Nubeals Reports

MYANMAR: The cyclone in Burma Myanmar is being seen by the locals as a God-willed retaliation against their totalitarian, lazy leaders. The government, they said, was more concerned with their constitutional referendum until it really hit them – literally and more adversely in their southern parts. Now the government has received its punishment and must work its ass off.

Calamities have lately been seen as God-sends in the recent years. The issue of increasing homosexuality in Northern Pakistan was cited as being the reason for the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. “God wanted to rid the world of those evil-doers.”

And for labelled-and-treated-as-terrorists Muslims at many parts around the world, the December 2004 Indian Ocean undersea earthquake was God’s punishment for ‘idol worshipers’.

Together, many religions take calamities as signs of Doomsday approaching. The Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam at least have a concept of heaven and hell, and for that concept to materialize, the world must come to an end soon sooner or later. With calamities becoming a common occurrence there is no doubt in a lot of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike that Doomsday is near.

I suppose, one day a major calamity will earth the entire planet. Maybe, like in the movie Armageddon, we will use science to survive and prevail. Or maybe, like the people of Lut, we will cease to exist and perhaps be preserved in some special way.

Lut was the nephew of Abrahim who went to the city of Sodom (now you know where ’sodomy’ comes from) which was on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The people of Lut engaged in homosexuality and other evil so they were apparently engulfed in burning lava by God’s will and the whole thing was so sudden that their entire town was preserved (and rediscovered centuries later according to a show on National Geographic).