scottbobo2 wrote:S8 booster said: [Additionally it is estimated that 45% of the total death toll are children. ]
I realize that good people perished along with the bad,but if you are in the U.S. the newspapers continually quote that this place was paradise.
The sex trade industry is massive in these countries,it is estimated that suicide by children who were abused is beyond count. Many of these children killed last week were living dead already.In 1999 the vactican(Pope) said the problem is so wide spread that companies should not do business with these sex trade countries(calling it an epidemic).It may not be politically correct with the rest of the world but in the U.S. many still believe God knows what he is doing.
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You are wildly mislead I am afraid. Typical news media errification and angling. Of course there are sex abuse and no one supports that but indicating that it is god´s will to drown them (all the innocents) - that should ring a bell - even for you.
For seasonal vacation like x-mas/new year it allmost only families from Europe who visits Thailand. The sex abuse activities is a very small part of this and are more likly spread over the non high season periods peaking at low seasons.
From the estimated death toll of now 150 000 - estimated Thailand casulties is about 8-10 000. Half of them tourists - the other part Thais.
So, what about the other 140 000? Any explatation there? Give me a break please.
Uppsala BildTeknik wrote:Have people gone crazy?
Talking about sex trade and nuclear weapons at a time like this?
And nuclear bombs? Why is this even anything to be thinking about now?
Nuclear bombs are horrible and should be minimized whenever possible, but there are so many countries that waste so much money on weapons (not only nuclear) that it is ridiculous, their people are very poor but they have high tech weapons. Sounds very stupid to me.
But who cares about how many nuclear weapons there are in a time like this? It´s not like everyone is going to build huge piles of new nukes instead of using the money to help the Tsunami victims. :roll:
The point is if all the countries band together and make a difference and really help out, it won't be enough if we also don't acknowledge that what the Tsunami did was a reminder as to what one nuclear weapon can do.
There are still 20,000 manmade "Tsunami's" all over the world known as nuclear weapons.
Last edited by Alex on Sun Jan 02, 2005 7:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
scottbobo2 wrote:S8 booster said: [Additionally it is estimated that 45% of the total death toll are children. ]
I realize that good people perished along with the bad,but if you are in the U.S. the newspapers continually quote that this place was paradise.
The sex trade industry is massive in these countries,it is estimated that suicide by children who were abused is beyond count. Many of these children killed last week were living dead already.In 1999 the vactican(Pope) said the problem is so wide spread that companies should not do business with these sex trade countries(calling it an epidemic).It may not be politically correct with the rest of the world but in the U.S. many still believe God knows what he is doing.
You are wildly mislead I am afraid. Typical news media errification and angling. Of course there are sex abuse and no one supports that but indicating that it is god´s will to drown them (all the innocents) - that should ring a bell - even for you.
For seasonal vacation like x-mas/new year it allmost only families from Europe who visits Thailand. The sex abuse activities is a very small part of this and are more likly spread over the non high season periods peaking at low seasons.
From the estimated death toll of now 150 000 - estimated Thailand casulties is about 8-10 000. Half of them tourists - the other part Thais.
So, what about the other 140 000? Any explatation there? Give me a break please.
R
I agree with Booster. I have been to these places for business trips and as a tourist - Madras (Chennai), Phuket, Penang, Sumatra, but not in Sri Lanka - thought it is very similar to Madras. In Madras, for example, this is the most religious area in the whole of India. Men wear sarong and cows are revered. I have not seen any sex activity going on in this area. For Phuket, I was there with the family. The reason we went there is to see the beautiful Phi Phi islands after seeing the movie, The Beach. If there are sex activities, they are mostly in Bangkok. Penang is all about families and business. The closest sex activity is in Epo and the capital, Kuala Lumpur. To say that there is massive sex activity going on in the Tsunami affected areas is wrong. And to say this is God's doing because they are sin areas is none of us to judge. God punish (Sodom and Gomorrah) and test people (Lot) by having them experience similar disasters but I am not going to delve further in that.
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The simple answer is if the people who lived along the beaches all were living totally "perfect", religious lives as prescribed by some, are we to believe the tsunami would not have happened?
I get frustrated to hear people talk of both sides of issues and not do a damn thing about it.
Its either put up or shut up.
-Donate money=good thing.
