Is God a conservative?

Sitting in the atmosphere-thick environs of Parliament House during COAG, the thunder and rain came with a bang just as negotiations heated up in the capital. One passing passenger on the COAG train mentioned that the claps of thunder may be a sign of the proceedings happening underneath it - the tensions of the negotiations reflected in the skies. Clearly this was a comment in passing not really to be believed, but on that same day others across the globe made similar observations between nature and human happenings on earth and decided God was pissed.

In Iran, a cleric warned that Iran's earthquake problem was the fault of under-dressed women (not the many fault lines underneath the country); in the US, right-wing pundit Rush Limbaugh said that the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano causing flight chaos in Europe was God's reply to the Obama health care legislation. While most of us sit back and laugh, if not cringe at this kind of theorising about God and his politics, it seems many out there, even in the Year of Our Lord 2010, still believe that God reflects, Old Testament style, his will through nature. But if God indeed does control nature for that purpose, is he really showing us his politics in the process? Indeed is God a conservative?

To know I guess we have to look at the self-declared experts in this matter - people who claim to know God's intentions and what natural disaster relates to which political or moral misdemeanour on earth. If we follow the specious reasoning of the aforementioned cleric and many like him, God is clearly socially conservative. He gives us earthquakes unless women dress more modestly or even if we watch too much cable TV.

In the right in America, the experts on this demonstrate the US God continues to stay on the conservative side. Most recently, Rush Limbaugh said he thought God may have replied to Obama's health care legislation because ''the earth has opened up'' with the volcano in Iceland. God clearly is not a fan of universal health care or anything approaching it. But if we go back further we find out more. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina was blamed on multiple immoral happenings, including legalised abortions according to Pat Robertson and others, Bush's support for withdrawal of Jewish settlers in the Gaza strip, and just a general God punishment on the sinful city of New Orleans.

There was even a spoof news item that ran with the idea that Pat Robertson blamed the Hurricane on Ellen Degeneres. This was not true but so believable that it got a run as actual news. God apparently is reasonably cool with Ellen. But in Australia, He was even involved with the bushfires in Australia. Pastor Danny Nalliah from Catch the Fire Ministries blamed the Black Saturday fires on God's anger about Victorian liberal abortion laws.

If all these experts in the area of God's wrath are to be believed, he doesn't like abortions, doesn't like too many women showing their hair line (but this seems okay in the US where God is not so worried about it) and he doesn't like universal health care. But what does he like? Does he have to punish all the time with natural disasters? And why does he lean towards conservatism?

It would be novel I suppose to see some soft pinko lefties blaming a really sunny day on the fact the middle class are buying more solar roofs. Couldn't that be proof of God's happiness at them doing something for the planet. Maybe God is an environmentalist and will punish us all when we don't have a price on carbon? But no, all the experts in this matter point to God being a conservative, angry with a modern corrupt world that has lost its way. Why God can't be a bleeding heart leftie for a while, instead of a hard-arsed, no one is allowed to have any fun conservative, I don't know.