This is based on a news story at
telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/01/nflood201.xml. Please note these are
Bishops of the Church of England.
A lot of Protestant churches are very hopped up on the “Jesus is coming! He is at the doors!” hype. But almost every generation has though the same thing. Still, we are supposed to watch and wait. This story does make me wonder.
I’ve never heard such utter poppycock & balderdash 
- One diocesan bishop has even claimed that laws that have undermined marriage, including the introduction of pro-gay legislation, have provoked God to act by sending the storms that have left thousands of people homeless.
In that case, why hasn’t San Fran been inundated or swamped by fire from Heaven ? Or did God miss ?
There are plenty of gays in Scotland - not just in the Midlands. Or maybe God’s a Calvinist, & has it in for Anglicans. Or may He just doesn’t like Midlanders. Or maybe He wants Anne Robinson to let Him on “The Weakest Link”. People who interpret these things are so boring & unintelligent: their ideas have more holes than a sieve: there is a ton of possible explanations. Yet only the usual ones are trotted out.
If “X has died horribly, therefore, X must have sinned horribly” is valid reasoning, that puts a massive question-mark over the English Protestants who were put to death for their Protestantism. As all sorts of Christians have died nastily, maybe God doesn’t like Christians. If God hates those groups so much - why doesn’t He kill them ? Maybe God hates gay-bashing Evangelical Anglican Bishops, & is storing up something really horrible for them. Do they know otherwise ?
If gays are so eeeeevil - well, He’s God, so he could kill off some of the Labour Party Cabinet members of the last ten years (now there’s a thought !), which He has so far declined to do. Maybe he was trying to slay Tony Bliar - or is He an ardent Blairite, & a bitter opponent of Gordy Brown, our new Great Leader ?
That’s it: God Hates Gordy
That would look good on a tee-shirt. It’s at least as likely as the piffle dreamed up by the doom-sayers in tin-foil hats,
who always blame the same old groups. (Though I’d be even more impressed if He loosed a few thunderbolts against brain-rotting garbage like “Big Brother”, which is to TV what Enron was to probity in business.)
Besides, what sort of theological explanation would fit the scientific realities involved ? Flooding doesn’t happen just like that - it’s part of a much larger pattern. So if one is going to read theological meaning out of a flood, or out of any other occurrence in the weather, one has to take that larger pattern into account as well. It is possible that the weather for the next X billion years was preordained at the creation - but if that idea is present in their thinking, it should be made explicit.
Even if they have thought about that set of details, that still does not deal with the Biblical difficulties with the idea that “X has occurred, therefore, Y must have sinned”. Was Jesus crucified for His sins ? That is what this over-simple theory implies. Those bishops make God Almighty sound like Osama bin Laden, the Ayatollah Khomeini, & the Muslim Brotherhood, all rolled into one: God the Terrorist, Who kills the innocent with the guilty (& only some of the guilty at that). And that is bad.
