Can Good Come out of the Haiti Earthquake?

In my last post I talked about how God is more concerned with human sin than he is with human suffering. This may seem insensitive from our point of view, but when we take a look at the world through God's eyes, we can easily see why:

A few statistics will make this clear:

100 million children have died since the turn of the century, mostly from preventable causes.

The United Nations estimates the over 2.5 million people are currently being trafficked around the world, most of them children.

1 billion undernourished people in the world right now, in a planet that has the ability to produce for 10 times our population.

100 million dollars is spent on food each day in North America that is later thrown away. By contrast, we only give about 5 million dollars in food aid every day.

We are spending 5 times more on pet food, than we are in helping the hungry

By the time we go to bed tonight, about 20,000 people will have died of hunger. 73,000 000 since the turn of the century.

250,000 killed by the infamous AK 47 every year.

15 million dying every year as a result of the brutality, greed, and selfishness of man.

Compared to about 200,000 to natural disasters. This means that natural disasters cause under 0.01 percent of un-timely deaths.

I want to emphasize that every death is tragic. death was never meant to have any part in God's plan. But we need to understand that the biggest cause of suffering and death, is mankind, not nature or God.

So why did God allow the Haiti earthquake? You'd have to ask Him for the complete answer. But one benefit that can be seen is that natural disasters tend to wake people up to the suffering in the world.

Almost everyone knows about the +200 thousand who died in the 2004 tsunami. There are few who are not filled with compassion for the Haitians, and reasonably so. Yet as we look at those images on the tv screen, we need to realize that what we are seeing is really the norm, rather than the exception of human life on earth. Here's a quote from one of my favorite authors

Our world is a vast lazar house, a scene of misery that we dare not allow even our thoughts to dwell upon. Did we realize it as it is, the burden would be too terrible. Yet God feels it all.
-EG White, Education, pg 263, 264

-A Lesson from the Past

At the turn of the 20th century, the scientific revolution was well underway. Efforts to form a science-based society were everywhere. The underlying theory behind much of it was the science of eugenics. Eugenics is the idea that human beings can help direct our evolution by selectively breeding the strongest, and/or eliminating the weakest. In 1906, a leading Smithsonan scientist, also director of the Brookfield Zoo, had Ota Benga, a Congolese Pygmy, placed on exhibit in his monkey house, sharing a cage with Dohung, the Orangutan, and next door to Dinah, the Gorilla. His intent was to show that the "lower races" had more in common with apes than with civilized Europeans.

HG Wells, a proponent of eugenics wrote, 'it is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.'

So this "negative" eugenics became a veritable force in Europe and America, where between 100,000- 500,000 people were sterilized without consent.

But sterilization was only the beginning.

It is George Bernard Shaw, who wrote in 1910, 'A part of Eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber, a great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them." Shaw was very much in favor of this. He believed in a scientific utopia, we would eventually breed out all of our problems by eliminating the defective human specimens.

It was a common practice by Eugenicists in the United States to pay illiterate vagrants to carry these signs in large cities

"I am a burden to myself and the state. Show I be allowed to propagate? I have no opportunity o educate or feed my children. They may become criminals. Would the prisons and asylums be filled if my kind had no children? I cannot read this sign. By what right have I children?

this was the mainstream view of the time. It was universally accepted science, and endorsed by 3 presidents. If it hadn't been for Nazi Germany, would anyone have woken up and stopped this before it became some variation of a Nazi World? (antisemitism was almost as big in the rest of Europe and America, as it was in Germany)

World War II woke people up. It got the message across. It forever canceled the blank check society had given to scientists. Science does not have anyway of providing value to a human being. We are just evolved animals, no more having rights than any other creature has rights. Why shouldn't the weak be eliminated?

World War two set up a conceptual wall between science and politics, a wall that is coming down only today with the Climate Change agenda, as well as the positive Eugenics being advocated by the human genome project.

What does this all have to do with Haiti, and natural disasters in general? Could it be that God is seeking to wake us up? To make us realize that there is too much suffering in the world to be wasting our money on entertainment and indulgence? What if all the money that is wasted on professional sports, music, movies, and the Olympics, were given to the relief of suffering? Does it not lie in our power to end this suffering if we would allow God's love into our hearts and allow Him to take away our selfishness? Would so many thousands have died if the same earthquake hit New York as hit Port Au Prince? Probably not. It is poverty that killed so many there, poverty caused by human greed. Will we wake up, or are more disasters on the way?