living a life devoted to social justice, and suffering the death of his oldest son?
I tend to tell people who ask such questions that life ain't a miniseries. The grander designs behind what happen to the world, whether at their simplest or most catastrophic -- are beyond our ability to grasp. The miracle that we're here at all is not diminished by suffering, it's imbued with even more miraculousness. And if everyone good had it good, and everyone bad got washed away, we would be puppets in a morality play, which life has never remotely resembled.
But, damn. When you see the bomb-like devastation that arrives out of the blue, it makes ya think: God invented terrorism. We're rank amateurs by comparison.
AG: I had a conversation with Elizabeth [Randall, our sister-in-law, an Episcopal priest] once that made a great impression on me. She raised the classic question, "Is God all-good or all-powerful? Because He can't be both." (Or, as Archibald MacLeish put it in his play "J.B.," "If God is God, He is not good; if God is good, He is not God.") And her answer was, "All-good -- of course!"
The only God I can conceive of set this amazing world in motion, but doesn't control every detail of it. (It would seem so stupid to me, for instance, to thank God for sparing our house in Fort Myers Beach, as if He had something personal against Punta Gorda. Sodom, Gomorrah, Punta Gorda??) I think God is what prompts us to avoid and prevent evil (if we're not lazy and in denial, if we have the guts, big if) and when we can't, to make the best of the worst that happens. I also think God is connected to awareness somehow. God might have screamed to people on the beaches to get out of there (and to German Jews in the 1930s to pack up and leave), but most of them weren't listening. I heard one survivor's story about how the director of their hotel was down at the beach and when he saw the water weirdly ebb out, he yelled to everyone to get off the beach, fast. No one from that hotel was hurt. This won't ever happen again quite this way, because these countries will put in tsunami warning buoys even on the supposedly "safe" Indian Ocean side.
Hoodafuknoze.
____________
Then I found this post on Althouse and sent it to David. Go there to read the whole post and follow the links:
“I think we have done something wrong and God is punishing us"
There are very few statements like that in the news stories about the tsunami. [Here] is a story of a Hindu group in Michigan condemning the characterization of the wave as divine retribution. Many prefer to see God's hand in the way some survived, like the baby who floated on a mattress. The willingness to thank and not blame God is sometimes truly astounding:
". . . The waves suddenly came in and I was saved by God -- I got caught in the branches of a tree," said Mahmud Azaf, who lost his three children to the tsunami.
An Alabaman man who was on vacation in Phuket when the tsunami hit saw hundreds of dead bodies, but perceived the will of God in the fact he was able to save one child: "That must have been why God let me live this long."
[Here] is an opinion piece from a Christian minister (Roger Ray) that does a straightforward job of presenting the religious perspective:
"There is an account in John's gospel . . . Jesus and his disciples encountered a man who had been born blind. His disciples asked Jesus why this had happened; was it the man's sin or his parents? Jesus' answer . . . : 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned. He was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.'
That is the only perspective on a crisis I ever want to have. God didn't send the earthquake or the tsunami. God didn't cause people to be killed or hundreds of thousands to be left in danger. But this crisis is an opportunity to demonstrate the works of God. . . . Persons of all faiths have the opportunity to do a good thing and support one another's efforts."
That's where I see God, or want to see God: not in the destruction but in the reaching out, the piercing recognition, stronger than I remember it ever being, that this is one family, that "every man's, woman's, child's death diminishes me."
- amba
UPDATE FROM DAVID: Alan Morinis, with whom I'm studying Mussar, saw things similarly to the Althouse blog you posted on yours. He said, "Events like this -- and like all events -- are opportunities. Not opportunities to say, See?! There is no God,' but to get to know God, the system built by God, and the extent to which God does and doesn't actively run our lives."
