Thursday, 5 June 2008

Karma

Amit Varma has cited two passages, one by Gandhi in 1934 and the other a recorded quote by Sharon Stone recently, where both describe earthquakes as cosmic punishments meted out to sinful humans. I was reminded of an interesting piece from Sam Harris's An Atheist Manifesto:

As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran: Their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence; their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God‘s grace.

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world‘s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is--and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgments of their happiness for no good reason at all.

1 comment:

Saurabh Das said...

Absolutely enlightening.

Its ironic that a survivor thanks god for saving him/her but does not blame the same god for killing (actually, make that murdering, for if god did exist then a million deaths in an earthquake is nothing short of mass murder) his/her closest kin!