-Getting ya butt over there and actually giving a damn about helping the people= you're a saint
-Just talking about 'theories' of whos fault it is, or if God did it cause they are inferior people to us= stupidity
-talking about how you care about this tragedy but yet you sit on your ass to watch sunday afternoon football while not donating or making a damn difference = you are the reason people hate the idea of 'americanism'
the same is true with the war in iraq./ i get sick of all these people that claim 'supporting our troops' is to just put a damn yellow ribbon on their car (many of which funds, they paid $4 for the thing, and Did the money really go to 'support the troops') and then turn a blind eye about what is really going on the world/ current/past/ events and not really giving a damn about politics or the troops. if you really want to support the troops get on your gear and go help the troops in iraq- fairweather patriots!
The simple answer is if the people who lived along the beaches all were living totally "perfect", religious lives as prescribed by some, are we to believe the tsunami would not have happened?
Yeah, a good one.
I guess "the holy hand of jesus christ would have come down from heaven and stopped the big wave and saved the lives of all and performed a few other miracles when at it, holy hell, the almighty has saveth us all" and so on :lol:
Big chance. :lol:
Religion is the biggest joke of all, and that people still believe in it today is a total mystery. Look at the world around you, where is the almighty when small children are raped every day, where is he when innocent children are killed in accidents or by maniacs. The list goes on and on. Wake up. Open your eyes and wake up.
I really need to quit with this religion stuff, this is my last post. Really.
If not, send God to punish me will ya´. :lol:
Uppsala BildTeknik wrote:I guess "the holy hand of jesus christ would have come down from heaven and stopped the big wave and saved the lives of all and performed a few other miracles when at it, holy hell, the almighty has saveth us all" and so on :lol:
Big chance. :lol:
Religion is the biggest joke of all, and that people still believe in it today is a total mystery. Look at the world around you, where is the almighty when small children are raped every day, where is he when innocent children are killed in accidents or by maniacs. The list goes on and on. Wake up. Open your eyes and wake up.
I really need to quit with this religion stuff, this is my last post. Really.
If not, send God to punish me will ya´. :lol:
Good to hear you shut up your mouth about this. It is enough to say you don't believe in God. But to ridicule him in front of believers is just plain stupidity.
It is obvious from your posts you don't know anything about God, who he is, and his teachings. I must say you wake up and do your research before having a laugh about it.
Bunner wrote:I get frustrated to hear people talk of both sides of issues and not do a damn thing about it.
Its either put up or shut up.
-Donate money=good thing.
-Getting ya butt over there and actually giving a damn about helping the people= you're a saint
-Just talking about 'theories' of whos fault it is, or if God did it cause they are inferior people to us= stupidity
-talking about how you care about this tragedy but yet you sit on your ass to watch sunday afternoon football while not donating or making a damn difference = you are the reason people hate the idea of 'americanism'
the same is true with the war in iraq./ i get sick of all these people that claim 'supporting our troops' is to just put a damn yellow ribbon on their car (many of which funds, they paid $4 for the thing, and Did the money really go to 'support the troops') and then turn a blind eye about what is really going on the world/ current/past/ events and not really giving a damn about politics or the troops. if you really want to support the troops get on your gear and go help the troops in iraq- fairweather patriots!
First things first, have you made a donation to this forum? 8O
I'll give Gary Leupp the last word here, and you can all have a little education in Tsunami history to boot.
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. Here is his most recent article:
Earthquakes and End Times, Past and Present
Meaning and Meaninglessness in the December 26 Tsunami
By GARY LEUPP
Two and a half centuries ago a colossal earthquake probably measuring 8.7 to 9.0 on the Richter scale, centered 200 miles off the Iberian Peninsula in the Atlantic, shook Lisbon, Portugal. The tremor lasted a few minutes, immediately followed by a tidal wave. The water of Lisbon harbor was momentarily, mysteriously sucked back, revealing the carcasses of ill-fated ships. Then the ocean surged forward through the downtown area. Historians disagree about the casualty figure of this double blow, most estimates ranging from 30,000 to 90,000 (one-third the city's population). One-third of the city's buildings were destroyed.
Southwest Spain and western Morocco were also hit by great waves; in Morocco, 10,000 perished. There was moderate damage as far west as Algiers. Tidal waves hit the coasts of France, Holland, Belgium, Britain, and Ireland, then raced across the Atlantic Ocean, doing damage in Madeira and the Azores, and within hours even raising the surf in the Antilles, Antigua, Martinique, and Barbados.
