The Ultimate Terrorist
  by Doris Drisgil

What is the difference between a multi-victim crime and a natural disaster? The first is willed by an intelligent mind; the second is the random result of natural forces.

The September terrorist attacks were a vicious crime. While the volcano that recently errupted in the Congo was a natural disaster.

Violence is a part of nature. Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have been wreaking destruction since the planet first formed. Humans, being a part of nature, are also violent. We wreak havoc on each other through murders, wars, terrorism and countless other means. The distinction is that we, as thinking beings, can devise a moral code to guide our acts. We can condemn the pointless killing of innocent people.

Nature has no morality. Nature is wholly pragmatic: whatever works. Animals kill to eat; animals die to feed each other. They don't think it's good or evil; they just do what they have to. An unimaginably complex system of natural laws interacts continuously to produce life, to make weather, to shape continents, to create planets or destroy galaxies. These events are neither good nor bad; they're just the normal workings of the universe. So far as we know, we humans alone have the ability to create moral standards and make moral judgments. Unless of course there is, as so many want to believe, a god who sets standards for us and controls the universe we live in. Natural disasters have long been termed, "acts of god." To a rationalist, this phrase holds the strongest irony. Have all the earthquakes and floods that have killed thousands of people over millennia been willful acts of an intelligent, omnipotent god?

If that is true, this supernatural being who has us in his power is the worst terrorist ever imagined. If he has the ability to regulate natural events, and chooses to cause disasters that result in undeserved pain and death, then how can anyone consider him good?

Many believers will say that natural disasters can't be blamed on god. Are they admitting that their god doesn't have full control over everything that happens? Certainly a less-than-all-powerful deity would be more believable than the omnipotent but cruel god of traditional beliefs. Yet nearly all monotheists insist that their god is omnipotent, and we just don't understand his reasons for doing what he does.

For the rational person, it is much simpler to accept that the universe follows natural laws, and there is no higher intelligence that intervenes in the operation of those laws. Natural disasters are misfortunes, but not evil. The term "act of god" was devised to explain disasters before humans developed scientific understanding of the natural laws that cause such events.

Rationalists cannot accept the idea of a willfully cruel higher power. We understand that natural disasters are the blind workings of physical forces, unguided by any intelligence. Terrorism, on the other hand, is a human concept: the willful targeting of innocent victims. When a disaster such as September 11 occurs, it is intended by a thinking, human mind, and no one can argue that it is not evil.

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