Are Earthquakes a Curse from Allah? Today Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran answers the solution of “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes,” he said.
Iranian mullahs think that women should stick to strict codes of modesty to protect themselves and the world from being buried under the rubble. Modesty will probably ensure that earth’s tectonic movements will stop. In his view the earth reawakens from slumber when women wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously and this reawakening of earth causes big earthquakes. Tens of thousands of people have died in Iran earthquakes in the last decade.
According to Red Cross, 901,177 people died in natural disasters between 1995 and 2004, compared with 643,418 in the previous decade. It looks like things have gone bad. But other factors could be responsible for this high figure. For example, on July 27, 1976, China had officially declared that 255,000 people killed in an earthquake in its Tangshan region which measured 7.5 on the Richter scale. Independently, the death toll was estimated at 655,000. Communist regimes hardly ever reported figures for famines and other natural disasters. The increased openness has made available more information that is helpful in understanding disasters and fashioning responses accordingly.
Mr Sediqi delivered a televised sermon at the Tehran University campus mosque on the need for a “general repentance” by Iranians when he warned of a “prevalence of degeneracy”. Disasters seem to be never-ending, the Japanese North East big one, the Sumatran tsunami to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the rains in India and the earthquake in northern Pakistan. Are we reaching the end of an era of tranquil nature that we were acquainted with? Have our moral turpitude and tryst with pleasures finally taken a toll on our planet?
I think ‘Religion’ has been rightly called the opium of masses by Marx. Unquestionably, religious-based prejudices have led to disintegration and division of man over our short conscious history. The Indian Ocean earthquake on December 26, 2004, generated a tsunami that killed approximately 275,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
The India Plate, a part of the great Indo-Australian Plate, which underlies the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal, is drifting northeast at an average of six centimetres a year. The India Plate meets the Australasian Plate (which is considered a portion of the great Eurasian Plate) at the Sunda Trench. It was this movement of Indian Plate under the Eurasian Plate that caused the recent earthquakes in Pakistan.
Hojjat ol-eslam believes that women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society that increases earthquakes.
No one is out to punish us. We live in a very benevolent environment. The laws of nature are secular and uniform. Understanding the phenomena that lead to disasters can help us relax. Interpreting the disasters in the wrong way can make us lose hope. And without hope one cannot build a future.
Northern Japan is largely on top of the western tip of the North American plate. Southern Japan sits mostly above the Eurasian plate. Normally, the Pacific Plate is moving west at about 3.5 inches (8.9 centimeters) per year, and the movement has produced major earthquakes in the past — nine earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater since 1973. Earthquakes typically happen along faults, which are breaks in the rocky plates of the Earth’s crust. These faults build up strain over the years as two plates butt heads. The rupture during Friday’s quake was almost 200 miles (322 km) long, on an underwater fault that is about 220 miles (354 km) long by about 60 miles (97 km) wide, said Tom Broker, of the USGS.
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As the world media stares into options of heightened concerns on heart wrenching reports of spent fuel fires or core melt down and like bunch of hypochondriacs make speedy comparisons to ill fated Chernobyl; I remain firmly optimistic that mankind will come out of this robust clear and nice. We will not disappear into oblivion, these extreme stresses and tests will make us feel that physical laws of nature if respected shall provide security of progress and sustainable development. On the other hand are likes of Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi who pronounce these natural diasasters as wrath of Gods.
Are Earthquakes a Curse from Allah? Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran answers the solution of “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? Gods must be very very angry this time around, “This was just a ginormous earthquake,” It’s really hard to grasp how big it is.” Gods shortened the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds.
The co-relation between immodesty of women and punishment of Gods is earth shattering this time.The intense temblor accelerated Earth’s spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Japan’s Earthquake Research Committee said the earthquake forced the North American plate eastward by about 66 feet (20 meters), reported Japan’s national broadcast agency, NHK. The entire island of Honshu was moved about 8 feet (2.4 m) east, according to USGS scientists. Geologists in St. Louis reported that their city moved up and down a fraction of an inch during the quake, but too slowly for anyone to notice, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
When a mind is devoid of logic and reson and science, its only refuge is relgion. For Hojjat ol-eslam Sediqi ”There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.” Hojjat ol-eslam believes that women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society that increases earthquakes.
Iranian mullahs think that women should stick to strict codes of modesty to protect themselves and the world from being buried under the rubble. Modesty will probably ensure that earth’s tectonic movements will stop. In his view the earth reawakens from slumber when women wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously and this reawakening of earth causes big earthquakes. Tens of thousands of people have died in Iran earthquakes in the last decade.
Mr Sediqi delivered a televised sermon at the Tehran University campus mosque on the need for a “general repentance” by Iranians when he warned of a “prevalence of degeneracy”. Disasters seem to be never-ending, the Japanese North East big one, the Sumatran tsunami to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the rains in India and the earthquake in northern Pakistan. Are we reaching the end of an era of tranquil nature that we were acquainted with? Have our moral turpitude and tryst with pleasures finally taken a toll on our planet?
This is no boobquake; this is Pacific Ring of Fire playing its settling role. Dear Mr Sediqi, We are prisoners of our birth please, the tectonic plate movements are happening shall happen and these phenomenon are geological where ‘Gods’ after creating are now resting to see how their works cooling down. Their hands are tied now the internal forces of the earth crust has taken over. The Pacific Ring of Fire is home to 452 volcanoes in total — that’s 75 percent of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes. Earthquakes along that fault can affect the rest of the world.
