Overnight a powerful earthquake, with potential tsunami implications - centred in the Aegean Sea - rocks Turkey. Does anyone in their right mind consider this a mere coincidence, just another arbitrary 'freak of nature'? Surely that's not how your average Middle Easterner, anyhow, would, in their heart of hearts, so regard it.
It hardly occurred in a void, rather it follows some highly inflammatory, bordering on genocidal language, in not just Turkey but now apparently throughout the Muslim world - seen especially in the huge protest marches in Pakistan and Bangladesh - against France and its leadership, who have gone out on a courageous limb and denounced in no uncertain terms the Islamist Fascists now vying for supremacy in the Gallic nation.
Which country has now forthrightly declared it is no longer prepared to bear with a long-time 'softly, softly' approach to the existence of terrorists in its midst, wreaking 'merry havoc' with *the innocent on every side, a nation no longer resiling from its longstanding commitment to freedom of speech and expression, but, in the wake of the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and republishing of those 'inflammatory' cartoons, laying down the gauntlet to those who have used the liberties which are every Frenchman and woman's very birthright to challenge these very values under the disguise of supposed religious intolerance and persecution.
Yet what we are seeing not only in South Asia and Turkey in particular but in France itself are sympathizers with such intolerant - Islamist, note, not Muslim - fascists: yes, let's, like France's President Macron, who's at long last recovered his mojo, as folk might put it here down under, call it for what it actually is - under the protection of France's long-established and deeply-cherished **liberties, seeking to subvert and overturn those selfsame liberties by disingenuously conflating them with the very intolerance that is their own especial trademark!
I'm afraid that sticking your finger up and in the face of Western Europe's proud (post-Protestant Reformation) heritage of civil and religious liberty is one that - ultimately, eventually - even the Almighty will one day soon(er than many think or realize) call time on, declaring verily
Enough is Enough! It's all over, folks, and I'm returning to claim My own...
*/********But sadly, it is the innocent who tend to suffer, not the despotic leaders such as Turkey's Erdogan. Yet does that mean that God actually approves such innocents suffering unjustly? Hardly; He has ***denounced as an abomination that very thing throughout His (Older Testament) word, including especially in the 'Torah' (****first five books of Moses) and in the Book of Proverbs in particular.
Rather, as the American university-based 'defender of the faith' (once delivered unto the saints) - whose name I've somehow forgotten - well put it - ******by sheer coincidence this very day, after I'd long since begun, and even almost completed, this very blogpost - in the oft-noted and (*******quite understandably) denounced Older Testamental genocides wherein entire peoples, including every last man, woman and child, were declared due for complete and utter extermination (by God to His people), these peoples' children did indeed perish through no special fault of their own, as a result of (unavoidably) sharing in the consequences accruing to their parents, who had by such time (often long since) surpassed the moral boundaries God has set for human beings, indulging in child sacrifice among other abominations...
**One of its revolutionary triad of 'liberty, equality, fraternity'.
***In scriptures such as Exodus 23:7 and Proverbs 6:17 in particular.
****For those like myself who cannot believe it wasn't Israel's *****great deliverer (Moses) who penned the timeless classic of the well-known Book of Job (about which I've long been preparing 'a layman's guide', if it ever gets written).
*****But of course it was Yahweh/the LORD Almighty Who through Moses - and angelic agencies - really, truly delivered the Israelites from their Egyptian captors/oppressors/slavemasters, an event of historical moment ever after known as 'the Exodus'.
******But to 'true believers' nothing, no, nothing is sheer, mere 'coincidence'; sovereign divine Providence overrules all. Which of course doesn't mean that accidents don't happen, or - even more importantly - that it is ever somehow God's rather perverse will for the innocent to suffer and/or die.
Entire volumes/tomes have been written on this very subject, but suffice to say the general consensus of Christian authors upon the same seem in unanimity in agreeing that what God is oftentimes (throughout sacred scripture) declared as causing...is rather, just as often, something He happens to allow...and, again, suffice to say that here is a world, nay, a universe, of difference between the two...
*******From an initial, if ultimately superficial, secular human perspective.
********Which is why I heartily concur with (New Zealand's) Family First spokesperson Bob McCoskrey's summation of his own opposition (anyhow) to the recent (almost exactly) 2:1 approval of euthanasia ('assisted dying') in our general election-concurrent referendum. The problem with euthanasia is the same as that with capital punishment, you simply cannot ensure that even one innocent person will not suffer as a consequence. And for myself as for Bob, one mistake is too many.
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