Yesterday I posted the above YouTube clip that’s been all the rage across the internet the last few days. Watch it, notice your feelings, then read on if you care to. (Glenn Beck and other “Christian” leaders continue to make similar points, as you can see at the end of this post.)
__________________________________________________________________

This morning I discovered that this young woman is a satirist, intentionally spoofing the worst of what we all know actually exists among us.

I was fooled upon initial viewing. . . Were you?

If your heart sank as you watched her make the transition from sweet-hearted innocent to a (non-fundamentalist) pastor’s worst nightmare, do take a moment to reflect on that. Our hearts sink because we know that this kind of thinking still exists.

The upside of this sad incident is that maybe you and I are motivated to be less tolerant of the twists in scriptural literalism that ramp up to devastating results the in-group / out-group dynamics that our evolutionary heritage has saddled us with. It is no longer acceptable—at all—for Christian evolutionaries to promote peace and justice and love without being willing to take the heat for outing the throwbacks whose blind and seemingly good-hearted adherence to ancient texts lends itself to such abominable, yet utterly believable, dark satires (and real-life examples; see video below).

I addressed this dark side of the monotheistic faiths in my book, Thank God for Evolution. In a sidebar (page 22) I reminded readers of some of the horrific explanations for the 2004 tsunami that were objectively reported on and quoted in some of our premier American newspapers.

In its 8 January 2005 issue, The Washington Post published an article by one of its staff writers, Bill Broadway. It was titled “Divining a Reason for Devastation” and its tagline read, “Followers of Various Faiths Differ on Natural, Supernatural Explanations for Tsunami.” Here’s how it begins (emphasis added):

Catastrophes often leave religious leaders fumbling for explanations. But there has been no shortage of reasons given for the South Asian tsunami that killed more than 147,000 people, many of them children.

In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, the hardest-hit area in the world’s most populous Muslim country, imams blamed the Dec. 26 tsunami on lay Muslims who were shirking their daily prayers and following a materialistic lifestyle. Others said Allah was angry that Muslims were killing Muslims in ongoing civil strife.

In Israel, Sephardic chief rabbi Shlomo Amar, one of the country’s top religious leaders, called the disaster “an expression of God’s wrath with the world. The world is being punished for wrongdoing — be it people’s needless hatred of each other, lack of charity, moral turpitude.”

Even the nonmonotheistic religions are not off the hook. Here is the next paragraph in the report:

In Sri Lanka, which recorded the most fatalities after Indonesia, Buddhist survivors told the story of a tsunami that flooded the island kingdom 2,200 years ago when a king killed a Buddhist monk in a fit of anger. They wondered which political leader angered the sea gods this time.

And, of course, there are comments that we who call ourselves Christians cannot shirk as having arisen from our own:

On the Internet, self-appointed prophets said the reason was God’s anger at the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries hit by the tsunami, or His displeasure at the number of abortions worldwide. Some said the large-scale tragedy was a sure sign that the world will end soon.

Sadly (yet also understandably, given how seldom the findings of science are interpreted meaningfully in our culture), even one of America’s most respected faith leaders, a friend and colleague well known for his interfaith work in promoting peace, justice, and sustainability, explained the cause of the tsunami in this way:

Rabbi Michael Lerner, founding editor of Tikkun, a magazine devoted to “the healing and transformation of the planet,” presented a similar theme this week in an online newsletter.

Part of his answer to the question “How could God have allowed this to happen?” includes a point of view that “deserves some continuing attention — the answer from karma or universal justice,” he writes.

Referring to the earthquake that caused the tsunami, he goes on to say, “The tectonic moves of the earth are part of a totally integrated moral system that has been in place since the earth began to evolve. That moral system, described by the Bible, tells us that the physical world will be unable to function in a peaceful and gentle way until the moral/spiritual dimension manifest in the behavior of God’s creatures coheres with God’s will: that is, is filled with justice, peace, generosity and kindness.”

