{"id":563,"date":"2011-05-11T11:30:36","date_gmt":"2011-05-11T09:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=563"},"modified":"2015-04-21T18:33:35","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T16:33:35","slug":"youtubes-teenage-theologians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/youtubes-teenage-theologians\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube&#8217;s teenage theologians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dear readers, I hope you can forgive me for <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d74d3\">abandoning<\/span> two of my principles.<\/p>\n<p>The first is not to revisit a topic too soon after having written about it. I thought I was done with <a title=\"Tornado stories (Mike Pilewski)\" href=\"\/blog\/tornado-stories\" target=\"_blank\">tornadoes<\/a>, but they kept coming. After those in North Carolina, there was the one that destroyed the airport in St. Louis, Missouri. Then a major city in Alabama was hit. I had wanted to share a video with you, but hadn&#8217;t found any good ones of the first two storms. Then I saw this, filmed by a student from a university building in Tuscaloosa.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/beJttz_KTAs\" width=\"440\" height=\"330\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>My other principle is never to read the comments on YouTube. Their uncontrolled <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d78ba\">venom<\/span>, <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d7ca0\">profanity<\/span> and misspellings tell me that most of them are written by <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d8088\">latchkey teenagers<\/span>. But although that&#8217;s true of the more than 1,000 comments on the video below, they fascinated me for a different reason. The teenagers were having a <b>theological debate<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/T0FHTG9VETY\" width=\"440\" height=\"330\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The basis for this was the way the cameraman kept saying <b>&#8220;Jesus, help these people&#8221;<\/b> as he watched the tornado go past. This is how many people talk in the Deep South. They <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d8470\">invoke<\/span> Jesus not only at Christmas, Easter and mealtimes, but in lots of situations. Many of the commenters did not seem to understand this, <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d8858\">inviting<\/span> numerous <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d8c40\">rebuttals<\/span> and explanations from <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d9028\">the devout<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p><b>If Jesus had wanted to<\/b> help those people, he would have prevented the tornado from forming, wrote an atheist.<\/p>\n<p>Jesus did help them, wrote a believer. While the victims were <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d9413\">swirling around<\/span>, <b>he pulled them out<\/b> and took them to heaven \u2014 at least the good ones. (I imagined him up there separating the saints from the <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d97f9\">sinners<\/span> the way we&#8217;d separate bottles and <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d9be0\">cans<\/span> from our garbage.)<\/p>\n<p>A third person said that <b>a lot more people would have been killed<\/b> if <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0d9fc9\">prayers<\/span> had not been said, causing Jesus to <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0da3b1\">get up off his butt<\/span> and do something after the tornado was already there.<\/p>\n<p>The causes of the tornado were also highly disputed.<\/p>\n<p>Some said it had resulted from <b>natural forces<\/b>. Others argued that if God is all-powerful, he is <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0da798\">capable<\/span> of <b>creating a tornado<\/b> and <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dab7f\">steering<\/span> it.<\/p>\n<p>Some saw the tornado as a form of <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0daf68\">punishment<\/span>. Various radical <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0db351\">clerics<\/span> with large TV audiences had said that 9\/11 as well as hurricanes in Florida and Louisiana were <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0db738\">divine retribution<\/span> against atheists, gay people and Democrats. (As an <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dbb20\">aside<\/span>, last month&#8217;s tornadoes <a title=\"Tornadoes destroy churches in Alabama, Georgia (United Methodist Portal)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.umportal.org\/article.asp?id=7850\" target=\"_blank\">destroyed some Methodist churches<\/a> as well.)<\/p>\n<p>That would mean that God is a <b>mass murderer<\/b>, someone pointed out. The Old Testament <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dbf08\">illustrates<\/span> his anger-management problem quite well.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe God is a little <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dc2f2\">hot-headed<\/span>, so we need to pray to Jesus to <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dc6d8\">calm him down<\/span>, came the reply.<\/p>\n<p>Well, perhaps God sent the tornado as a warning to people to <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dcac0\">behave<\/span>, said someone. Or perhaps he just let it happen, in order to test people.<\/p>\n<p>Was the tornado, then, or the suffering it caused, <b>evil<\/b> that God allowed to happen? someone asked. Evil exists because without it, good would have no meaning, someone replied. God <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dcea8\">literally<\/span> made a pact with the Devil.<\/p>\n<p>Teenage theologians aren&#8217;t the only ones who are <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dd293\">stumped<\/span> by this. The <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dd678\">pope<\/span> himself was asked recently why God allows so much suffering. <a title=\"Pope Benedict admits there isn't a full answer to suffering in rare TV interview (The Telegraph)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/religion\/the-pope\/8468312\/Pope-Benedict-admits-there-isnt-a-full-answer-to-suffering-in-rare-TV-interview.html\" target=\"_blank\">He said he didn&#8217;t know<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So I won&#8217;t speculate either. To be honest, I was <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dda60\">bothered<\/span> much more by <b>something else<\/b>. If you&#8217;re out in the middle of a tornado, or a protest in Syria, <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dde49\">for God&#8217;s sake<\/span>, hold the camera <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0de230\">steady<\/span>. You could die out there, and you don&#8217;t want to be remembered for your bad photography.<\/p>\n<p>The commenters could at least agree that the Alabamans had something to film, unlike these guys in Brooklyn who were <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0de618\">ridiculed<\/span> all over YouTube, and <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dea00\">rightly so<\/span> \u2014 <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0dede9\">for sure<\/span>, <span id=\"tooltip551fa6d0df1d1\">dude<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/m50n4hqx1Ho\" width=\"440\" height=\"330\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear readers, I hope you can forgive me for abandoning two of my principles. The first is not to revisit a topic too soon after having written about it. I thought I was done with tornadoes, but they kept coming. After those in North Carolina, there was the one that destroyed the airport in St. Louis, Missouri. Then a major <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/youtubes-teenage-theologians\/\">&#8230; >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,42],"tags":[213,138,127,73,163,211,212,214],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1429,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/1429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}