Asking the perp for help
President Donald Trump met with leaders of the Christian community in the Oval Office and urged the nation to pray for the survivors of Hurricane Harvey and for the response and recovery efforts on Sunday. He also pledged $1 million of his personal money to help victims in Texas and Louisiana.
“From the beginning of our nation, Americans have joined together in prayer during times of great need to ask for God’s blessing and God’s guidance,” President Trump told the christian leaders Friday. “When we look across Texas and Louisiana, we see the American spirit of service embodied by countless men and women.”
But we also see a fuck-ton of water, and ruined houses, schools, hospitals, roads, parks, farms, neighborhoods, cities…
And if we’re asking for God’s blessing and God’s guidance…can we also ask God why God did this to us in the first place? By which I really mean why the fuck are we flattering “God” and requesting favors when “God” didn’t see fit to divert the hurricane or weaken it or abort it? Why are we babbling about God’s blessing and God’s guidance when God is the perp? Why do we keep doing this? If God can help, God could have prevented. If God did this to us, God is not a friend and not an entity to admire and praise and grovel to.
At least 44 people have died in incidents related to Hurricane Harvey, while 32,000 people have been forced into shelters, according to officials.
“We invite all Americans to join us as we continue to pray for those who have lost family members and friends, and for those who are suffering from this great crisis,” Trump said.
Why? What for? If a gang comes to your house and burns everything up and tortures you and throws poison into your well, then that gang intends harm toward you. That gang is not someone you should be petitioning or sucking up to.
“And behind me, we have faith-based people who are highly respected, and especially so in their communities where they’re not only respected, but they’re loved — evangelical leaders, Christian leaders — many people of faith. And I just want to thank you all for being with us today because we’re going to be signing a Day of Prayer, and that will be on Sunday. It will be a very special day. And I don’t know when this was done last, but it’s been a longtime coming. It’s been a longtime coming.”
That’s so Trump. He has no idea what to say, so he talks about reputations. They’re respected, they’re loved – they’re famous, they’re huge. It’s all appearance with him; he doesn’t even know what substance is.
And if he doesn’t know when it was last done then how can he know “it’s been a longtime coming”?
He can’t, it’s just a stupid whiny culture war thing to say.
Meanwhile, Trump also promised to donate $1 million.
But he didn’t actually do it. He could have done it, but he didn’t – instead he “promised.” He’s broken all such promises in the past.
Stick it to them, Ophelia! You’re one of my heroes!
Maybe the idea is, you pay off the perp so they don’t repeat it. Take the hurricane as an extortionist’s calling card; you don’t want more of this, you want to keep what you still have, make with the prayers and sacrifices. You have to think like an egotistical thug to understand Trump. This may help explain his appeal to Christians – he’s very much like an Old Testament God.
What does this:
have to do with this:
People keep asking god for help, and then they go out and do the work themselves.
It’s because of God’s guidance! You pray for God’s guidance, and God guides all those people to go out there. It’s not their built-in sense that when thousands of people are in desperate trouble, people should rush to help. That would be secular. No, it’s God’s guidance, delivered in response to prayers…by the entity who put all those people in desperate trouble in the first place. It’s circular, but it keeps things ticking over.
And I see that the orange twonk still thinks that evangelicals are not Christians, despite his own (alleged) evangelical background.
“…still thinks that evangelicals are not Christians”
Not necessarily. He may have some dim notion of biblical parallelism, where the same idea is repeated in different words:
“The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork”.
Yes, Surely he could have made that donation then and there, as easily as the rest of us donated a few quid by credit card. He could have done it on camera, for that matter, so that everyone saw.
But he didn’t. And the value of that ‘donation’ decreases as time goes by because it robs charities of flexibility in their long term response and doesn’t help the people with immediate need at all.
Trump doesn’t understand the difference between him giving a million dollars and someone else receiving it.
But I don’t believe for a moment that he’ll give it. If it turns up, it will be far too late and via his ‘foundation’, which is full of other people’s money and hardly any of his.
Look, either god did this all by himself in which case he deserves opprobrium and the cold shoulder right now. The “no more floods” promise to Noah was a lie.
Or, far more likely, Harvey was a conjunction of the basic laws of physics made more disastrous by the damnfool things we’ve done, like building a major city in a swamp on the coast and siting your major industry there, before we even get to global warming and the deep layer of warm water in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, we know quite enough about all these things. We have university libraries full of the stuff and armies of scientists still working on it all. At very least we could have predicted better, protected better, planned better.
God had nothing to do with it and clearly lacks the power or the will to save us from ourselves. We should ignore him or her.