© Laurence T.

Pearson 2021
700 CLUB
This is a true story.
This essay was inspired by a conversation that I had with a priest in Cebu in the
Philippines a few years ago. (I think it was in 2013.) The response that I got from the
priest to the death of 700 people, a death that I considered, was certainly, due to human
negligence and greed, shocked me. Even more shocking was the response of a woman
who was sitting with us. I see her response as fundamentally (or theologically, if you
will) different to his, but he certainly affirmed what she said. As if he had not really
thought deeply about either of their responses. For years I brooded on the conversation
and the event that is described here and finally decided to explore its implications a little
more.
The conversation took place at a dinner that I attended one evening while I was
on a visit to the Philippines. The dinner was a big open-air affair for some guy's birthday.
Calling it a “dinner” may make it sound more posh than it was. It was a very informal
neighborhood affair attended out in the open ground adjacent to some primitive houses
by a group of neighbors drinking San Miguel beer and eating typical Filipino stewed
meats. I was sitting next to a young priest - maybe in his mid-twenties. Just ordained.
People kept calling him father and I could not figure out how he could be a daddy to so
many people at his age. He was knocking back glass after glass of sugared apple
flavored vodka. Disgusting stuff. Stress of the job I guess.

My wife clarified for me that he was a priest.

I was polite (a skill that I have almost lost completely since then) and showed
interest in him. I asked him about his job description - what kind of thing he did for his
parishioners. (In other words, did he earn his stipend by actually working or did he just
spend it on apple flavored vodkas?) He said he listened to them. It was a new idea his
parish management had. I asked him what he did with what they told him. Answer,
nothing. But it made them feel good and that God was looking after them. I kid you not.
That was his answer.

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 There was a woman seated opposite to me who was listening and had her own
opinions. She asked me what I believed in general and I said basically I am a scientist. I
do not have a faith. I live life by a number of experimentally testable hypotheses that
describe the behavior of the material world. I have little or nothing to say about any non-
material worlds out there. If I am ignorant in something, I choose not to have faith in a
higher, non-material being in order to resolve the ignorance. She said she was not
comfortable with science because it could not explain so many things. I suspected that
some of what she felt it could not explain was related to spiritual things, like bleeding or
crying statues of the Holy Family. Or the miracles that result in sainthood being so easy
to acquire these days. I did not want to go down that rat-hole.
She did not get the message, or had never been offered the message, that
ignorance does not necessarily have to lead to faith. We did not talk about what kind of
things that she is ignorant of. I did not push the message. It seems to me that if a
person cannot see that the unseen or unknown need not be explained by the existence
of a God, then that person probably has a hole somewhere in their education.
(I have wondered about how people saw invisible things 2,000 years ago. When
the wind blew and they did not know that it was a gaseous mixture comprising oxygen
and nitrogen blowing, did they ascribe it to a spiritual cause? It takes imagination to see
the bigger picture, as Newton did when he saw the apple fall. The earth is falling into the
apple as much as the apple is falling to earth. A similar leap of imagination must have
hit Einstein. The apple and the earth both distort spacetime around them. That distortion
causes a force between them. I have spent so much time in the last 20 years or so
studying the Jewish religion, I think I need to direct my attention more to the Greeks. As
Paul once claimed, that his gospel was “foolishness to the Greeks.” I agree with him,
but I don’t accept anything that is in the Bible as being an explanation for natural
material phenomena. Given a choice between praying for my safety on the ferry that I
describe below, and abandoning the trip knowing how unstable that ferry was likely to
be, I would have chosen the latter. So should the ferry captain.

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 “20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is
the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the
world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God
through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our
proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and
Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling
block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the
called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of
God. 25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s
weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:20-25,
NRSV.))