UPDATE II: A woman whose first-person story of surviving the tsunami in Thailand is posted on Unknowncountry.com concludes by saying, "This kind of tragedy simply breaks one's heart open to life and how fragile we all are. How can we wage war on [one] another becomes even more impossible to contemplate." Makes you wonder: is that the message we're meant to get? Mini-update: one of my thoughts about the "message," if there is one, of this Flood, comes down to one word: "Division." Between Tamil Tigers and Sinhalese; between red states and blue states. God might be trying to awaken us to the fact that we are one family, that the grieving wail of a South Indian woman feels like it came out of my own gut, and in fact did. The response has been to work together. Even Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush -- a trivial example, maybe, but a signal one. Salty Vicar echoes this thought, not as his own, particularly, but as one of those floating around:
Some see God in the aftermath of such disaster. Maybe he wanted the revolutionaries in Aceh to submit to the Indonesian military; or he was tired of the civil war in Sri Lanka, thinking – you petty humans, if you really want destruction, let me tell you what I can do. No religion was safe from his wrath - Hindu Mystics, Thai brothels, mosques, teak framed temples and churches, nunneries and beach huts, all broken before the surging, indiscriminate waves.
UPDATE III: Rodger Kamenetz: "There is no God in the disaster. . . . I think there is God in the response".
UPDATE IV: Rabbi Yehoshua Karsh strongly disagrees with most of the above:
When a child asks
if G-d
caused the Tsunami
Don’t be afraid to say
Yes . . .
That doesn’t mean
You know why He did it
You don’t have to know
Why He did it
Let them ask
Let them question
Let them be angry
If they feel anger
Keep it real
Even if it’s scary
Keep it real
Read the whole poem. Apparently the first tenet of believing Judaism is: G-D is all-powerful. Is He all-good? Our conception of "good" is too small, too local and self-interested, to answer that question. (See the Book of Job.) He is all-powerful, and He is all-wise. It all comes from Him. To believe anything less is to
relegate G-d
To nothing more than
Santa Claus
You don't have to be a kid to think that's scary. And sublimely unsentimental. I don't know if I can believe it. But I'm impressed.
UPDATE V: An eminent Baptist agrees:
God is in control of the entire universe, and there is not even a single atom outside His sovereignty. And God's goodness and love are beyond question. The Bible leaves no room for equivocation on either truth.
Thus R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And the meaning of the tsunami?
In Australia . . . the Anglican Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen, explained that natural disasters are a part of God's warning that judgment is coming. Jensen was right of course, as Jesus Himself pointed to natural disasters as a warning to human beings of our own mortality and of the coming judgment of God. . . . Jesus clearly warned His disciples that famines and earthquakes, along with wars and other ominous phenomena, would be the "birth pangs" of coming tribulation and judgment [Matthew 24:7-8].
We each look at the tsunami and strive mightily to see the universe we want to see.
UPDATE VI: This has got to be the single most-searched, most-blogged, most-discussed question weighing on the collective mind and heart today. And it's utterly fascinating to hear people of every religion, every spiritual and agnostic and atheistic persuasion, weigh in. From Scarborough Country last night (1/6/'05):
JOE SCARBOROUGH: [T]he big question going around the Middle East right now is whether the Christmas tsunami was God‘s punishment for sex-crazed tourists in Asia. . . . At least, that is what some Saudi clerics are claiming.
UPDATE: It was Sheikh Fawzan al-Fawzan:
Some of our forefathers said that if there is usury and fornication in a certain village, Allah permits its destruction. We know that at these resorts, which unfortunately exist in Islamic and other countries in South Asia, and especially at Christmas, fornication and sexual perversion of all kinds are rampant. The fact that it happened at this particular time is a sign from Allah. It happened at Christmas, when fornicators and corrupt people from all over the world come to commit fornication and sexual perversion.
Thanks, Chrenkoff, for this and other weird Saudi, Hollywood and more quotes on the tsunami. Now back to "Scarborough Country":
MAX LUCADO, author of IT'S NOT ABOUT ME and other Christian bestsellers: God‘s priority is not this world, but the next. He has never promised us that there would be no suffering in this life. In fact, he has promised that the suffering could be used to prepare us for and help us to make decisions about the life to come. The 150,000 deaths tragically remind us how frail our life is and how brief our time on Earth is.
The question is, can God be both good and strong? I believe he can. I believe he is a good God, and what he does always has a purpose. It has a reason. I believe he is strong. I don‘t believe he is capricious or careless. I don‘t understand his ways. Whoever does understand his ways claims a falsehood, because his ways are higher than ours, but I do believe that he will use this to glorify his name and to awaken people to the brevity of this life. . . . [T]he priority of God has never been earthly comfort. The priority of God has always been eternal salvation. And throughout scripture, he does whatever it takes. He brings burdens or he brings blessings to awaken us.
