May 8 is celebrated as the Buddha’s birthday, and the smiling fat man sucker-punched China’s Sichuan province with an earthquake to highlight the occasion. In keeping with the Olympic Games, slated to begin in less than 100 days, one judge gave the quake a score of 7.5, while a second judge gave it a 7.8. It was felt as far away as Vietnam and Thailand. The death toll is near 9000, and climbing.

900 students were trapped under the rubble of one school, and at least five other schools were in ruin. A chemical plant in Shifang city had cratered, burying hundreds of people and spilling more than 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia from the site.

Two girls were quoted by Xinhua [News] as saying they escaped because they had “run faster than others.” (Now that’s refreshingly honest; God didn’t save them, they just boogied faster than the others.)

The quake hit about 60 miles northwest of Chengdu - a city of 3.75 million - in the middle of the afternoon when classrooms and office towers were full. There were several smaller aftershocks, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site.

While the Olympic venues weren’t affected, the quake struck at the heart of the Wolong Nature Reserve and panda breeding center, one of the last homes of the giant panda.

The good news is that the Chinese government has improved its response to disasters in the last few years, and the military’s rapid responders were quickly deployed. Also, with the new openness to foreigners and the press, word got out to the world very quickly, and wasn’t hidden or denied as in the case of the Tangshan earthquake, which the government at first denied even happened even though it has become known as the worst quake in history.

Natural disaster could become catalyst to blow away injustice

Even at the best of times, the Irrawaddy delta is one of the least accessible areas of one of South-East Asia’s most closed and impenetrable countries. […] It is too soon to know the extent of the destruction, but there is no longer any doubt that a massive humanitarian catastrophe has struck Burma. Cyclone Nargis, with its 120mph winds, coincided with a 12ft-high storm surge. Even last night there was little hard information about the extent of the damage but it seems clear that fields, houses, roads, ditches, houses and entire communities have been blown and washed away. […] The numbers of injured, it can be assumed, are several multiples of the dead. The numbers of homeless are unknown — the best that Richard Horsey, a United Nations official in Thailand, could guess was several hundred thousand “but how many hundred thousand we just don’t know”. A World Food Programme official said that 90 per cent of houses in the worst-affected zone were destroyed. No one in Burma has seen a natural disaster like this in living memory. But this is a catastrophe whose consequences do not end with the dead and injured. Its ripples will be felt across the region and it has the potential, at least, to reshape the entire country. Apart from the loss of life, the injuries and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes, the disaster may have far-reaching secondary effects. The flooding and destruction of sanitation systems increase the risk of epidemics, including malaria and typhoid; the loss of livelihoods is crippling in communities where many people subsist on less than $1 a day.

Oh, yes, let’s kill the most knocked-down, oppressed, and downtrodden — and, further, let’s kill them in highly remote areas.

How unbelievably loving…

Further reading, for anyone interested…

It always interests me how the same arguments are pulled out against atheism. I mean, here’s a guy from Berkeley, who I’m sure is relatively intelligent, and then I read the following:

That led me to re-turn to one of C.S. Lewis’s finest books–and one of his first “Christian” ones–”The Problem of Pain.” And here’s the quote: “We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it.’” Lewis is simply right, and even though it’s a tough word, it’s a good one. As he concedes, “It does not matter that I know I must become, in the eyes of every hostile reader, as it were, personally responsible for all the sufferings I try to explain…. But it matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.”

And I feel the same way. I’d suggest that looking at both the amount and distribution of natural and moral evils shows that this “too much on one’s plate” explanation is simply a vapid attempt that goes nowhere.

And then, if that wasn’t enough, I get to read — once again — the values argument from theism.

The existence of good—and the related realities of meaning, purpose, and beauty—present together an almost insoluble problem for the atheist. […] Consider the words of Richard Dawkins, Oxford scientist, and bestselling author of The God Delusion: “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” That’s a reasonably bleak portrayal of the universe, and, since we’re part of that universe, of our lives as well. It does, however, correspond perfectly with a basic conviction from Philosophy 101—“nothing comes from nothing.” Start with a purely physical system without any Creator, and all you have is brute fact. If the universe is simply a physical system, then why should something non-physical like good, meaning, purpose, or beauty arise? It cannot.

I’ll leave the “physical” and “non-physical” fallacies for the reader for homework.

And this is out of Berkeley?

[*sigh*]

Brazil priest carried aloft by balloons missing

SAO PAULO, Brazil - A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons was missing Monday off the southern coast of Brazil.

Rescuers in helicopters and small fishing boats were searching off the coast of Santa Catarina state, where pieces of balloons were found.

Rev. Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off from the port city of Paranagua on Sunday afternoon, wearing a helmet, thermal suit and a parachute.

He was reported missing about eight hours later after losing contact with port authority officials, according to the treasurer of his Sao Cristovao parish, Denise Gallas.

Gallas said by telephone that the priest wanted to break a 19-hour record for the most hours flying with balloons to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for truckers in Paranagua, Brazil’s second-largest port for agricultural products.

Some American adventurers have used helium balloons to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons.

A video of Carli posted on the G1 Web site of Globo TV showed the smiling 41-year-old priest slipping into a flight suit, being strapped to a seat attached to a huge column green, red, white and yellow balloons, and soaring into the air to the cheers of a crowd.

I know ya’ll have fun with this one.

A good edition of Maher’s New Rules. As usual, all the really good stuff comes at the end (3:15)…

The Muppets sing “Danny Boy”…
(Just gotta love Animal)…
If this doesn’t make you smile, get medication…
(Or alcohol — yes, I’ve been drinking)…

If you ever wonder what a two-dimensional self-righteous asshole does in his spare time when bad things happen in the world, just read this guy:

The Northern Illinois University shooting is a prime example of the atheist influence in our nation. For decades, atheists have been telling us there is no God, Christianity is bad, Christ was a lunatic, and all religion is false. It’s taught in schools and forced down our throats at every Christian holiday. Where does that leave a person in despair? Where can the next would-be school shooter turn? Because you know there’s going to be another. Atheists tell us that humans are just matter and chemical reactions and synapses firing. Richard Dawkins defends abortion by claiming a fetus has no right to the claim, “human.” How in the world can we expect our world to survive the dehumanizing of humans? Is it any wonder that a person, under this atheistic influence, feels no remorse or sympathy for his fellow human beings? Whether this shooter was an atheist or not is irrelevant. It’s the atheistic influence in our society that has lead to the dehumanizing despair in otherwise mentally ill individuals. We have opened the door and let the demons in. We’re going to have to clean house and close that door, or we’re going to see these horrific tragedies again and again.

I’m sure you all knew it was coming, sooner or later. And right along with the lame-ass values argument, yet again.

Yes, because saying “because God says so” really avoids that bad moral skepticism.

God punishes / answers prayers with “no” / unfolds part of his great mysterious plan we can never understand and must simply accept / tests / lets happen because of humanity’s free will / loses to or stands back while Satan makes hay in Tennessee…

But the Shrub assures victims he won’t pull a NOLA on them…

While NOLA celebrates Mardi Gras anyway, despite shootings…

And God still hates Turks…

And old people.

The latest death-toll I’ve heard for the tornadoes is 59 people so far…