What’s Going On?

2006 is just a few days old and already the faithful of the world are having the crap kicked out of them.

On January 4th why did 12 miners die in West Virginia when their town and the entire country was praying non-stop for them?
On January 4th a landslide in Indonesia sent mud, rocks and trees cascading onto the Java island village of Cijeruk before dawn, when many residents were asleep or were praying at a mosque, approximately 200 were feared dead, most of the dead were found in the mosque.
On January 5th at least 76 people die when a hotel in Islam's holiest city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, collapsed as millions of Muslims arrived for the annual Hajj pilgrimage?

What is the reason for all the death and suffering that is happening so early in this New Year? The Atheologist didn’t have to search for very long to get some answers. Pat Robertson as usual, was one of the first to offer an explanation, on the subject of the Indonesian and Mecca tragedies he said:

"It’s simple, New Year - New Smiting, that’s a no brainer, when you pray to the wrong God, the right God will smite you, and the good Lord is a smiter extraordinaire. When you cry out, 'Allah Akhbar', while the mud is rising all
around you, you would have to be crazy to think that Jesus would put out his hand, or even his pinky to try to rescue you.”

But Robertson was not so sure about the smiting of the miners and their community, he had several theories:

“It could have been a problem with their praying. I know they say they were praying in that church, but were they praying hard enough? Were enough of them praying? Were they praying correctly? Were there any Atheists present? They do seem like good Christians, going by all the news reports, with them constantly praising and thanking God and Jesus for taking their loved ones from them. It seems that they have not allowed this little mishap, to weaken their faith, but it has actually strengthened it, but I will have to look a little more deeply into this one. Did they change their public school curriculum to include the new sciences of Intelligent Design and Creationism or are they still teaching old fashioned, heathenistic evolution theories that were disproved long ago? This smiting may have had several causes which contributed to it; it’s what’s commonly known as the "combo-smite".”

James Randi, of the James Randi Educational Foundation shares similar similar views as those of Reverand Pat; that the prayers for the miners may not have been properly phrased or that there may not have been enough of them, he writes in his weekly newsletter that when the first report came out on the NBC-TV Today Show:

“that all 13 miners had survived, people were quick to attribute it to God. On that same program, there was an item about a woman who’d won a huge lottery prize. The first words out of her mouth were, “God has answered my prayers!”…God ignored all the prayers for the trapped miners… because do you suppose there weren’t quite enough prayers? God allowed the miners to die because the pleas for mercy directed at Him weren’t properly phrased, while the lottery winner’s prayers were better formulated?”

An acquaintance of the Atheologist, who goes by the name of Crosius, seems to think that Mr. Robertson may be on to something with the prayer issue and Atheists, he notes that:

“There are no miner deaths in countries without Athiests, so Athiesm, diluting the power of prayer is to blame.”

Crosius’ theory is similar to the one that states that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s.

It’s possible that if we all learned to pray correctly, maybe God wouldn’t just answer prayers at a rate that makes it seem like he wasn’t listening or even there.

The Atheologist