I think ‘Religion’ has been rightly called the opium of masses by Marx. Unquestionably, religious-based prejudices have led to disintegration and division of man over our short conscious history. The Indian Ocean earthquake on December 26, 2004, generated a tsunami that killed approximately 275,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
The India Plate, a part of the great Indo-Australian Plate, which underlies the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal, is drifting northeast at an average of six centimetres a year. The India Plate meets the Australasian Plate (which is considered a portion of the great Eurasian Plate) at the Sunda Trench. It was this movement of Indian Plate under the Eurasian Plate that caused the 2005 earthquakes in Pakistan.
The one in Japan last week is along the Japan’s stretch of the Ring of Fire where the North American, Pacific, Eurasian and Philippine plates come together. Northern Japan is largely on top of the western tip of the North American plate. Southern Japan sits mostly above the Eurasian plate. Normally, the Pacific Plate is moving west at about 3.5 inches (8.9 centimeters) per year, and the movement has produced major earthquakes in the past — nine earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater since 1973. Earthquakes typically happen along faults, which are breaks in the rocky plates of the Earth’s crust. These faults build up strain over the years as two plates butt heads. The rupture during Friday’s quake was almost 200 miles (322 km) long, on an underwater fault that is about 220 miles (354 km) long by about 60 miles (97 km) wide, said Tom Broker, of the USGS.
The ever-increasing connectivity has turned our planet into a huge ‘neighborhood’. It has been just more than a century since we were able to conquer distance. The last two decades have been all about global togetherness in terrestrial space; our ‘village’ has shaped up so fast that our minds are unable to cope with its new realities. Pleasures and pains of the entire world have become our own. We tend to learn about disasters and their gory details far more minutely than we did ever before.
According to Red Cross, 901,177 people died in natural disasters between 1995 and 2004, compared with 643,418 in the previous decade. It looks like things have gone bad. But other factors could be responsible for this high figure. For example, on July 27, 1976, China had officially declared that 255,000 people killed in an earthquake in its Tangshan region which measured 7.5 on the Richter scale. Independently, the death toll was estimated at 655,000. Communist regimes hardly ever reported figures for famines and other natural disasters. The increased openness has made available more information that is helpful in understanding disasters and fashioning responses accordingly.
We live in a complex environment that we can partially control. Recent analysis of South African rocks has revealed that 251 million years ago rivers suddenly became clogged with sediments. It is believed that a huge comet or asteroid walloped earth to cause the mass die-off at the end of the Permian Period and dawn of the Triassic.
The myth of ‘overpopulation’ has been with us since Malthus. Today, we have crossed the threshold of malnutrition; we die not because of lack of food but because of poor distribution and efforts to maintain price stability at the cost of human lives.
Tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes are nothing new. In the North Atlantic Ocean, the Storegga Slides, a series of sudden underwater land movements over tens of thousands of years, caused tsunamis and mega tsunamis across a wide area. Between 1650 BC and 1600 BC (the date is still debated), the volcanic Greek island Santorini erupted, causing a 100-150 metre high tsunami that devastated the north coast of Crete, 70 kilometres away.
Winchester reports that after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake killed 60,000, “Priests roved around the ruins, selecting at random those they believed guilty of heresy and thus to blame for annoying the Divine, who had then ordered up the disaster. The priests had them hanged on the spot.” The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in what is now Indonesia fuelled the growth of an extremist strain of Islam, bent on purging society of impurities displeasing to God.
I always look at most pessimist ‘environmental reports’ with a view that ‘the glass is half full’ more often than not; it is a fact that recuperation is better than destructiveness. The ultimate truth is that evolution is based on survival of the fittest – it started with singularity and will finish with singularity, the remaining in-between is dominated by logic, reason and effort. Human race has to find answers to disasters; in the dinky little existence of over 10,000 years of known history we have discovered one thing that is the most important, i.e., that we are just at the cusp of a major bout of new knowledge, yet this realisation has given us tools of not being shocked by anything. All this mass epidemic news is exaggerated response of a very hypochondriac cynical mankind. It appears as if we have become a sickening collection of killjoys. The Universe is complex, so why should we dumb down our conversations. We live in a world of staggering complexity, a world poised at a dangerous turning point with science and technology living at the root of both our problems and our possibilities. And yet, in this poised world and at this critical moment, our leaders speak to us as if we were minors.
Mankind will go from strength to strength; our survival is a story of victory over adversary. Conceivably there are so many anxieties if you really want to add one more bad news in addition to viruses and bombs, here’s the bad news. According to the calculations, the Solar System will be passing through the galactic plane in the near future, and should see an increased risk of impact. Our risk of impact could increase 10-fold. In fact, one of these high points of comet activity would have been 65 million years – the same time that an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs.
Some can argue that exaggeration is a process that expedites healing and action (‘When the fire department puts out your house do you claim that since it is out the house would have never burnt down in the first place?’) Preparation is important but to embellish our inability to respond to ruin does not help. Life is about moderation and measured appropriate timely response to effective threats without blowing or killing ourselves up with nameless fears.
No one is out to punish us. We live in a very benevolent environment. The laws of nature are secular and uniform. Understanding the phenomena that lead to disasters can help us relax. Interpreting the disasters in the wrong way can make us lose hope. And without hope one cannot build a future.