WILLIAM DONOHUE, President of the Catholic League: Catholicism in particular is a theology of suffering, as Cardinal O‘Connor once said. Cardinal O‘Connor once stunned the Jewish community by saying that the great gift of Judaism was the Holocaust. He didn‘t mean that to insult Jews.
What he was saying was this. There is no greater suffering than what Christ did. He died on the cross, but that‘s a source of optimism. That‘s a source of redemption. So, I think we have to look at this in a positive sense. In one strange sense, then, what‘s happening to these poor Asian people is their gift to the world. It makes us think about our mortality and about salvation and about redemption. That‘s what we should be thinking about.
And then there's this from Hirhurim (Musings) -- perhaps the most extreme example of "Jewish guilt" I've ever seen:
In wake of the recent tragedy in the Far East, whose deadly repercussions are still being felt, some rabbis have tried to find reasons for the "natural" disaster. One sin in particular that I have seen attributed as the cause is inappropriate talking in the synagogue. . . . R. Yoel Teitelbaum . . . notes that rabbis have traditionally responded to great disasters by searching for spiritual causes. . . . Do we not find in the Talmud many statements that attribute specific disasters to specific sins? . . .
With such a vast historical tradition, why are people so offended by these types of statements? . . . [W]e have become acculturated to the modern, secular world. People simply do not believe that violating commandments are sins that will be punished . . . We trivialize the commandments so that violating them does not seem like something that should merit major punishments. . . . That is not the faith of our ancestors.
On the other hand, when we attribute a disaster that happens to others on our sins, are we not being arrogant? First of all, we must keep in mind that the Torah calls us God's firstborn son. This is an obligation and a responsibility. Regardless, though, what is the other option? Would it be better to blame the tragedy on the sins of those who died?
This debate is just wild.
UPDATE VII: Yikes! This may be the wildest one of all.
Mis-nagid describes him- or herself as "a secretly atheist frum (pious) Jew -- a kind of mole inside the minyan. He (or she, but the anger sounds male) calls other devout Orthodox "godiots," and frankly admires the enlightened, rational view of the tsunami offered by science. You expected this to be coming from Richard Dawkins (whom s/he quotes approvingly), not from a "frumie":
The godiots would love for you to take away from the tsunami tragedy that "we are helpless; throw yourself at the mercy of [Yahweh|Allah|Jesus] and trust that He'll only torture you for your own good." This is the exact opposite of the true message, and is totally self-serving on their part. They would love for you to think that you're helpless, and that there are no better options than faith.
The true message is that faith is futile. Whether or not any religion is true, faith has shown itself to be utterly ineffective. Prayer doesn't work, but reason does. We are not helpless, unless we discard reason for the futility of faith. People resort to praying in situations that are not under their control. No one prays that the fridge door will open -- they just open it. Priests, Rabbis and Mullahs benefit from a sense of helplessness and are the last ones to give men tools to empower themselves.
Unlike religion, which is based on faith, science, being based on reason, works. It's not perfect, but it gives us earlier warnings, and better understanding of the timings, risks and consequences. It gives us airships to move supplies across the world in time to save lives. It gives us vaccines to stave off infectious outbreaks. It gives us radios to coordinate rescue efforts with. It gave us mass communication tools to help spread the word about the desperate need for help. Meanwhile, the Pope held a mass, and some words were said. No results were achieved, nor can any be expected to be.
Mesorah.org sent out an email invitation to a live online class titled "Tsunamis. What is the Torah's View?" That's as useful as a class whose topic is "Tsunamis. What is the Elizabethan view?"
Besides, you're not likely to get any valuable moral advice from the Mishna Berurah. For example, if the tsunami knocked a house down onto a goy on Shabbos, you're halachically required to let him die, rather than "violate" Shabbos. If he's a Jew, move heaven and earth to save him. If not, heaven forbids you to move earth.
Apparently there's a whole underworld of secretly irreverent Orthodox who do their blaspheming in blogs. Mis-nagid links to a bunch of them, including one character who calls himself Rabbi Pinky Schmeckelstein and features "Words of Torah Dripping with Sarcasm and Condescension." Another unsuspected world to explore!