So, yes, the video above that is the spur of this particular blog is a spoof. But I am not off the hook, nor are we. Myself and the other thought leaders in this Evolutionary Christianity series must do more than speak loftily among ourselves and with those of similar ilk. We must reach even farther. These quotations above, which spoke to the previous tsunami disaster, are a sobering reminder of the harm we do if we neglect to connect our religious teachings in meaningful ways to what kids ought to be learning in science classes (and do learn on the Discovery Channel).

Why did the earthquake and devastating tsunami happen? Here, let the scientists speak, as reported in the 11 January 2005 issue of The New York Times, by one of the paper’s top science writers, William J. Broad. The report was titled, “Deadly and Yet Necessary, Quakes Renew the Planet.” This understanding is so crucial for helping religious worldviews evolve in step with the times, that I print it in full below:

They approach the topic gingerly, wary of sounding callous, aware that the geology they admire has just caused a staggering loss of life. Even so, scientists argue that in the very long view, the global process behind great earthquakes is quite advantageous for life on earth – especially human life.

Powerful jolts like the one that sent killer waves racing across the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26 are inevitable side effects of the constant recycling of planetary crust, which produces a lush, habitable planet. Some experts refer to the regular blows – hundreds a day – as the planet’s heartbeat.

The advantages began billions of years ago, when this crustal recycling made the oceans and atmosphere and formed the continents. Today, it builds mountains, enriches soils, regulates the planet’s temperature, concentrates gold and other rare metals and maintains the sea’s chemical balance.

Plate tectonics (after the Greek word “tekton,” or builder) describes the geology. The tragic downside is that waves of quakes and volcanic eruptions along plate boundaries can devastate human populations.

“It’s hard to find something uplifting about 150,000 lives being lost,” said Dr. Donald J. DePaolo, a geochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “But the type of geological process that caused the earthquake and the tsunami is an essential characteristic of the earth. As far as we know, it doesn’t occur on any other planetary body and has something very directly to do with the fact that the earth is a habitable planet.”

Many biologists believe that the process may have even given birth to life itself.

The main benefits of plate tectonics accumulate slowly and globally over the ages. In contrast, its local upheavals can produce regional catastrophes, as the recent Indian Ocean quake made clear.

Even so, scientists say, the Dec. 26 tsunamis may prove to be an ecological boon over the decades for coastal areas hardest hit by the giant waves.

Dr. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a geologist at Wesleyan University who grew up in Indonesia and has studied the archipelago, says historical evidence from earlier tsunamis suggests that the huge waves can distribute rich sediments from river systems across coastal plains, making the soil richer.

“It brings fertile soils into the lowlands,” he said. “In time, a more fertile jungle will develop.”

Dr. de Boer, author of recent books on earthquakes and volcanoes in human history, added that great suffering from tectonic violence was usually followed by great benefits as well. “Nature is reborn with these kinds of terrible events,” he said. “There are a lot of positive aspects even when we don’t see them.”

Plate tectonics holds that the earth’s surface is made up of a dozen or so big crustal slabs that float on a sea of melted rock. Over ages, this churning sea moves the plates as well as their superimposed continents and ocean basins, tearing them apart and rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle.

The process starts as volcanic gashes spew hot rock that spreads out across the seabed. Eventually, hundreds or thousands of miles away, the cooling slab collides with other plates and sinks beneath them, plunging back into the hot earth.

The colliding plates grind past one another about as fast as fingernails grow and over time produce mountains and swarms of earthquakes as frictional stresses build and release. Meanwhile, parts of the descending plate melt and rise to form volcanoes on land.

The recent cataclysm began in a similar manner as volcanic gashes in the western depths of the Indian Ocean belched molten rock to form the India plate. Its collision with the Burma plate created the volcanoes of Sumatra as well thousands of earthquakes, including the magnitude 9.0 killer.

But despite such staggering losses of life, said Robert S. Detrick Jr., a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, “there’s no question that plate tectonics rejuvenates the planet.”

Here’s the take-home message for any and all religious people who encounter this blogpost: So long as any among us, and especially our clergy, believe that our best understanding of God and divine guidance comes from the Bible, rather than all forms of evidence, we’re going to continue to see (and be appalled by) these kinds of interpretations.