A disaster struck with the Syria and Turkey earthquake this current year, and so the question returned: 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 the disaster was permitted — namely, who permitted the disaster to happen and the death of thousands, and who prepared the way for it? The answer: not God, but the authority (the state) and its institutions.
The cause of the disaster:
The disaster happened when the buildings collapsed, causing the death of thousands of their inhabitants, and this goes back to two matters. The first: corruption and the poor construction process, and this is what the Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ confirmed when he said “his ministry has established special offices to investigate accusations of fraud in construction work, which may have been the cause of the buildings collapsing in the earthquake.”
The second matter: not adhering to construction and safety standards in seismic zones, and because of the state of laxity in applying safety standards, which contributed to the collapse of many buildings in the recent earthquake that claimed the lives of thousands in the country — the Turkish Ministry of Justice announced on Monday the arrest of more than 100 building contractors, in the framework of the investigations into the collapse of buildings as a result of the earthquake due to failure to adhere to construction standards(1), and in Syria only 5% of buildings are built according to safety standards and the international earthquake code.
As for Japan, the danger of exposure to earthquakes has driven the Japanese authorities to devise various ways to protect 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 make clear — the first, corruption in construction, and the second, corruption in standards — who is responsible for the tragedy and the disaster, and who “permitted” the disaster to happen that caused thousands of victims, dead, wounded, and disabled during the earthquakes: it is the authority and its institutions and the corruption within them, exactly like the explosion of the port of Beirut, which the authority caused through criminal negligence; the two matters are one and the same.
As for the religious discourse in these disasters, it is an antiquated discourse, one that never takes into account causes and effects, and it loads everything onto God in an ignorant and anesthetizing way. Here Marx is proven right in his saying “religion is the opium of the peoples” in this case, where (God) is made out to be angry because of the sins of the victims, while the religious preacher forgets and overlooks the role of the officials and their corruption and their thievery in bringing about the disaster.
The preacher or exhorter relies on the sayings of saints without any regard for the time of their sayings, their circumstances, or the extent of scientific discoveries in their era. 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 cosmos, and God is innocent of the blood of the victims from all eternity.
Unfortunately we disfigure God and present Him as a dictatorial eastern ruler who grows angry and torments, forgetting that He is the One crucified for us on account of our sins. So the religious preacher works neither at consoling the afflicted, nor at contributing to the development of the intellectual structures of society in order to prevent the disaster from recurring, by directing attention toward the true responsible party and punishing the negligent and the corrupt, nor at working to clarify the necessity of developing nature and gaining mastery over it, and directing thought toward the true causes of the disaster’s occurrence. And because religious thought still carries within it the remnants of pagan thought about the wrath of nature and the gods, and is shackled by the fetters of the old interpretation, you see it incapable of working to control nature and avert disasters — as the philosopher Francis Bacon says, “in order to control nature, you must first study it,” and this is exactly the divine creative thought that gave man sovereignty over nature.
The second matter: the religious preacher believes that by calling people to repentance he does a great thing, seizing the opportunity to bring people back to God, making of Him a pagan god and the disasters signs of His wrath. Thus 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 has come upon you from Him. And the preacher thereby lifts the social injustice off the shoulders of the oppressors and places it upon the shoulders of the oppressed themselves, so they take to seeking forgiveness and asking for repentance.” Thus the oppressor is relieved and considers himself an instrument of God in punishing the people, and the people are burdened with loads they cannot bear; in so doing he neither sets the country right nor lifts the affliction from the servants.
The religious discourse, unfortunately, is a discourse that loads the guilt onto the oppressed and makes him bear the burden of what happened, so you see it raising its hand against the people, the folk, and the weak, rebuking and disciplining them, making God angry and tyrannical, and everything that happens is because of the people’s sins and transgressions. And the religious preacher forgets that the American and Western development and the strength of the countries there is not because their peoples are monks and saints, but because their peoples are a people of work and reason, and it places the true responsibility upon its bearers and holds the corrupt official accountable.
And the religious preacher stands incapable of confronting the political and religious leaders, the rulers and officials, and of telling them: you are the cause of the affliction. The problem with our preachers is that they take the side of the ruler and fight the ruled, so you find them acknowledging the deficiencies of nature when they review the deeds of rulers — for if the ruler wrongs his flock or casts it into the abysses of evil, they say: he strove and erred, and every human being 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 folk proverb says, and not cast blame on God while there are those who must be held accountable for their negligence, corruption, and thievery. The religious discourse must stand on the side of man and defend him and his dignity before the authority, not the opposite. John the Baptist used to (rebuke) King Herod and console the weak and afflicted people, and Christ used to raise the whip before the rulers and open His embrace to sinners.
But among us, they do not take heed.