God Storms: A Historical Perspective

As is generally the case in the wake of devastating weather events such as Hurricane Katrina, we’ve all heard from one religious group or the other in regards to the supernatural implications of such a violent storm. Whether it be related to homosexuality, sexual promiscuity or the availability of abortions (the linkage and significance of which I will discuss later in this post), there’s never a shortage of explanations about natural disasters serving as deserved punishment sent forth from their designated higher power. As most sane and rational people, I tend to have an initial volatile mental reaction when these claims start spewing until logic slowly kicks in and reminds me of the reasons behind such flights of fantasy. Actually, after a bit of reflection, I, at times, even feel my disdain turned more towards pity for these people. After all, many of them will go throughout their entire lives without any basic understanding of the commonalities they shared with our primitive ancestors who started the ball rolling on what has become their modern-day faith…

First, let’s travel back a few hundred thousand years and view the world from the perspective of an early Homo sapiens man who we’ll call ‘Grog’ for this purpose. Grog is quickly finding himself at the top of his world. He has conquered the competing Neanderthal species into extinction. There is no wild beast that he and his fellow hunters working in a team cannot eventually ensnare or kill. Life is a struggle for Grog (though not as much as it had been in previous generations) but he has reached a balance and understanding of the natural world around him with only a few nagging exceptions: the weather and geological events, death and the galaxy shining above. These were forces beyond the ability of Grog’s ‘cave man’ aptitude to explain in the terms of his existence. Of these annoyances, none had the daily impact on his very survival as did the weather. It could provide the best of hunting days or turn and hold the entire tribe at its mercy. And when it turned savage, it often brought death in its path. Being unable to define such natural occurrences in the compacted view of the food chain he operated within (and with zero understanding of the science behind it), the only path left for Grog was to assign control of the weather to powerful, and unseen, forces or beings. Hence, the earliest forms of religions were born to man…

Weather also played a crucial role in the transition of religion from an individual belief system to that of an organized construct. The most primitive sects known in our history were founded when one individual claimed to have a special relationship above all others with such natural forces and soon had a following of 'believers'. It may have been a claim to actually control the weather or simply playing the role of explaining to the group why weather events had occurred. Regardless, and aside from the mysteries of death, weather was probably the most influential ingredient to the recipe of our spiritual perception of the world around us. As maintaining a managerial handle on the skies above proved problematic for early shamans, assignment of the weather reigns were slowly transferred over to non-visible Gods in nearly every archaic faith. Of these (and there are hundreds of examples), Zeus has always remained personal my favorite as few Gods played such a direct and active role as he and his angry bolts of lightening.

Even in modern Christianity, it’s not hard to find examples of the direct guidance weather had in that faith’s formation and development. I won’t begin to cite the innumerable stories in the Bible of weather being directly controlled by Yahweh, but rather will briefly touch just on how weather and geological disturbances served as the foundations upon which the Christian version of the afterlife is based. Back from the days of Grog, the activities of daily life were strictly governed by the pending weather on the horizon. Blue skies and white puffy clouds were good stuff; skies clear enough to see all the shining lights in the night sky were even better. Peace in the sky meant a less harsh life on the ground. In essence, there’s your starting point for the ‘fluffy’ contemporary view of Heaven. As for the heated descriptions of Hell, I’ll just take it for granted that everyone reading this is aware that the modern interpretations of that domain heavily lay in the hands of the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, and the first book in his Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), namely ‘The Inferno’. Considering the history of Italy and volcanic eruptions (today it’s labeled the ‘Cradle of Volcanology’ by the scientific community), it’s a sociological given that the denizens of that region had not only a great respect for unpredictable geological occurrences, but a deep-rooted cultural apprehension and fear of the burning death it regularly brought. In a nutshell, this is where the visions of flame and lava as eternal punishment in the Christian mythos were first committed to print to endure to this very day almost 800 years later. Though, in all anthropological honesty, I guess we can’t solely blame Dante and his geographical location for this aversion to flame. Even Grog suspected a mystical property to flames since there were only two natural reasons for the occurrence of fire: lightning and volcanic eruption. Fires in the primitive nature were powerful and dangerous mojo that left a lasting impression for millennia of generations.

