President Bush proposed holding a day of prayer for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show asked if Hurricane Katrina was an act of God why are we praying to him to help us with an act that He did.
That is a problem with monotheism, a problem that pagans in the past did not have.
In history, the many pagan religions that existed for thousands of years, usually had many gods. To use the hurricane dilemma, pagans would have blamed the bad god of the sea for going crazy and unleashing his power on us poor humans.
These same humans would pray to a different god, lets say the god of dry land, to help them recover.
They would pray to the head god (Zeus?) to keep his gods in line and not harm humans.
Today, Christians (for instance) have to accept the punishment God visited on New Orleans and its people and then pray to the same God to help them survive the punishment - kind of dumb.
Taking this a step further, we pray to OUR God to protect our troops in Iraq. Since our God controls everything (we are told) he must also allow our troops as well as innocent Iraqis to be slaughtered by the Islamic infidel / terrorists who don't even believe in our God.
In the good ole' days, the pagans had a pantheon of gods and their enemies had theirs. If the enemy kicked the pagan's asses, they knew that their god was weak or he was pissed at them and wanted them to lose.
They would either pray extra hard and offer extra sheep to their god so he would help them. If he still did not they would admit that the god(s) of their enemies were stronger and start praying to the god of their enemies. This really did happen - read some history.
Whoever dreamed up this one god thing did not look at the big picture and definitely not at all possible scenarios.
You can only take the old "God works in mysterious ways" shit for so long.
Janusz
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