Nepal quake exposes our excuses

Aik TC SG

Jim Taylor May 24, 2015 The Daily CourierKelownadailycourier.ca

My daughter and I were in northern India when the first earthquake struck Nepal on April 25. I felt nothing. My daughter thought she felt a faint trembling in the ground under her feet, but she wasn’t sure. We were, after all, almost 1,000 kilometres from the epicentre near Kathmandu. To feel anything at that distance indicates the size of the earthquake — magnitude 7.8, the biggest in Nepal in 80 years.

The seismic scale is exponential; an 8.0 earthquake is 10 times as strong as 7.0, and so on. The strongest earthquake ever recorded was 9.5 in Chile in 1960. The offshore earthquake that caused the 2011 tsunami in Japan registered 9.0; the 2004 Indonesian tsunami was launched by a 9.2 tremor.

Nepal was lucky. Even with two major quakes and at least 35 aftershocks, only about 10,000 people died, with another 20,000 or so injured. By comparison, Haiti had over 100,000 victims, Indonesia about 230,000.

Thankfully, I didn’t hear any fundamentalists rushing to say that Nepal deserved it.

You may remember after the Haiti earthquake, televangelist Pat Robertson declared the people of Haiti had brought destruction on themselves by entering a pact with the devil more than 200 years before.

Similarly, Jerry Falwell attributed the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center to insidious influence of “abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” plus the American Civil Liberties Union.

Does anyone believe if Washington had ruthlessly cracked down on such movements, the 19 al-Qaida hijackers would have cancelled their plans?

The obsession with laying blame reveals a deep-seated belief in a supernatural being who punishes and destroys.

In one Nepali town, over 80 per cent of the local temples collapsed into rubble.

But two were left virtually unharmed. Even some highly secular Indian newspapers wondered whether the devotees of those two temples had especially effective prayer practices, or whether the gods they worshipped wielded more power.

The same with stories of amazing survivals. Rescuers pulled a 101-year-old man from beneath rubble that had reputedly buried him for a week. A five-month-old baby was reunited with his mother after 22 hours buried alive.

Not surprisingly, his mother called it a miracle — something that could only be attributed to divine intervention.

Similar “miraculous” stories surfaced after the Indonesian tsunami, for example. One man claimed he was saved because he cried out the name of Jesus as he was being swept out to sea.

Of course, we don’t hear from those who were not saved, so we don’t know how many of them also called out to Jesus.

Or to Shiva, or to Allah.

We hear about — and marvel at — the exceptions, but they prove nothing, except that they are exceptions.

They stand out against the hundreds and thousands a capricious god did not save.

In my opinion, any god who would murder thousands to gain praise for saving a favoured few doesn’t deserve to be worshipped.

Besides, if you’re going to give a god brownie points for saving you, whom will you credit for not saving all those others?

A competing god, perhaps? An evil twin? Given the death tolls and loss of property, the evil god would seem to have more power than the good one.

But why would a deity wish to punish Nepal anyway?

Nepal is about 80 per cent Hindu; Tibet, on the other side of the Himalayas, is primarily Buddhist. Hindus revere the world’s highest mountain as Sagarmatha, Tibetans as Chomolungma. But Everest is hardly pristine, with hundreds of climbers ascending its summit every year, strewing garbage in their wake.

Did a holy mountain fight back with a catastrophic avalanche last year, an earthquake this spring?

Such an explanation actually makes more sense to me than most religious explanations. The Himalayas are among the world’s most seismically active regions. The mountains themselves result from the Indian sub-continent ramming into the great mass of Asia. The collision crumpled the floor of the Tethys Sea, the way a car crash crumples fenders, and thrust the ancient sea floor nine kilometres into the sky.

I find that a perfectly rational explanation for the region’s recurring earthquakes.

I don’t understand why people need to find a supernatural explanation for natural phenomena.

Unless it’s a means of absolving them of responsibility for failing to consider natural phenomena — from earthquakes to landslides to flooding — when building their homes and cities.