I told the priest and his friend that they have no testable basis for belief in God. I
mean that the idea of a belief in God is not experimentally falsifiable. When people refer
to “science” they should be referring to the process of postulating hypotheses and
working to prove their hypotheses wrong. But in any case, the evidence points to the
idea that God really does not care too much about what happens to people on this
earth.
As an example I gave the case the previous year (maybe two years before the
conversation that I was having) when a captain of a Filipino ferry from Manila to Cebu
took the ferry into a typhoon and it overturned, killing 700 people. (It was a very big,
multistorey ferry. Like a block of flats from London on a pontoon. When that thing
overturned it trapped all 700 inside a dark tomb waiting to die by suffocation or
drowning.) I pointed out to the priest and his friend that all of those people were
Catholics and all of them prayed to be saved. They would have been better off if the
captain had taken a scientific approach to his job, listened to the weather forecasts, and
never sailed that day. God never answered their prayers, of course. Just like he never
answered a prayer in Haiti during or after the recent earthquake. I suspect that the
coastguard in Cebu was bribed to let the ferry sail by the Catholic owners of the ferry
company. Who then went on to sue the Philippines’ weather service for an inaccurate
prediction of the location of the typhoon. That fact implied that they really did not have

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faith in God but had been trusting the weather service after all. One of their stated trusts
is a lie. And that case went to a court in which the (Catholic) judge was probably bribed.
And so on. Such is life in a poor Catholic country.
(By the way, when you hear people talk after a disaster that “a miracle”
happened. For example a tornado hit their house and they are still alive because a
flying bathtub missed them by a few inches, then ask them why God allowed the
tornado to hit them in the first place. I think it is a basic property of human nature that if
our expectations are low – as in, I am about to get ripped to pieces by a tornado – then
the more effusive will be my thankfulness to any local deities when my expectations are
not met.)
The priest and the woman each gave to me what was a "classic" reply. The priest
said that therefore it had been God's will that they die. (Also my Filipina wife's
response.) The woman said they were not good enough or sincere enough Catholics. I
think she may have said that the death was their punishment. So it seemed her point
was that all 700 of them must have been put there by God, on that day, in a typhoon of
His making, to be punished in this way? If 700 insincere Catholics get on a ferry then
God takes the opportunity to drown them all at once. Or to put it another way, maybe he
arranged the whole thing as an “execution voyage”. God would also have had to try at
least to ensure that no “innocent” people were on the ferry. Although if you spend a
while reading the Old Testament you may notice that God lets innocents die with the
guilty with impunity.
I suspect that many evangelicals, like my ex-manager that I described in the
pamphlet above and here, and who was a true God fearing “proddy”, will say something
to the effect that these 700 were Catholics and therefore God would not listen to them
anyway. Accidents are God’s will. My response to that is that I am not a Roman Catholic
and never have been and never will be. I think most forms of Catholicism are hard to
understand for people not born into their cultures, and that the church has problems,
especially with rogue horny priests that are not allowed to direct their sexuality into
legitimate channels. But when those 700 cried for help, they were calling on the name of
Jesus and calling to Jesus. I know they were, because for all the ritual and iconography
that goes onto being a Catholic, this was the moment that they needed a response. And

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they were calling to Jesus with more sincerity than I think I have ever heard a protestant
call (let’s say, for example, “should I paint my table”?).
In the Book of Acts chapter 27 the author recounts a story about Paul being
shipwrecked while a prisoner of Roman guards. He is on his way to Rome, according to
the story, to be tried by the emperor. (Nero.) An angel appears to Paul and tells him that
if everybody stays cool, then all will survive the wreck. The group which consists of
guards and prisoners ends up on a beach in Crete. It never occurred to me while I was
talking to this priest to ask a very obvious question. If he had been on board that ferry
would he have survived, given the explanation that he had for all of the other dying?
And given Paul’s special position in relation to Jesus. A more complete way of asking
the question would be in the form of an SAT question.

“If you had been on the Cebu to Manila ferry of 2013 which capsized in a typhoon
killing all 700 people on board, which of the following options apply?
(a) All 701 of you would have died.
(b) You would have survived and the other 700 would have died.
(c) All 701 of you would have survived.”

I know the answer to that question.

While I was in Cebu for that visit, human body parts started showing up in the
bodies of fish that were caught near the route of the ferry. I hear your skepticism about
the news media in the Philippines wanting to blow this out of proportion. But it seems
reasonable that would happen.
I bit my tongue after hearing their (the priest and his companion) explanations. I
thought my example was a slam dunk for rational thinking. I also look at that event
emotionally. It must have been a horrible way to die. Calling out in the pitch blackness
for help and waiting for the water to rise above your head as it fills the inverted hull of
the ship. And the cynicism of religious people always amazes me. Christians and
Catholics can be accused by rationalists of not following the teachings of Jesus and
sometimes defend themselves by saying that their accusers do not understand those
teachings. Or that the teachings alluded to do not actually exist in the New Testament.