A disaster of exceptional magnitude, the Great Lisbon Earthquake of November 1, 1755 was not unique in its destructiveness. Half the population of Port Royal in Jamaica had been wiped out by an earthquake and tidal wave in 1692; maybe 3000 had died. The city of Callao in Peru had been destroyed by a tidal wave following an earthquake in 1724; 6000 had died. In 1737, a tidal wave over 200 feet, the largest ever recorded, had swept over lightly populated Cape Lopatka on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula. In 1703 the most destructive tidal wave on record had struck the country that gives us our word tsunami ("harbor wave"): it had hit the port of Awa in Japan, killing up to 100,000 people. But few in Europe knew of these remote events. Lisbon in contrast was not some New World or East Asian backwater, but the fourth largest city in Europe, and maybe its richest. It was the resplendent capital of an empire extending from Brazil to Angola to Goa to Macao and Timor, a citadel of Roman Catholicism and the ongoing Inquisition.
So when Lisbon, in minutes, saw its monuments and cathedrals either crumbled by the quake, gutted by the tsunami, or in some places consumed in flames, Europeans naturally asked, "How could this have happened?" For some the answer was obvious: this was God's punishment meted out upon the Portuguese. The Jesuits faulted the leniency the Portuguese authorities had shown the large resident Protestant community, while Protestants attributed the calamity to the sins of the Portuguese Catholics. In England, John Wesley, founder of Methodism (to which, by the way, both George Bush and Dick Cheney adhere) suggested that "the late accounts from Portugal" showed that there was "indeed a God that judges the world." In his view, the Catholics were being punished for the bloody Inquisition. Wesley wrote hymns inspired by the disaster.
Awake, ye guilty Souls, awake,
Nor sleep, till Tophet [Hell] takes you in!
The Lord of Hosts is ris'n to shake,
The Earth polluted with your Sin!
Philosophically irreligious intellectuals had a different take on the disaster. They were living in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment, when thinkers argued that (as Immanuel Kant put it) intelligence combined with courage could progressively transform the world. Deism (the belief in an impersonal God ordering a rational universe ever more comprehensible to the human mind) was a product of this period (it influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States far more than Christian theology). Some thinkers, notably the French philosophe Voltaire, saw in the magnitude of the tragedy evidence that we do not live in "the best of all possible worlds," rationally organized by a Deity, but in a world where colossal destruction happens randomly, irrationally, without any transcendent meaning. Weeks after the tragedy Voltaire wrote a friend:
This is indeed a cruel sort of physics. People will really find it difficult to divine how the laws of motion bring about such frightful disasters in the "best of possible worlds." A hundred thousand ants, our neighbors, suddenly crushed on our ant-hill and half of them probably perishing in inexpressible anguish amidst debris from which they cannot be extricatedWhat a sad game of chance the game of human life is! What will the preachers say, especially if the palace of the Inquisition remains standing? I flatter myself at least that the Reverend Fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed like the others. That ought to teach men not to persecute men, for while some holy scoundrels burn a few fanatics the earth swallows up the whole lot of them.
In 1759 Voltaire published his brilliant satirical novel, Candide, or Optimism, in which the innocent Candide and his perennially optimistic tutor Pangloss arrive in Lisbon Harbor just as the tsunami strikes. Narrowly surviving a shipwreck, the pair assist in relief efforts until Pangloss, attempting to philosophically explain the disaster, is overheard by a Jesuit and punished for heresy. The Jesuits, whose founder (St.) Ignatius Loyola had established the Portuguese Inquisition in the early sixteenth century, now celebrate "a fine inquisitionto prevent earthquakes." In fact the order was expelled from Portugal in 1759, having alienated the regime by its efforts to use the disaster to promote its own religious and political agenda.
Like the Lisbon episode, the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004 struck a broad swathe of the world's surface and exacted a huge human toll. Tsunamis are part of the natural amoral order of things, and have a long dignified history of slaughter for absolutely no reason. There are records of tsunamis hitting the Syrian coast around 2000 BCE, Crete around 1450 BCE, and Alexandria, Egypt in 365 CE. But this one this week was the mother of tsunamis, drowning whole islands, uniting in horror coasts separated by 3000 miles, wiping out by current estimate over 130,000 people. That's more than all the U.S. military fatalities since 1945, more than all the Iraqis slaughtered by U.S. aggression in the last two years. It will naturally produce the same range of religious, philosophical and political responses as those generated by the 1755 tidal wave.