Fine and dandy, you may say, so that’s how weather played a role in forming our religions, but why is still described as a tool for Godly vindication for society’s sins? Well, to address that issue, let’s bring back up the three main reasons I listed above that were associated with the recent destruction of Hurricane Katrina (homosexuality, promiscuity and abortions). It takes far less than a rocket scientist to see the common denominator in these areas of blame; sexually-related activities that deviate from the more puritanical views on the subject. But before going forward, let’s understand why major religions have such adversarial attitudes towards active intercourse and, more importantly, why that view actually stands in contradiction to the continuing attribution of God controlling the weather.

A key component of the principles of most monotheistic religions has always been the separation, or better said, ‘elevation’, of man from the natural world around him. I have been in debates with Christian friends on many occasions in the past where they would literally turn blue in the face before admitting man was, at his biological core, an ‘animal’. As one of several approaches to delineating man from the animal kingdom (along with a propensity to demean women as sexual miscreants, which I’ll save for another article), the self-control of sexual impulses has long been regarded as the integral cornerstone in setting us aside from the other beasts fornicating openly in nature for all to see. In more ancient and unabashed times, punishment for sexual activity outside the dictates of the religious authorities didn’t need to wait for such ethereal judgments as storms…those in charge of our older faiths often took matters of punishment into their own hands. But as legal systems formed over the course of advancing societies, protections eventually fell in place to protect the common citizen’s non-criminal sexual adventures from the wraith of the zealots. So, the torch for administering ‘moral dues’ for such non-approved sexual behaviors fell to the guardians of the afterlife and to disasters, whether natural or man-made, that were beyond the faith’s ability to physically control.

So, how does this connection of God-controlled weather by religious fanatics stand in contrast to their other views of ‘God in Nature’? Well, that’s easier to illustrate than you might realize. Some of the earliest religions held the natural world as a crucially-important component of their faith. As societies evolved and man became master of the animal kingdom, God’s direct influence over the beasts of our world faded. They became relegated to soulless creatures put here by the Creator for either our consumption or amusement. With the onset of the Industrial Age and man’s rapid ability to raze the lands around him for energy, agriculture and expansion, God slowly filtered out of the environmental picture as well. The woods, soils and waters of our planet became mere resources, again provided by the Almighty solely for our mastery and unbridled use. Hopefully, you can see the obvious pattern emerging here - once we can control it, God no longer does. Hmm, the involvement of our modern Gods in the natural world seems little more than selective at best from that perspective, doesn’t it? We exclude his opinion on cutting down a rain forest, but we pat him on the back for swirling up storm clouds to rid us of fellow sinners. Though it may seem science-fiction to most, there will come a day far in the future when we are able to moderate, if not directly control, weather systems and their impact on our civilizations. And when that point of meteorological mastery arrives, God will finally fall out of the equation in this regard as well.

I also could spend a good amount of discussion on the logical fallacies of a belief system that purports the Creator of the entire universe becomes personally involved in one single planet and its inhabitants. By claiming that Gods still directly control natural aspects of our world, these so-called ‘religious’ persons only show how little they understand the vast immensity of the universe. It’s the philosophical equivalent of a human traveling to the other side of our planet for the sole purpose of moving one grain of sand into (or out of) the path of a traveling ant. But then again, most man-made ‘Higher Beings’ have rarely exhibited intelligence suitable to their designated position of omnipotence. Generally, their behavior is confined within the emotional constraints of our own psyches. As the author Robert A. Heinlein best put it, “Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”

Anyway, and back to the original focus of this post, the next time our world is hit by the destructive effects of uncontrollable weather and the religious pundits and freaks again come out of the woodwork to tag it as Godly retribution for this or that, keep in mind that they are the inevitable, though extreme, end-products of hundreds of thousands of years of groveling to dark skies. Grog and Pat Robertson could probably sit side by side and nod in agreement at the forces behind the storm clouds above them, even with millennia of years separating their worlds…if only Grog was intelligent enough to speak and voice his shared mentality… Jage