God as Godzilla?

COMMENT | Even for devout agnostics, the way some self-styled “true believers” misuse and abuse the alleged Almighty as a fall guy and alibi has gone way beyond a joke.

The latest joke is the assertion by Umno president and criminal suspect Ahmad Zahid Hamidi that Allah sent the earthquake and tsunami that recently devastated the resort town of Palu on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for the express purpose of punishing LGBT behaviour.

This view of the Great One as a horror movie-style monster seems to me not only blatantly blasphemous, but ludicrously selective.

If Allah’s of a mind to wreak his wrath on what Zahid called a ‘hub’ of LGBT activity, why would he single out some small island in sexually-intolerant Indonesia instead of one of the countless countries where people of LGBTQI persuasions are free to express their sexuality, and even marry each other?

And if he’s so smart at divining the motives of the Divinity, how come Zahid so conveniently overlooks the possibility that the recently ended six decades of misrule by the Umno/BN regime might well have been Allah’s punishment of the Malaysian people for LGBT and other sexual peccadillos as well as for their apparent penchant for putting up with corruption and oppression?

Then there’s the mystery of how Zahid receives his messages from God about His motives. Via Hemail, perhaps, or Faithbook? Or by download from the Cloud?

Whichever, the ultimate question, as far as I’m concerned, is why an all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful God would choose a zero like Zahid as one of his earthly spokespersons?

The answer to this, of course, is that God can’t be simultaneously both great and ga-ga, and thus we have to assume that Zahid’s presumption that he’s capable of comprehending and communicating God’s proverbially mysterious ways to the rest of us is a product of wishful if not witless thinking.

A thought that inevitably reminds me of the old saying that goes: “when you imagine that you’re talking to God, it’s called praying; when you imagine that God’s talking to you, it’s called schizophrenia”:

But I suspect there’s method in Zahid’s apparent madness, and thus, that in his case, it’s not so much a matter of praying to the Almighty and schizophrenically hallucinating auditory responses from Him, but more like a connection I’ve mentioned many times before between praying and preying.

In other words, piously pretending to pray, but actually preying on the gullibility of the innocent, the ignorant and the gormlessly godly for the express purpose of getting away with robbing them of their reason, rights and protection and plundering their country’s riches and resources.

Of course, Zahid and his Umno/BN accomplices in Malaysia are by no means the world’s only misusers of Allah and other alleged gods and their associated religions as fall guys and alibis for the atrocities they commit against their citizens.

Similar if not more extreme hypocrisy is evident almost everywhere from faux sanctimonious but murderous Saudi Arabia and other similarly fake ‘Muslim’ kleptocracies, through countries with brutal realities despite ‘Buddhist’ beliefs like Burma/Myanmar, to all the self-declared ‘Christian’ plutocracies whose true creed is actually greed...