God as Godzilla?

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.

The con in ‘conservative’

My own country of Australia, for example, is currently cursed with a ‘con’ as in ‘conservative’ government whose neo-liberal ideology of “greed is good if not God” completely conflicts with what should be the values of its ‘Christian’ prime minister, members and supporters.

The currently-ruling Liberal-National-Party coalition is so violently opposed to environmental activism, especially anything involving climate change and renewable energy sources, and so perversely and indeed, suspiciously, supportive of continuing use of fossil fuels, especially coal, that most of us have taken to sarcastically calling it the COALition.

And it is so persistently un-Christian, or what I like to think of as ‘Crasstian’ in its crass privileging of the rich and powerful at the expense of the rest, and in its appalling persecution of asylum seekers, to be beyond ridiculous.

Yet when this right-wing, or in other words, wrong-wing rabble recently chose an avowed born-again Pentecostal Christian Scott Morrison (photo) as its latest prime minister of Australia, lots of clerics celebrated.

For example, as the Guardian Australia reported, pastors Adam Thompson from the Voice of Fire Ministries and Adrian Beale from Everrest Ministries told a congregation at Hope City Church that Morrison’s elevation to power was “divinely inspired”.

Thompson, who according to the Guardian Australia claims that he “can interpret dreams and supernatural signs and manifestations”, told his audience that he’d “received a message from God that Morrison and the Coalition must win the (next) general election”.

“The Lord woke me up at 4.30 this morning,” Thompson declared, neglecting to mention whether he was talking the Saviour’s or Sydney daylight-saving time, then ranted that “in the next six months, it’s time for the body of Christ to put its differences aside … to come together and agree that Jesus is the Messiah and start praying together and calling it in and praying for our prime minister right now, and for our government.”

Then, having finished with his praying/preying in a style so eerily similar to that of Zahid’s approach to God, he proceeded to ape Zahid’s leap into Godzilla mode with the warning that “if the prime minister right now doesn’t get elected in this next election, there’s going to be darkness coming”.

I’ve no idea what form of darkness or other disasters the good pastor had in mind, but if it’s even half as drastic as Zahid’s recent earthquake and tsunami, not to mention his dramatic forthcoming trial on massive corruption and money-laundering charges, it should be enough to bring a whole new level of meaning to the term God- (or, if you prefer, Godzilla-) fearing.

---

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published compilations of his Malaysiakini columns include "Mad about Malaysia", "Even Madder about Malaysia", "Missing Malaysia", "1Malaysia.con" and "Malaysia Mania”. - Mkini