Divine retribution

Divine retribution was previously carried out by a large number of really immature gods, but at present it seems an oligopoly has been established by the Christian God and Allah. Typically, they have their own spheres of influence, with the Christian God punishing Europe and America, and Allah confining His activities to the Middle East and Asia. They usually show Their hate love with punishment for generalised sinfulness — gayness, for example — and notably gay marriage. Somehow, these disasters tend to hit religious hot spots like Indonesia and the American southeast while mostly sparing San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest. It's almost as if even their religious scriptures say that good works do not always correlate with good and bad natural phenomena.

The gods have a lot of weapons at their disposal: lightning bolts, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes (cross-fire or otherwise), viruses, tsunamis, and wildfires, to name but a few. Some gods, particularly the Christian God, sometimes engage in passive divine retribution, where the god does not act affirmatively (e.g., fomenting a hurricane), but rather passively by removing a protective bubble around a certain area with a high percentage of sinners.

If sinners escape divine retribution, it just means that God is biding His time.

Targets of divine retribution
Historically, their wrath was pretty specifically targeted at individuals who irritated Them in some way, as can be seen from the many biblical examples of God personally killing people. In modern times, however, divine retribution generally strikes something or somebody linked in some way to the perpetrator of the abomination that made the two Gods throw a temper tantrum, though with a suspicious lack of precision. Examples are:


 * In around 2348 B.C., God set the high water mark for all future acts of divine retribution when He flooded the entire world, killing everyone, except eight chosen individuals and several million animals, who escaped in a big ass boat.
 * In 1755 on All Saints Day, God sent an earthquake and a tsunami to utterly obliterate the city of Lisbon and kill tens of thousands of faithful churchgoers, boosting the reputation of Enlightenment philosophers among the confused citizenry of Europe.
 * In 1861, the Mormon God started the American Civil War to punish the United States for its previous mistreatment of the Mormon church and its kingpin leader, Joseph Smith. Indeed, the Mormon God's polygamist mouthpiece on Earth prophet and revelator, Brigham Young, relayed the message from the Mormon God to anyone listening that the Civil War was "God-given retribution or punishment for Mormon persecution." This put the Christian God in somewhat of a quandary, as He was expected to be the final arbiter of the competing North and South prayers for victory, in a civil war He didn't even start.
 * In 1984, God, furious with the blasphemous pronouncements of the Bishop of Durham, sent down a thunderbolt upon York Minster in York, which is a city that looks a bit like Durham.
 * Also in the 1980s, God (or possibly Allah - credit is disputed), furious at all the gayness going on since the 60s, created a disease that claimed gay men, heterosexuals of both sexes, the wives of cheating husbands, many recipients of blood transfusions, and babies born to infected mothers. AIDS more or less ignored lesbians, who had received favor in His sight for being "Just so frickin' hot, thou knowest?". This may not have been God's first utilization of biological warfare, as He has been previously implicated in the Black Death plague of the mid-1300s.
 * In 1997, in an act of passive divine retribution, God removed his protections over a particular Kentucky school and allowed a student to shoot and kill or wound 8 fellow students. This is also an example of God's long smoldering wrath. He was upset over a 1980 Supreme Court decision, but didn't display his anger until 17 years later.
 * In 2000, Pat Robertson prophesied that Orlando, Florida, would be destroyed by the wrath of God as retribution for Disney World allowing homosexuals to attend on "Gay Day". Later that year, numerous wildfires broke out in a ring completely (and pointedly) around Orange County, California, where Disneyland is located. No mascots were harmed in the blaze.
 * Not only that, but the first hurricane of the 1998 Atlantic hurricane season, actually turned away from Florida and hit the area where Robertson's television show is broadcast. Everyone agrees this was a hilarious "Fuck you" from God to Pat Robertson.
 * In 2001, God (Allah?) exacted vengeance upon a building full of people from all over the world to punish America for allowing itself to become secular and gay.
 * In 2003, Allah destroyed the city of Bam in Iran (and sent various other earthquakes) in punishment for women's immodest dress and sexual laxity.
 * In 2004, Allah — as a consequence of his fury at homosexuality, fornication, and the celebration of Christmas — sent the Boxing Day tsunami.
 * In 2005, furious that his unequivocal message had not been heeded, God sent Hurricane Katrina to flood the whole of New Orleans apart from the decadent bit.
 * In 2007, God, furious at all the gay weddings that were suddenly going on in Britain, submerged the not particularly gay city of Sheffield, leaving Brighton, Britain's gay capital, unaffected (it was, after all, two hundred miles from the flooding).
 * In 2008, God, who really likes hurricanes and windiness in general, sent Hurricane Ike to punish the Internet Tubes for the establishment of RationalWiki.
 * In 2009, Allah punished Australia with bushfires. In 2011, He tried to drown them all out.
 * In 2010, Allah moved out of his usual sphere of influence and caused an Icelandic volcano to erupt in order to punish infidels and disrupt air flights.
 * In 2010, God caused an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease for lack of respect towards Himself in South Korea, despite the fact that South Korea is one of the most Christian countries in Asia.
 * In 2010, the Haitians invoked God's wrath again, and He caused another earthquake. This time, it was because of the Haitians making a deal with the Devil to get the French kicked out (according to known nutjob Pat Robertson). Oh, and it's also the gays' fault.
 * In late August 2011, God, in a reprise of one his greatest hits from 2005, "Katrina", sent Hurricane Irene to punish the wicked in New York and send a coded message to Obama.
 * In 2011, God acted in Asia and punished Japan for Buddhism, Shinto, idolatry, paganism, and secular ideals with a gigantic earthquake leading to a tsunami and other disasters.
 * In 2016, God sent down two Kumamoto earthquakes and one Ecuador earthquake to punish worshipers of the Whore of Babylon.
 * In late August 2017, God punished Texas using Hurricane Harvey for being… uh… hypocritical Christians?
 * In April, 2019, the Jewish God partially burnt down the Notre Dame Catholic cathedral in Paris, in apparent anger over the burning of Jewish manuscripts over 800 years prior. It is unclear if, when, and how the Catholic God will retaliate. Complicating the internecine battle among the gods, Allah, the Islam God, has claimed credit for burning Notre Dame too, but He did it because of France's burqa ban. This could get ugly, as the various gods try to maximize their leverage in the disaster.