UPDATE VII: Gerard Vanderleun at The American Digest has a beautiful and haunting essay on why this disaster is too big to feel:
[W]hat has happened has already gone, beyond our power to recall it, into the realm of myth. We will remember it not as the Great Tsunami of 2004, but as the day that the sea swallowed up the land and all that were in its path. And we will all vaguely remember that it has all happened before, in smaller or greater ways, long ago, and will happen again. We have seen the myth of the deluge made real and as such it plunges deep down into our souls, far deeper than that shallow place where our modern, civilized emotions dwell.
UPDATE VIII: Sitting with our dad (87 and healthy) on the beach, watching the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico -- for the nightly quality of which he traditionally gets the credit or blame -- he comments on the congruence of of this activity with "the sunset of my life." (One of those long, lingering ones, in no hurry to be over.) A bit later he says, "You know, I imagine I pass away, and I come face to face with God, and he says, 'Well, here I am. What's this about you not believing in me?' And I say, 'How can I believe in you when you let the Holocaust happen? When you allow the poorest people on earth to suffer so terribly?' And God says [making a fist] 'C'mon! Ya gotta believe! Whats'amatta you?!' And I say, 'NO. WHATS'AMATTA YOU!'"
That may just be the last word.
In the Larry King's interview on Jan 7 2005, a panel of six spiritual leaders offers their insightful views on the Dec 26 Tsunami disaster but none offer a plausible explanation for the causes.
The missing view is from the entity Seth (of Jane Roberts). You might have heard of him .He offers an unusual explanation on earthquakes as found in his book "The Nature of Personal Reality" -dictated through Jane Roberts.
[See my summary below and the relevant book transcripts on 1. dying under natural disasters 2. Earths and and periods of great emotional and social upheaval throughout the world
S U M M A R Y
Dec26 Tsunami – we created & formed it?
In the Larry King's interview on Jan 7 2005, a panel of six spiritual leaders offers their insightful views on the Dec 26 Tsunami disaster but none offer a plausible explanation for the causes.
Reference to the interview (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0501/07/lkl.01.html) with CNN’s Larry King, spiritualist Deepak Chopra said
“... there's lots of evidence, even scientific, that the earth is a living organism. Is it possible that our consciousness and the turbulence in our consciousness have anything to do with the turbulence in nature?”
“If we quiet the turbulence in our collective minds and we heal the rift in our collective souls,” Chopra said, “that could have an effect on nature’s mind -- if nature has a mind.”
In this regard, Seth (of Jane Roberts http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5484/quotes.htm) explains (see pg 405-409, Book reference below) that those in earthquake regions are attracted to such spots because of their innate understanding of the astonishing relationship between exterior circumstances and their own private mental and emotional patterns.
Here you can find individuals of great energy; of unstable, ‘excessively’ temperamental natures
They need a strong stimulus or impact with reality against which to pit themselves. However there is often a great impatience with social situations and unusual vitality. Such individuals operate at a high pitch, and en masse emit inordinate amounts of emotional non-physical qualities which being unstable affect the deep electromagnetic integrity of the earth's structure.
No event is predestined. Earthquakes and their resulting tsunamis are often associated with periods of great social change and unrest. The Aceh and Sri Lanka areas have been in turmoil for years. The earthquake caused a tidal wave on one side of the world, just as a stroke might affect a portion of the body far from the original damage
Here you can find individuals of great energy; of unstable, ‘excessively’ temperamental natures and with intense capacities for creativity and innovation.
If we believe that the earth is a ‘living organism’ then our planet has a body as much as we have. Our blood follows certain prescribed patterns - so does the wind. We are inside the body of the earth in those terms.
As your body is in a state of constant flux and chemical interaction, so is the atmosphere, which reflects on another level all of the psychic, chemical, and electromagnetic properties that exist within the body.
There is little difference between the currents of blood that flow through your veins, and the wind current, except that the one seems to be within you -and the other without. Both are manifestations of the same interrelationship and motion, however.
Your planet has a body as much as you have. Your blood follows certain prescribed patterns and so does the wind. You are inside the body of the earth in those terms.
As cells within your body influence it, so too does our individual body affect the larger body of the earth.
The weather faithfully reflects the feelings of individuals in any given local territory. Overall weather patterns follow deeper inner rhythms of emotion. We do not simply react to the weather, we also help to form it
Also in the same interview with Larry King, the Muslim scholar Maher Hathout agreed that the tsunami was not a punishment thrown down by God. He said: ‘It was an accident.’
