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 city in Alabama was hit. I had wanted to share a video with you, but hadn’t found any good ones of the first two storms. Then I saw this, filmed by a student from a university building in Tuscaloosa.
My other principle is never to read the comments on YouTube. Their uncontrolled venom, profanity and misspellings tell me that most of them are written by latchkey teenagers. But although that’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 theological debate.
The basis for this was the way the cameraman kept saying “Jesus, help these people” as he watched the tornado go past. This is how many people talk in the Deep South. They invoke Jesus not only at Christmas, Easter and mealtimes, but in lots of situations. Many of the commenters did not seem to understand this, inviting numerous rebuttals and explanations from the devout.
If Jesus had wanted to help those people, he would have prevented the tornado from forming, wrote an atheist.
Jesus did help them, wrote a believer. While the victims were swirling around, he pulled them out and took them to heaven — at least the good ones. (I imagined him up there separating the saints from the sinners the way we’d separate bottles and cans from our garbage.)
A third person said that a lot more people would have been killed if prayers had not been said, causing Jesus to get up off his butt and do something after the tornado was already there.
The causes of the tornado were also highly disputed.
Some said it had resulted from natural forces. Others argued that if God is all-powerful, he is capable of creating a tornado and steering it.
Some saw the tornado as a form of punishment. Various radical clerics with large TV audiences had said that 9/11 as well as hurricanes in Florida and Louisiana were divine retribution against atheists, gay people and Democrats. (As an aside, last month’s tornadoes destroyed some Methodist churches as well.)
That would mean that God is a mass murderer, someone pointed out. The Old Testament illustrates his anger-management problem quite well.
Maybe God is a little hot-headed, so we need to pray to Jesus to calm him down, came the reply.
Well, perhaps God sent the tornado as a warning to people to behave, said someone. Or perhaps he just let it happen, in order to test people.
Was the tornado, then, or the suffering it caused, evil that God allowed to happen? someone asked. Evil exists because without it, good would have no meaning, someone replied. God literally made a pact with the Devil.
Teenage theologians aren’t the only ones who are stumped by this. The pope himself was asked recently why God allows so much suffering. He said he didn’t know.
So I won’t speculate either. To be honest, I was bothered much more by something else. If you’re out in the middle of a tornado, or a protest in Syria, for God’s sake, hold the camera steady. You could die out there, and you don’t want to be remembered for your bad photography.
The commenters could at least agree that the Alabamans had something to film, unlike these guys in Brooklyn who were ridiculed all over YouTube, and rightly so — for sure, dude.