Christian religious fundamentalists will interpret it as divine retribution. They will likely note that those smitten are overwhelmingly the Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Somalia. Perhaps they will exploit the ever-serviceable Book of Revelation, replete with its catalogue of divine scourges. It describes how in the End Times, after the second angel has blown his trumpet, it will be "as though a great mountain, all on fire, has been dropped into the sea; a third of the sea turned into blood, a third of all living things in the sea [will be] killed, and a third of all shipsdestroyed" (Revelation 8:8). I know some think this describes an asteroid striking the earth, but the language is vague enough to apply to December 26. In the Old Testament, Zechariah 9:4 describes the fall of the city of Tyre; God will "take possession of her; he will topple her power into the sea; she will be consumed by fire." Surely this is a combination earthquake, tsunami and conflagration. This punishment of Tyre precedes the great battle in Jerusalem (14:1-21) when God will "strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will moulder while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths," and so on. What the pompously knowledgeable "Associates for Spiritual Knowledge" call "the Damascus Phase of End-Time Prophecy" will "start abruptly with a great tsunami (sometimes wrongly referred to as a 'tidal wave') that will destroy the entire coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean Sea from just south of Turkey all the way to and including Gaza. This will be the single event that will begin a countdown of prophetic teachings leading to the Second Advent."
So there you have it. The Bible says nothing about Sumatra and Sri Lanka and the Maldives, but it tells us that God in the End Times will send unprecedented calamities to punish His enemies. Notice how Indonesia hasn't recognized Israel, and that Sri Lanka, having just done so a few years ago, has refused to accept an Israeli rescue team. Surely, the apocalypse groupies will inform us, they are among His foes!
This is reasonable. Voltaire advocated that we humans "cultivate our own garden." But how can we do that when the Eden we inhabit is owned by a tiny fraction of our species that does not care about its cultivation except insofar as it reaps its unholy profits? A fraction which happens to, as a matter of policy, cleverly exploit religion to argue the poor will always, no matter what progress humanity makes, be with us? (See for example Matthew 26:11.)
Tens of thousands of mostly poor super-vulnerable people, drowned by mere meandering water, the origin and stuff of life. I hear that onlookers found the waves beautiful. The beauteous shit that happens on the global level comes and goes as naturally as it does in your bathroom or fertilized garden. We manage and contain the stench in those locales. But the planet-wide stench of decomposition and disease, and the bootless cries of the victims, now rise to deaf heaven. Enlightened humanity should respond with reason and compassion, demanding that human institutions (the best we've got) do what deaf heaven cannot do: place people over profits in our best, worst and only world.
Alex wrote:
We have far to travel when it comes to learning from our own planet. Cursing a Tsunami and questioning how God could unyield such a force entirely misses the bigger picture. For those who believe in God, Thank God that a Tsunami may have been the gentlest reminder we could ever be given about just how deadly our own manmade nuclear weapons really are. If we fail to see the connection between a Tsunami and our own nuclear weapons arsenal, we put the worlds future at great risk, and we have disrespected all of those killed by the Tsunami.
While not being on the caliber of a Volatire, I don't see what I wrote as being much different than what he wrote, just not as eloquent.
Ultimately we don't know who the people who died were or what kind of lives they lived. Probably all kinds of people, mass disasters are never discriminating. Every kind of people would be my guess.
...and presently the concern should really be for those still alive and suffering. There is after all no way to change the past, but we can change the future.
Wow! If you read my original post I mentioned the suffering of innocent children due to the sex trade in Indosian ,Thailand and Sri lanka. And in terms of saying that God punished these people,i....f you believe the Bible cities such as Sodom ...Gormorrah....etc were destroyed by God.When the flood happened with Noah only his family survived..millions killed..If you believe the Bible....So ....if you believe the Bible.......why is it hard to image that God could not do this today?......If you believe the bible.......these tradegies are predicted by Jesus ....If you believe the Bible. Did God suddenly change and say all the cities that were destroyed in the past I won't do this again,I made a mistake? If you believe the bible you can not just pick out the nice stuff......If you believe the Bible, God bring Judgement...(Not my words but the Bible)