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So I wondered, what did Jesus himself have to say about such events? I wondered
which answer (that of the priest or the woman) was supported by the gospels. The
answer appears to be that the woman was right. Jesus seems to have been quoted as
saying that being an unrepentant sinner (and we do not know whether all 700 of the
victims were) is just cause for being allowed to die in a natural or man-made disaster.
People have a tendency to label disasters that do not result in large numbers of
deaths with the word “miracle”. The usage of that word implies kind of an unknown force
at work, perhaps God, that saved lives. And perhaps another force at work, maybe
Satan or God, that was the cause of the disaster in the first place.
The obvious “miracle” in the United States is the “Miracle on the Hudson.” The
skill of a pilot brought a plane down safely on the Hudson River after the plane had
been hit by birds in both engines and the presence of a flotilla of private boats was
available to remove the passengers before anybody got wet. Or how about a miracle
Canadian plane landing that was needed because Canadians think in kilograms and
U.S. Americans think in pounds. When the volume of fuel (in liters) fed to the tanks of
the plane was converted to weight the wrong units of weight were used.
The “Gottrora Miracle” occurred in Sweden in 1991 and is described in at least
three videos of which this one is the most complete. A plane (MD81) that had not been
effectively deiced of clear ice ended up with the ice being sucked off the wings and into
the engines, which were tail mounted. The engines failed. The pilots, plus a passenger
who also happened to be an SAS pilot, brought the plane down in a field near
Stockholm where it conveniently split into three sections (so no need to open the doors
to evacuate, people could walk away for the most part) and despite the presence of a
full load of fuel, did not catch fire.
Which is the most reasonable explanation for the results of these disasters?
Seeing 700 people killed in a ferry and nobody killed in these airline accidents begs the
question of whether the priest thinks that the people saved in Sweden or on the Hudson
some somehow deserving of being saved by God. Perhaps they were not as bad
sinners? (Canadians are obviously not big on sin.) It seems logical that he (the priest)
would think that. The problem is that Sweden and even America have far fewer religious
people than the Philippines. Admittedly most of the Philippines is Catholic. Probably

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nearly all of the 700 were Catholic and all of them called on Jesus. If he had simply
broken the hull of the ferry at a few strategic points, many of the 700 might have
escaped. (I am also sure that a few of the people seeing themselves landing in the
Hudson got religion in an “atheist in a foxhole moment.”)
If you maintain that God saved the people involved in these “miracles”, then you
are also denying the skill of the pilots involved (Sullenberger, Pearson (no relation), and
Rasmussen) and therefore implying that no amount of training, and in the Swedish case
clearing ice of wings in a disciplined way by competent technicians, could have saved
anybody from a disaster like one of these. You are denying that if the captain of the
ferry perhaps had been trained, or the operator of the ferry had been less greedy, or the
coastguard authority that been more competent then the 700 could have been saved.
In the gospel according to Luke 13: 1-5 Jesus clearly has something to say about
that ferry. Roughly 2,000 years ago a tower in Siloam collapsed and killed people.
Jesus is not asked directly about the tower in Siloam, but he according to the gospel
account he volunteers a comment on the event and his analysis is that being killed in
that way is causally connected with not “repenting”. Whatever that means. Below are
some Bible versions of the Luke passage. Note some of the differences among
translations that I have emphasized. Also note that I do not necessarily believe that the
Jesus of history actually said these things. The words could very well have originated
with Luke. Luke had an agenda (Luke 24:13-17 and 24:33 – centering the post
resurrection Christian experience in Jerusalem, and not in the boonies of Galilee. See
Matthew 28:10 and 16, where the disciples went to Galilee to meet Jesus. Both
passages refer to the meetings that they describe as the first post resurrection
appearance of Jesus to the disciples. So they cannot both be true?)
Jesus seems awfully grumpy in the passage quoted below, especially
considering people were simply trying to convey a snippet of news to him. He also
seems to be implying that the murder of Jews by Pilate makes Pilate an agent of God in
killing “sinners”.
Note that the people in these events presumably perished before the end of what
one could call their natural lives. When Jesus says that unrepentant sinners will perish,
he is does not seem to be referring to some judgment event after death. They are

