Natural Disasters and God

I know I'm not the first to ponder this subject, nor will I be the last.

But it seems that just when we can start to forget about the last disaster and beginning to enjoy "basking in god's light" as JP would say, disaster strikes again. The catastrophe in Haiti is a painful reminder of the fine, almost invisible line between normal, organized and happy life, and total chaos. 30 seconds seperated them.

Each time something like this happens, I think, "how can they really believe in god?". But they do. We humans have a tremendous ability to rationalize, deny, sublimate. We focus our energies on what needs to be done, and deceive ourselves in any way necessary in order to allow ourselves to go forward. So we choose the believe that the dead have gone to a better place. Or that the disaster happened for some good reason. Or, horrifyingly, that the victims deserved their fate. And then there's natural hypocrisy: when the disaster doesn't happen to us, when its far, far away, we don't even have to ask these uncomfortable questions. In that case we are satisfied with the naturalistic explanation. Shit happens. God doesn't really care about them anyway. Only when it happens to us, we search for an answer.

I think that on the Day of Reckoning, God will hold us accountable for having believed in Him. He'll say, "you idiots, I gave you all of the signs that I don't exist. Natural and man made disasters causing untold pointless suffering. A big brain which was able to unlock the secrets of nature and explain almost everything without the need for "miracles". I gave you "The Big Silent Treatment", refusing to communicate with you or answer your prayers. I even showed you that my Holy Book was a fraud.

Yet you stubbornly persisted in your irrational and evil beliefs, and used them to screw other people. Shame on you.

You go straight to Hell.

Ten Discoveries that Pull the Carpet from Underneath Revealed Religion

As I commented on a recent post by Jewish Atheist about homosexuality, I had the idea of collecting in one post some of man's greatest recent discoveries and developments, which strike at the heart of revealed wisdom, and give intellectual underpinning to atheism. I won't go into the classic arguments and proofs (like the existence of evil, etc), but just stick to scientific and sociological developments. OK, here I go. In your comments feel free to add more.

1. The germ theory of infectious disease.

2. The neurochemical basis of mental illness

3. The discovery of fossils and evolution (I know thats a lot in one basket)

4. Cracking the genetic code.

5. The documentary hypothesis

6. The discovery of Ugaritic texts in Syria

7. The granting of equal rights to women

8. The acceptance of the ligitimacy and rights of homosexuals

9. The Big Bang

10. The acceptance of brain death as actual death

As I noted in my comment, 2 additional discoveries are "waiting to happen":

11. Discovering the neurophysiological basis of consciousness and the mind

12. Discovery of life on other planets.