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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. United only in name After Katrina America remains divided By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 800 words Publication date: September 11, 2005 Nine months ago, when a tsunami washed over Asia people in every country affected came together to help each other. Two weeks ago a hurricane washed over America and within twenty-four hours young men were fighting each other for food and water as the weak, elderly and infirm suffered and died. What to make of a city, a country, where the poor and underprivileged are abandoned, where the color of your skin determines your chances of survival and where armed gangs roam the streets? What to make of a society where in a disaster the police are ordered to rescue citizens and to abandon other human beings? What to make of a president who supervises an inadequate response and who sees the disaster as little more than an opportunity for Trent Lott to rebuild one of his several homes? Order is finally being restored and an army of volunteers across the nation is helping those in trouble, but the memories of rampaging looters and an incompetent president will haunt the country for years to come. Or worse; they will be forgotten until the next disaster strikes and such scenes are repeated again. How many lessons should be learnt from Katrina – and how many will actually be learnt? The reality of global warming? The folly of gun laws that encourage not a “well regimented militia” but anarchy and violence? The need for strong, effective government that protects rather than abandons its citizens? The absurdity of faith? I was reminded of that last point as survivor after survivor told reporters that God would give them the strength to rebuild their lives. Each time I heard such remarks, I shook my head. Why turn to a God who had stood by and watched as men, women and children lost their homes, their possessions, their families and friends? You do not ask help from the man who steals from your house or the woman who murders your brother. Why worship a god whose inaction leads to disaster? I wanted to shake sense into all who prayed or sang hymns. I wanted to shout at them that Katrina proves that there is no god. No lives were saved through prayer. No deity stared down for the heavens and decreed that one person should live and another die. The gulf states were protected by nothing more than ineffective government agencies run by incompetent men. Such things could be said in the privacy of my office. Had I met such vocal Christians face to face I would have kept my mouth shut. If faith in God is what they need to get through the worst days in their lives, then let them keep it, no matter how absurd or meaningless it is. Let them sing and dance until they gather their lives together again. The optimist in me hopes that a week, a month, a year from now, when they have homes, jobs and hopefully stability, that they will look back on these weeks and understand that Katrina demonstrates the irrelevance – and therefore impossibility – of God. But the pessimist in me is not holding his breath. After all, faith is irrational. It depends not on reality but on people’s need to be wanted, cared for and loved. When you have lost everything, you cling to whatever you have. Some children find comfort in an imaginary friend who they create in loving detail; millions of American adults find comfort in an imaginary God. This naivete is as depressing as the violence which Katrina brought in its wake. Where people are encouraged by organisations such as the NRA and the mistakenly named Second Amendment Foundation to own and use guns, the inevitable consequence is not law but anarchy. This is not a coincidence - only in America are the follies of gun ownership and faith so closely entwined. In the wake of Katrina much has been said by the president and others about America’s unity and strength. But despite these fine words and the optimism of “e pluribus unum”, the country has always been divided. Between loyalists and revolutionaries, North and South, white and black, rich and poor. For a brief moment in the 1970s, the nation seemed to be coming together, but since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 the two loudest Americas – one conservative, gun-wielding, religious, the other liberal, eschewing violence, secular – have been growing further apart. And unheard and forgotten, until a tragedy such as Katrina, is the third America – poor, often black, disenfranchised. Nine-eleven offered a unique opportunity bring all Americans together, but George W Bush’s narrow vision of the world and his confrontational style destroyed any potential unity. Katrina offered the president and the country a second chance. Ordinary Americans rose to the challenge but Bush and his lackeys failed again. The underlying tensions remain.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist.
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