Seth stated that, if we accept the possibility of the slightest, smallest, most insignificant accident, then indeed we must believe in a universe in which accidents are not the exceptions but the rule?
Once we accept that idea, then we must accept the idea of a random accidental universe, in which we are at the mercy of any accident in which mind or purpose have little meaning. In which we are at the mercy of all random happenings.
In such a universe, the individual has little hope for he will return to the non-existence that he came from. He has no control over his destiny and can be swept aside at any point by random fate over which he has no recourse.
The only answer to this is to realize that we form physical events - individually and en masse. We form and create the physical reality – including the Dec 26 tsunami.
K Y Wong
562 Jalan F-16, Tmn Melawati,
53100 K.L. Tel:03-41081362, 016-341-4279
[email protected],[email protected],[email protected]
references:
Other attributed quotes by Seth on
1. Dying in a natural catastrophe – an unconscious choice?
No one dies under any circumstances or in a disaster who is not prepared to die. There is always some conscious recognition, however, though the individual may play tricks with himself and pretend it is not there. Even animals sense their dying ahead of time and on that level man or woman is no different.
Many more human beings are aware of their impending deaths than is generally known. It seems, perhaps, easier to have no conscious idea of the year or time that death might occur. Unconsciously of course each man and woman knows, and yet hides the knowledge.
The knowledge is usually hidden for many reasons, but the fact of death, personal death, is never forgotten. It seems obvious, but the full enjoyment of life would be impossible in the framework, now, of earthly reality without the knowledge of death.
Spiritually the death sentence given you is another chance at life, if you are freely able to accept life with all of its conditions and to feel its full dimensions, for that alone will rejuvenate your spiritual and physical self.
I believe those who die in catastrophes choose the experience – the drama, even the terror when that occurs. They prefer to die in the most dire circumstances – being swept away by the raging waves of an ocean or crushed by an earthquake or battered by the winds of a hurricane. They prefer to leave physical life in a blaze of perception, battling for their lives, at a point of challenge, “fighting” and not acquiescent.
Natural disasters possess the great rousing energy of powers unleashed, of nature escaping man's discipline.
And for the young who died under such conditions may hold the strong belief that old age represents a degradation of the spirit and an insult to the body. Slow death in a hospital or an experience with an illness would be unthinkable to these same people.
A catastrophe is used consciously or unconsciously according to the individual. Some people change their plans and I leave town a day before a disaster comes about. Others stay. None of this is accidental.
Unconscious material is admitted into consciousness according to those beliefs an individual holds about himself, his reality, and his place in it.
Those who want to use their unconscious precognition of such an event will take advantage of it and save themselves, and choose - not to be involved.
2. Correlations could be discovered between earthquakes and periods of great emotional and social upheaval throughout the world
extracted from book, pg 405-409
Night and day - represent the innate rhythms of your consciousness physically. Through natural phenomena, for you are not yet equipped to perceive longer duration days. Your nervous system would find great difficulty in rhythm in which a day was stretched out to be three or in a four times as long, for instance.
The rhythms of your body and of your consciousness follow the patterns of your planet. The planet itself is composed of atoms and molecules, each with their own kind of consciousness, however; and in the gestalt and cumulative cooperative organization of their nature the physical structure is formed - out of consciousness.
As this formation took place there was constant give-and-take between interior and exterior realities, in your terms. The growth of feelings, sensations, I am-ness, concepts and beliefs was paralleled by the resulting exterior manifestations of animal species, and mineral and vegetable emergences; with these came the growth of complementary neurological structures, and the precise physical formations, such as mountains, valleys, seas, and so forth needed to sustain them.
In greater terms all of these events occur simultaneously. To make this easier to understand, however, I am talking in terms of your time.
Your feelings are as natural a part of the environment as trees are. They have a great effect upon the weather. There are even connections that can be made, for instance, between epilepsy and earthquakes, where great energy and instability come together, affecting the physical properties of the earth.
Your feelings have electromagnetic realities that rise outward, affecting the atmosphere itself, but at the time we paid little attention to the implications behind such ideas. Beliefs are the formations of self-conscious. minds, even as buildings are at another level.
Beliefs direct, generate, focus, and harness feelings. In the context then feelings are being compared to mountains, lakes and rivers. Ideas and beliefs bring about those obvious man-made structures that imply self-conscious minds and ocean of interrelated social events.
