If we assess ideas by Darwinian logic (and ever since Richard Dawkins coined that enticing term meme we have increasingly been doing so) then there is something remarkably satisfying about the idea of apocalypse. Here is an idea whose key advantage is that it ensures that religious fervour is massively increased at exactly the moment that a civilisation trembles on the edge of an abyss. It ensures that religious ideas are disseminated with even greater determination at a time when catastrophe is most likely to kill off all their previous adherents.
It's about that time again.
Pestilence is a rather clumsy way for God to go about culling humans. Aids was probably the hardcore moralists' favourite plague, because it seemed to have some sort of smart-targeting for those given to shenanigans of the back-bottom variety, but even the delight of the self-righteous must by now turned to chagrin as HIV turned out to be the usual blunt instrument striking about it with indiscriminate malice.
Where now is the Angel of Death who exceeded even the most optimistic boasts of ordnance manufacturers in striking down the first born of Egypt? Instead we have that epidemic equivalent of the cluster bomb: flu. Flu is what a wrathful deity finds at the bottom of His carpet bag once the locusts and boils have all been deployed. Short of any honest-to-goodness flu, He even had to make one up out of discarded scraps of other flus. H1N1 is the chop suey of flus.
Well, God made Adam from a handful of mud, I suppose, so He may regard working wonders with unpromising elements as a sort of prudent Home Economy.
So, let's look into the abyss and imagine that H1N1 does its grizzly work, bringing our civilisation to its knees. Almost certainly, the consequence would be an improvement in the religious fervour of the survivors, with the net result that the various faiths, great and small, would all claim a modest victory. Why is the overall reaction not that of Voltaire's to the Lisbon earthquake? Why is the net reaction to God's cruelty not the rejection of a cruel God?
Religious moderates argue that the problem of pain is not a problem because God is not specifically providential; He's more a "sit back and let the mechanism whirr" sort of deity, interested in the Big Picture and not so much the fall of a sparrow. If we're all saved posthumously, then the miseries of the world are a small price to pay for the freedom to carve our own moral path through the spatio-temporal whatnot.
All that is very well, but when people pray is that the God they are praying to? Or is it the one with The Carpet-Bag of Punishment?
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