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Electra
Registered Member

Date Joined Feb 2002
Total Posts : 611

Posted 9/8/2003 9:03 AM (GMT -6)

Doc, I came across this quote in a book I was reading, and I thought that "disaster studies" might lend some support to your thesis that "natural" evil is a result of human (and angelic) free will:

[P]olitical and social decisions impinge on the very meaning of disasters. Even the concept of a "natural disaster" must be questioned if the disaster is thought to be an occasion devoid of power relations and political decisions. The important monograph of Anthony Oliver-Smith, The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in the Andes [Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1986], represents a school of "disaster studies" that refuses to separate supposedly "natural disasters" from human intervention….The point is simply that disaster studies have come to see that human interaction with the environment —for example, decisions that are made against older wisdom—are inherently a factor in the assessment of "disaster." There is, in short, a politics of disaster that brings it closer to the study of the sociology of human crises of violence, war, and forced population movements. (Quoted from Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile. Overtures to Biblical Theology [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989], 28–29.)

Electra

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing. ~ Dostoevsky

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 9/8/2003 9:38 AM (GMT -6)

It has been shown that famines/starvation is more due to political corruption than it is due to the scarcity of food.

dlw

Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes."

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 9/9/2003 7:43 AM (GMT -6)

speaking of corruption, how come so few people have been checking out the Campaign Finance Reform link?

There is conflict in terms of whose interests get served by the gov't. Campaign Finance Reform is one of the ways that moneyed interests freedom of $peech gets tuned down some so as to permit the rest of us a better chance of getting heard.

If one wanted to see our gov't do more to ensure freedom of religion abroad, at the potential expense of disruptions of trade-flows, then this will require some reduction of the influence of moneyed-interests in gov't.

Likewise with avoiding more energy-crisis/Enron-type events.

dlw

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