Feelings are still dependent upon your neurological structure and its impact- with physical reality. An animal feels but it does not believe. Your feelings with their chemical interactions have, beside their subjective reality to you, electo-magnetic properties, as indeed your thoughts have.
But your bodies must rid themselves of chemical excesses in the same way that land must clear itself of excess water. There are what am going to call here "ghost" chemicals-aspects of norm chemicals that you have not perceived so far, where certain thresholds are approached in which chemicals are changed into purely electromagnetic properties, and energy released that directly affects the physical atmosphere.
As your body is in a state of constant flux and chemical interaction, so is the atmosphere, which reflects on another level all of the psychic, chemical, and electromagnetic properties that exist within the body.
There is little difference between the currents of blood that flow through your veins, and the wind current, except that the one seems to be within you -and the other without. Both are manifestations of the same interrelationship and motion, however.
Your planet has a body as much as you have. Your blood follows certain prescribed patterns and so does the wind. You are inside the body of the earth in those terms. As cells within your body influence it, so does your body affect the larger body of the earth? The weather faithfully reflects the feelings of the individuals in any. given local territory. Overall weather patterns follow deeper inner rhythms of emotion.
Those in earthquake regions are attracted to such spots because of their innate understanding of the astonishing relationship between exterior circumstances and their own quite private mental and emotional patterns. Here you can find - individual of great energy; of unstable, “excessively" temperamental natures, and with intense capacities for creativity and innovation. They need - a strong stimulus or impact with reality against which to pit themselves, ` however. There is often a great impatience with social situations, and unusual vitality. Such individuals operate at a high pitch, and en masse emit inordinate excesses of what I have called ghost chemicals.
Such emotional nonphysical qualities are unstable, and affect the deep electromagnetic integrity of the earth's structure. Obviously there have been earthquakes where there are no people, but in all cases the origins are to be found in mental properties rather than exterior ones.
Earthquakes are very often associated with periods of great social change or unrest, and from such locations the fault lines originate and are projected outward. They may then affect a generally unpopulated area on another continent, or an island, or cause a tidal wave on the other side of the world, even as a stroke might affect a portion of the body far from the original damage.
You do not need a self-conscious mind to feel, and in the "past," earthquakes represented the feeling patterns of species in the same way unstable conditions of consciousness that in themselves initiated natural phenomena, further altering the state of consciousness and the conditions of species as well.
In your terms consciousness is wedded with matter, and any of its experiences are physically materialized through interaction. There are great correlations between thunderstorms and psychic storms, for example, and between unstable electromagnetic properties of both feeling and thought, the brain's ability to handle these, and its need to rid itself of excesses. You do not simply react to the weather. You help form it, even as you breathe the air and then send it outward again. The brain is a nest of electromagnetic relationships that you do not understand. In certain terms it is a controlled storm. From it spring ideas that are quite as natural as lightning.
When lightning strikes the earth, it changes it. There are also changes that come about through the impact of your - thoughts upon the atmosphere. The great overall inner trust with which you were born forms the basis for the encompass-. Reliability of the physical earth. Your body dwells in the earth as you dwell in your body. You were born with a faith in your existence that automatically directed the proper functioning of your personal corporeal self. This provided the necessary stabilizing properties upon which your consciousness could play, and through which it could effectively and creatively operate.
The smallest atom has its own kind of built-in" integrity, upon which all of its organizations and alterations art', based, so generally there is a gestalt kind of permanence within" the body of the earth.
Yet with all of this there is always change, as with the experience of time in a linear fashion any event must "knock out" another one. In terms of your focus a given occurrence "takes time." You know that many events occur that you do not consciously perceive, but take on the word of others. In your terms, therefore, change is apparent. The body is altered.
Now: On other than conscious levels, simply as creatures, you are well aware of impending storms, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and so forth.
Posted by: mwt | February 01, 2005 at 10:27 AM
I wrote a whole bunch more on the tsunami, Including a reply to British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
Posted by: Mis-nagid | February 17, 2005 at 06:29 PM
BTW, I'm a guy, but you're wrong about he anger being male. I could (but can't) introduce you to some angry atheist stuck in the Orthodox community that have XX chromosomes.
Posted by: Mis-nagid | February 17, 2005 at 06:32 PM