The Halo Halo! Column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard
A word of advice to those who are in the habit of talking to God; don’t bother. You can’t believe a word he says and half the time he hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about.
Back in July he informed a group of 100 Liberian bishops, pastors, prophets and other assorted God-botherers that the Ebola outbreak was sent because of their corruption and immorality. Well, presumably, because of the corruption and immorality of the people generally. Not of the bishops, pastors and prophets, obviously.
He then had them running around like headless chickens demanding that the country be ‘locked up for three days of silence, fasting and prayer’ because he was ‘angry with Liberia’ and that ‘Liberians have to pray and seek God’s forgiveness over the corruption and immoral acts such as homosexualism’ (sic) and that ‘As Christians we must repent and seek God’s forgiveness’ (Liberian Daily Observer 31 July 2014).
Yet here we are several months later, and after much devout ‘fasting and prayer’ in Liberia and other affected areas, the Ebola outbreak continues.
Here too, back in February when much of the country was being flooded out God informed UKIP’s David Silvester (now ex-UKIP since his expulsion) that the floods had been sent in revenge for the newly-passed legislation allowing gays to get married. ‘This is not new, this happened in the Old Testament – they were warned if they turned against God there would be pestilence, there would be war, there would be disasters’ Silvester told us.
God must be reasonably happy with our corruption and immorality though. Even without the silence, fasting and prayers he eventually changed his mind and called off the flooding.
OK, he’s probably only having a joke and winding us up, but these occasional messages from God do become a bit irritating after a while. And now he’s at it again. Not threats this time, no, this time he’s decided to help the Pope get his head around the ideas of evolution and the Big Bang.
Unfortunately God doesn’t seem to have a very good grasp of these issues himself, or maybe the Pope wasn’t paying attention, but according to his latest thinking on the laws of physics (given via the Pope) ‘The Big Bang does not contradict the divine act of creation’. And even more puzzling, ‘Evolution of nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation’ (Guardian 29 October).
Bearing in mind that without any assistance from God we now know that evolution takes place very gradually, over millions of years, God’s latest views on the subject are not much better than his previous message in Genesis; that the act of creation took just six days, and with both the animals and mankind being created on the final, sixth day. And although he omitted to give us the exact date for it, one of his previous spokesmen, the 17th century Bishop James Ussher, did. Creation took place, apparently, on 23rd October 4004 BC. Not to be outdone, another religious scholar, one Dr John Lightfoot, calculated that it occurred at 9 o’clock in the morning.
Modern science, meanwhile, tells us that the Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. So in spite of God’s and the Pope’s efforts to take us back to the middle ages, and to square bronze-age mythology with reality, there is still a slight discrepancy between science and religion.
What we need, perhaps, is a new version of the bible to clarify God’s latest views. – ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was BOOM!’ But until we get that who should we believe?
NW
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