Boxing day, tsunamis and god.

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 15:35:47 +0100

It was great this morning - usually I feel slightly glum on boxing day (usually due to the excessive amounts of alcohol consumed the day before), but seeing as I'm on the old antibiotics, I was as sober as a quaker yesterday. Ergo, waking up this morning totally lucid and bright eyed while my flatmates crawled out of their holes groaning gave me a huge jolt of schadenfreude-based joy. I had Miniature Heroes for breakfast (come on, its [just after] Christmas!) while my fellow students threw up into bowls. Which, again, made me feel slightly euphoric.

But turning on the telly, I was greeted with the fact that a year ago today over 200,000 people died in Indonesia/Shri Lanka/West coast of Africa from the "Boxing Day Tsunami". I mean, Jesus, how is that fair? I know I'm stepping onto hackneyed territory here, but how can those people keep theit faith, be it Muslim or any other, after losing their entire family?

I watched a documentary on Channel 4 the other week about the Tsunami ("The Tsunami: Where was God?" I think it was called), and I was quite shocked at the mother (Well, former mother) who said that the tsunami was a punishment from God for the sins that her young children comitted in previous lives. Even more bizarre was the fact that she seemed quite alright with the whole thing. I don't quite know if that is naivety or madness. Even more strange was the guy saying that the tsunami was a fucking BLESSING!!

Being an atheist, I have no real idea what having faith is like, but putting the death of a loved one, a person of your own flesh and blood, down to something that has no basis of fact in anything at all seems like bloody madness to me.

Merry day after Christmas,
Dave

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The World, by Holy Dave

Boxing day, tsunamis and god.