Another Mind Warped By Religion

As many of you may know, the American Midwest has been experiencing a terrible ordeal from extreme weather events. Storms have caused record flooding and killed at least 25 people.

Now here is something you probably did not know. All of this terrible weather afflicting the nation is being caused by homosexuals and Oprah Winfrey. Well, the homosexuals and Oprah are not actually causing the bad weather, rather it is a sign of God's anger with America over its tolerance for homosexual perversions.

If you want proof, it's all here at the website for Street Preachers. This site came to my attention just this afternoon when I was reading the comments thread for this post at David Neiwert's blog Orcinus. A commenter named Ruben Israel posted the following comments:

IT'S THE MANIFEST WRATH OF GOD ON YOU PEOPLE....Floods, underwater earthquakes, monster hail storms, category 5 hurricanes, Mile-wide F-5 tornadoes, heat waves, drought, solar storms, wild waves of the ocean destroying lives and property, out of control wild fires and unrelenting, blistering HEAT WAVES which are but a foretaste of things to come for you HELL BOUND perverts! Need I go on with respect to...raging wild fires consuming millions of acres of land, destruction of property and life...It's on your front page, in front of your face but you refuse to believe it's the God of the Bible...You prefer to call it "Mother Nature" I've got news for you, it's FATHER GOD and He's had enough of the carnality, depravity and homo friendly disciples of Oprah Winfrey! REPENT!

I posted a response to Ruben Israel by pointing out to him that volcanic eruptions have been photographed on Jupiter's moon Io and fierce wind storms can be noted in Mars simply by looking at it through a powerful telescope. Since these violent phenomena are taking place on uninhabited planets and moons in our solar system that harm no one, it is clearly evidence that these things are natural phenomena. Why then are the same events taking place on our world attributed to the wrath of god?

Ruben Israel is a textbook example of how religious dogmatism can warp one's perception of the world. Catastrophic events such as volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes, rather than being seen for the natural events that they are, become in the eyes of ignorant religious fanatics signs of an angry god's displeasure with humans who flout his will.

While I look at this from the perspective of an atheist and skeptic, even if I were a religious person I would still take offense at Ruben Israel's bigoted nonsense. You see, if there really was a god that created us and everything in the universe, it would be perfectly capable of targetting its wrath directly at the people who offend it. For a god to cause an entire region of the United States to be flooded because it is angry with homosexuals would be like me burning down the houses of my neighbors because I am angry that a suicide bomber killed dozens of people in a marketplace in Baghdad.

If there really is a god that is angered by homosexual conduct, then surely it has the power to cause homosexuals to spontaneously combust every time one inserts his penis into another man's mouth or anus.