Father Lazarus Abboud
The catastrophe of the earthquake in Syria and Turkey occurred this year, and the question returned once more – who permits disasters, God or another? But what is striking is that we do not ask why earthquakes are permitted, because the earthquake occurs by reason of the nature of the earth’s formation and its movement, and this we leave to science (the geologists) to answer: why was the earth created as plates and not as a single plate?
But the essential question in our discussion today is: why was the catastrophe permitted? That is, who permitted the occurrence of the catastrophe and the killing of thousands, and who prepared it? The answer: it was not God, but rather authority (the state) and its institutions.
The cause of the catastrophe:
The catastrophe occurred when the buildings collapsed, causing the death of thousands of their inhabitants, and this is due to two matters. The first matter: corruption and the poor building process, and this is confirmed by the Turkish Minister of Justice Bekir Bozdağ, who said “his ministry established special offices to investigate accusations of fraud in the building works that may have been the cause of the collapse of buildings in the earthquake”.
The second matter is the failure to adhere to the building and safety standards in seismic zones, and because of the laxity in applying safety standards – which contributed to the collapse of many buildings in the recent earthquake, which claimed the lives of thousands in the country – the Turkish Ministry of Justice announced on Monday the arrest of more than 100 building contractors within the framework of investigations into the collapse of buildings as a result of the failure to adhere to building standards(1). And in Syria only 5% of buildings are constructed according to the safety standards and the international earthquake code.
As for Japan, the danger of exposure to earthquakes drove the Japanese authorities to devise various methods for protecting buildings and infrastructure, and Tokyo has been classified since 2017 as “the safest city in the world” in the Safe Cities Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit.
These two matters illustrate – the first, corruption in building, and the second, corruption in the standards – who is responsible for the tragedy and the catastrophe, and who “permitted” the occurrence of the catastrophe that caused thousands of victims, dead, wounded, and disabled during the earthquakes. It is authority and its institutions and the corruption within them, exactly like the explosion of the Port of Beirut, which authority caused through criminal negligence. The two matters are one and the same.
As for the religious discourse in these disasters, it is an archaic discourse that never takes into account causes and reasons, and loads everything onto God in an ignorant and narcotizing manner. Here Marx rings true with his saying “religion is the opium of the peoples” in this case, where God is made to be angry because of the sins of the victims, and the religious preacher forgets and overlooks the role of the officials, their corruption, and their thievery in the occurrence of the catastrophe.
The preacher or the one exhorting relies upon the sayings of the saints without any regard for the time of their sayings, their circumstances, and the extent of scientific discoveries in their age. Today we have come to understand the events of nature in a manner completely different from theirs, for what the ancients read as wrath from God we have understood through science as a natural movement in the universe, and God is innocent of the blood of the victims from eternity.
Unfortunately we disfigure God and present Him as an oriental dictatorial president who grows angry and torments, forgetting that He is the one crucified for us because of our sins. So the religious preacher works neither to comfort the afflicted, nor to contribute to developing the intellectual structures of society so as to prevent the repetition of the catastrophe by directing attention toward the true responsible party and punishing the negligent and the corrupt, nor to work at clarifying the necessity of developing nature and mastering it, and directing thought towards the true causes of the occurrence of the catastrophe. And because religious thought still carries within it the remnants of pagan thought about the wrath of nature and of the gods, and is shackled by the bonds of the old interpretation, you find it incapable of working on mastering nature and averting disasters, as the philosopher Francis Bacon says: “In order to command nature, you must first obey it.” And this is precisely the divine creative thought that gave man mastery over nature.
The second matter: the religious preacher believes that by calling people to repentance he accomplishes a great thing by seizing the opportunity to bring people back to God, making of Him a pagan god and of disasters the signs of His wrath. The writer Ali al-Wardi says: “the preacher seizes the opportunity and cries out to the people: you have sinned before God, and so the plague descended upon you from Him. And thereby the preacher lifts the social injustice from the shoulders of the oppressors and places it upon the shoulders of the oppressed themselves, who then turn to seeking forgiveness and asking for repentance.” So the oppressor is reassured and considers himself an instrument of God in punishing the people, and the people are burdened with loads they cannot bear. Thus he neither reforms the state of the country nor lifts the affliction from the servants of God.
The religious discourse, unfortunately, is a discourse that loads the guilt onto the oppressed and makes him bear the burden of what happened. You find it raising its hand before the people and the weak, reproaching them and disciplining them, making God an angry tyrant, and everything that happens is because of people’s sins and transgressions. And the religious preacher forgets that the American and Western advancement and the strength of the countries there is not because their peoples are monks and saints, but because their peoples are a people of labor and reason, who place the true responsibility upon those who bear it and hold the corrupt official to account.
The religious preacher stands incapable of confronting the political and religious leaders, the rulers and the officials, and saying to them: you are the cause of the calamity. The problem of the preachers among us is that they take the side of the ruler and fight against the governed, for you find them acknowledging the shortcomings of nature when they review the deeds of the rulers. If a ruler wrongs his flock or casts it into the abyss of evil, they say: he exerted effort and erred, and every man errs, and infallibility belongs to God alone.
In the end, everyone must bear his responsibilities, and we must put our finger on the wound, as the popular saying goes, and not cast blame upon God while there is someone who must be held to account for his negligence, corruption, and thievery. The religious discourse must stand on the side of man and defend him and his dignity before authority, not the opposite. For John the Baptist used to (humiliate) King Herod, and comfort the weak and the afflicted, and Christ raised the whip before the rulers, and opened His arms to the sinners.
But among us they do not take heed.