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removed, or allowed to be removed, from this life by the agency of some intermediary
disastrous event.
Of course, maybe (probably) these stories are not Jesus speaking but the author
of the gospel of Luke, which was written many years after the event after the destruction
of Jerusalem by the Romans, which explains why Luke felt it necessary to point out that
non repenting Jews would be killed by Romans or falling towers. There must have been
many Romans and falling buildings in Jerusalem between the years 66 – 70 C.E. when
Jerusalem was being confronted by the Roman empire. But the point is, Jesus is not
really saying anything here that informs us of anything new. With his words he is saying
that we will all die like this (i.e. either by being slaughtered by Romans or having a tower
fall on us.) Or he is saying that we will all die (or perish) period, although the word
“likewise” is troubling in this context. It is hard to tell as he may have been exaggerating
when he said a tower would fall on us. He may have just meant that it would be a
horrible death. If he is referring to the upcoming (at his time) sacking of Jerusalem, then
he is certainly implying that repenting of sins would save a person from Roman anger.
One prominent person that did get saved from Roman anger was Josephus and it was
not by any recognizable repenting. (reference) He simply befriended the general Titus
who was managing the sacking of Jerusalem, and Josephus became a servant of
Rome.
The author of Luke is merely trying to scare his audience into “repenting” or
“turning back to God” as one version would have it – a scare tactic that seems to have
worked for various churches and denominations for 2,000 years. And the author of Luke
does not address the fate of those who died (perished) after repenting. Maybe like many
of the 700 in that ferry who were probably sincere believers in Jesus. Were they
genuine followers of Christ by being believers or members of the Catholic church? If so
then why were they not saved by an act of God from the disaster? The priest had a
point perhaps. If it was God’s will that all 700 died maybe he just wanted them off this
planet at that time.
This is not a flippant question. Those that claim that the bible is infallible and an
exact statement of the word of God must answer this kind of question about the alleged
statements of Jesus. He could have just said that an accident is sometimes just an

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accident. But according to Luke He turned “perishing likewise” into a punishment for not
repenting. He introduced the idea of God acting in this material world and therefore
being responsible as a judge in the here and now, rather than just at the end of time.
The people that died in Siloam, and in the ferry, were given no further opportunities to
repent before the end of their natural lives. God was judge, jury and executioner.
If it is possible that God can act in this way in human lives now, how are we
supposed to tell whether a professing Christian is sincere and has a “bubble of God”
surrounding him and that protects him from disaster? Is it merely somebody that seems
as if they live a godly life? Consider the woman’s response to the 700 deaths, compared
to the thoughtless response of the priest to my question about the 700 deaths, the
woman’s judgment was impossibly smug. She must have thought that she was not a
sinner, or she would not have made that statement. That faith in her own infallibility
would apply to billions of people who believe in God but had not been sunk with a ferry
in a Filipino typhoon and had to call on, or scream for, their God to save them.
Obviously, my response to the idea that God was judging the 700, finding them
guilty and executing them, and the woman was godly enough to still be alive is: (Well,
put your own word in here.)
Ethiopian Airlines flight 102 (a Boeing 737 Max) provided more fodder for
American televangelists that want to attribute God’s punishment to natural or man-made
disasters. Around 16 people on board were affiliated with a UN environmental group.
Did God punish them for their environmental activities? (Or was it Trump?) Some
people are at least halfway to both of those conclusions. I have a personal example of
the kind of person that would hold that belief. I experienced once working for a
manager, an attorney that I reference above and in the body of this pamphlet, who
believed that everything that happens in the world happens because God wills it. He
was a protestant but on this point he had the same belief as the priest. He worked for a
large corporation that was proud (probably unjustifiably, it turns out) of its safety record
and had many procedures in place to prevent accidents. Accidents happened at the
same rate there as anywhere.
His response was that nothing happens unless God wants it to. In his mind the
first element of any safety procedure should have been “pray”. He should have been

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fired for that attitude but worked in a typical corporate atmosphere whose real first
working rule was hypocrisy backed up by lies.
My conclusion from watching and listening to Christians’ and Catholics’ view of
life is that if God exists and if he is involved in a real physical way in the world, then
whether you are a devout Christian or a staunch atheist, he will arrange your death
when he feels like it and it can get pretty gruesome. In other words, in the eyes of
Christians, Catholic or Protestant, He is judge, jury, and executioner. There is no
rationality to what he does.

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