We have previously seen how Christian leaders like Pat Robertson routinely attributed natural disasters like Katrina to God’s revenge for everything from gay rights to abortion to secularism. Not to be outdone, according to various sites, Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner have informed the faithful that the recent deadly forest fires were punishment for gay rights and abortion even though they struck the conservative areas of Colorado Springs rather than places like Boulder. Presumably, God also wanted 19 fire fighters killed in Arizona under the same theory.
What is striking about these bizarre claims is that there is a population that loves the model of a vengeful Old Testament God who thinks nothing of wiping out villages or most of Mankind because he is peeved with some affront. They also want to believe that God is randomly killing people for sins to complete their own twisted view of faith.
Swanson noted that a Denver Post photograph of State House Majority Leader Mark Ferrandino kissing his partner also helped trigger God’s wrath.
Of course, that still leave the odd fact that God chose to hit Colorado Springs which is deeply conservative and spared the liberal areas of Colorado — a pattern that might suggest God is pretty liberal. That did not stop these two pastors:
Buehner: Why Colorado Springs? Understand that Colorado itself is a state that has been begging for God’s judgment. How did we do that? Well, we were the first state to make abortion legal; you could murder your baby as long as it’s in your womb.
. . .
Swanson: When you have a state where the House leadership is performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post two months ago? Does God read the Denver Post? Do you think He picks up a copy of the Denver Post? He gets it. God gets the Denver Post.
Buehner concluded that Coloradans should be glad God “hasn’t destroyed the whole state yet” as “an act of grace.” But why were the fires concentrated in Colorado Springs, Buehner asked, “Why not wipe out Boulder or Denver” where all the Democrats live? He answered his own question: “Judgment begins in the House of God.”
They also attacked airplane movies showing breasts, young men “doing the metrosexual thing with the skinny pants and the little fairy shoe” and women wearing pantsuits.
One can debate whether people like this actually believe this nonsense, but clearly people listen who want to hear that God is killing people in retribution for sins. Of course, massive fires occurred before the birth of Jesus Christ and natural disasters have struck the most God fearing, conservative areas. None of that even slows down the narrative.
The curious thing about this narrative is that one would normally assume that God is at least as good a person as most human beings. If we ever met a person who kills people randomly to express anger, we should view him as a psychotic individual. Yet, those same attributes are constantly reaffirmed by pastors like these two individuals.
By the way, Swanson has also condemned the new Star Trek movie on the basis for inter-species sex . . . and suggested it is the natural extension of evolution: “He said the movie “implicates the good guy in the film as mating with the wrong species, but not just one, but two. . . That’s how you get evolution, and so the end result of course is that evolution has no basic problem with bestiality or cross-species mating.”
