Millions of Americans will find themselves in the path of a total eclipse of the sun on Monday. A rare earthquake shook New York City and the surrounding region Friday, with another aftershock that afternoon. Also, Monday’s darkening sky could possibly reveal the so-called “devil comet” that is making a once-in-71-years appearance in our corner of the solar system.
In an earlier, more superstitious time, any one of these events would have been widely taken as a dark omen requiring serious repentance.
In an earlier, more superstitious time, any one of these events would have been widely taken as a dark omen requiring serious repentance. Taken in combination, I joked on Friday soon after the earthquake hit, these kinds of signs could take down a whole dynasty. But as is so often the case these days, reality overtook satire, courtesy of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who wrote, “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
Whoo, boy. That view isn’t surprising coming from someone who once suggested forest fires had been started by Jewish space lasers. Conspiracy theories often take advantage of the human brain’s desperate search for explanations even in ways that defy reality. It’s the same quality that helped early humans piece together stories to explain the natural world: What better to explain, say, thunder than to give it an unseen manufacturer?
Seeing these kinds of phenomena as judgments on human morality extend back almost as far. The flood myth, one that is most popularly told through the story of Noah’s Ark these days, can be linked back to the ancient Sumerians, if not further. Likewise, as I mentioned in a recent piece on the man-made nature of famines, the Torah and other books of the Hebrew Bible see God’s wrath in the natural ills that befall mankind and in the darkening of the sun and moon.
Seeing these kinds of…
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