Gays are under attack in Liberia. According to Catholic Archbishop Lewis Zeigler
of Monrovia (along with many other many Christian leaders in Liberia), Ebola is
a punishment from God for the act of homosexuality.
However, the “Before
its News” website, which appears to produce baloney on an industrial scale, has
a more terrifying assessment to share. It tells us that “our culture is becoming morally degraded
with each passing year. Additionally, mysterious events are happening
throughout the world and many prophecies are being fulfilled right before our
eyes: Pandemics rising (Ebola, TB, cancer, aids), … God’s judgment is coming” it
announces gleefully.
If you thought that
was bad enough, then according
to Ronnie Baity, (or should that be “Batty”) a Baptist preacher in
Winston-Salem, N.C., much worse awaits us all, for God is about to send
something even worse than Ebola. This is because he (God that is, not Ronnie)
is so angry over the decision of a federal judge to strike down a ban on gay marriage in North Carolina. Why isn’t there Ebola in North Carolina then?
All of this is palpable nonsense of course. Ebola is not a biblical punishment – it is a
blood born virus, like HIV. Transmission is by infected body fluids alone and
as such, is probably about as easy, or difficult, to catch as HIV. The most
important differences between it and HIV are that, instead of years, it
manifests itself within days with an incubation period of between 2 and 21 days.
Ebola kills up to about 60 to 70 percent of its victims under truly gruesome,
horrific circumstances. Hence all the anxiety and fear. However, a person with
Ebola is not infectious until they have developed the symptoms. It is not airborne;
you can’t contract Ebola from sitting next to someone on a bus or breathing the
same air as them or through casual contact. It’s a virus, virulent, deadly, non-discriminatory
but also weak. For instance it does not like heat and it can’t survive for long
outside its host and is quickly killed by soap and water. The full attentions
of our health institutions are now lasering in on it and it’s likely an effective
treatment if not even a cure, will be found soon.
Yet, in addition to this, Ebola also seems to
activate a “disease of the mind”, as the opening quotes above by these religious
figures seem to show. Whilst most Christians will find these sentiments as
ridiculous and crass as anyone else, this fundamentalist religious style of viewing
the world’s misfortunes is still pervasive. The desire to attribute
divine intervention to all earthly events, especially those causing suffering
and misery speaks not to holy interventions, but to a form of possession of the
mind. The notion of God and its much wider philosophical dimensions are cast
to one side in favor of a small minded, malevolent and mercilessly brutal Old
Testament monster.
There is a virus of the mind at work here, a
meme, which prevents the mind from exercising any form of balanced rational examination
of the facts. The capacity for sensible thought has been taken captive by an
extreme philosophy of unreason. Many people are easily able to see though these
mad statements - why does God not hate gays in countries where Ebola has not
broken out? Why is God punishing Africans in Liberia for America’s attempt to
divide Israel, and so on?
We see evidence everywhere of these memes that
cultivate perverse ways of thinking, from suicide bombers believing that,
though mass murder and self-immolation, an eternal reward awaits them, though
to the a preoccupation with the great doomsday event, replete with all its
terrible judgments and damnations. The outbreak of Ebola induces another
outbreak of perverted thinking in those who see God’s handiwork in this
horrible sickness. Their only intellectual currency is anger, misery and
despair, and either consciously or subconsciously, an almost sadistic yearning
for the final human Götterdämmerung, secure in the delusional
assumptions of their own immunity from it.
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