My grandfather was a preacher. When I was young, he told us all to pray in "thees and thous" as if it were a structured English that might be more understood by God. It clearly was an old way of speaking, but, God had been around a lot longer than me, so who was I to question it? But I did. I asked him why? Jesus never even spoke English. My grandfather didn't quite have an answer for me that made an awful lot of sense. I mean, Jesus never heard of the King James Version of the Bible. It was written long after His time. Once again, also many years ago I questioned him. He said that bodies should be buried, not cremated, for the resurrection of the body at the time of the Second Coming. Just before this, I lost my Boy Scout troop leader, who was a TWA pilot. The plane crashed and his body was never recovered. He could have been pulverized, like someone in an atomic or major explosion. I aked him about these people, who have no body. He didn't quite have an answer for me on that one, either. My point is not to question his religious fervor or rationale or beliefs, but to show how far religions have evolved since those days in the early 60's. Many religions of the Christian faith no longer adhere to such thinking. New versions of the Bible have been written. People of all faiths are cremated every day. As far as other religions, I am not that learned and make no conjectures of my own. Certainly my grandfather had to have changed with the times, but he was old even then, being born in 1904 and instilled with doctrines from an earlier era.
This recent event encompassing such a massive area of destruction in Sri Lanka, Phuket and surrounding countries was and is terrible and catastrophic. These things have occurred since the existence of earth. How could such things happen? I don't think a merciful God would snap His fingers and...Poof! Death and destruction everywhere! I have a hard time, for one thing, believing that God is a man, with the same organs and urges as the ones He placed on earth, but that is another issue. I think the earth is continuously evolving, thus evolutionary. This earthquake was a natural disaster, which brought on the impending tidal waves, and caused the deaths of so many innocents. The forces that caused this did not happen overnight. It took how many thousands or millions of years for all the dominoes of nature to fall in just this precise formation in order for this to happen? One thing of particular interest to me is how do animals know when to find shelter? How many animals were killed during this event? Did something tell them to seek higher ground, a message we humans did not receive? Why would God alert the animals and not us? Could this be an instinct preserved from ancient times that we've lost as we evolved into a more intelligent species? Everyone, at some point, has sensed something they wouldn't normally feel. Could this be remnants from a time long gone that we've mostly lost down through the years?
Could nature and God coexist? Why not? We do with nature. If there is a God in the universe, don't you think this god would want humans to learn to fend for themselves? To evolve into constructive, intelligent beings that know how to protect themselves and others, and to grow with life's experiences? I'm certain that more people around the world are murdered every year than the ones who were lost on that fateful December day. Would God want any of these events to take place? I don't think so. And you can pray for the rest of your life for none of this to ever happen again, but it will. Unnatural versus natural deaths. Such is the recurring theme.
Think of the first computer. It was the size of a house. How small are they today? It has evolved into what it is today and will evolve into what it will become tomorrow, with God's help, or did we as humans do it all alone? This is what I ask unto you: Shall we live in a distant past, intrinsically tied to the laws of God written by men from a bygone era? Or are we to live here on earth, bound by the forces of nature not of our doing, along with an ever evolving God and universe and grow along with the ride?
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