Things that are not targets of divine retribution

 * Despite the fact that Christ forbade the accumulation of wealth more often and more unambiguously than he forbade anything else (never once mentioning homosexuality at all), he — or at least God, although they're supposed to be the same, sort of — clearly wasn't that serious about it, since America is rarely bothered by God for making too much money. (However, note that England, having a much more liberal clergy, is punished by God for this, up to and including random members of the public drowning when their feet get stuck in drains, as atonement for the sins of the World Bank. )
 * The Anglo-Saxon nations grew rich in the early nineteenth century through child labour and slavery — since neither is as bad as gayness, and this was an otherwise pious and churchgoing age, they were relatively untroubled by divine retribution, to the extent that anyone remembers.
 * The European heatwave of 2003, although killing tens of thousands, was not divine retribution, since it took all summer and God usually does a better job of hitting the headlines.

How to invoke divine retribution
This leaves the question, if I want God to lay waste to some particularly irksome locality, what should I do?

The first thing to bear in mind is that divine retribution is generally on a per-country basis, and only occasionally more specific than that.

The second thing to remember is that God is perfectly in tune with his creation — he will not destroy through natural disaster anything that wasn't likely to cop it sooner or later anyway. For example, cities with decaying/nonexistent flood defenses will get flooded, and disaster response agencies headed by inexperienced buffoons will screw up the response — Praise Be that God works so in harmony with his creation!

(Bear in mind that especially wicked nations such as the Netherlands have not been spared simply because they have well-organized government and technologically advanced solutions to flood defense — no, places like this are so gay and liberal that their punishment is too awful for this life and will have to wait for the next.)

And, most importantly, primarily sexual transgressions are bad, though a wide range qualify. Ray Comfort cites, “running around naked, having an orgy.”, fornication, homosexuality, pornography, and every sexual sin they [or Ray] can imagine.

So, if you wish God to destroy Raleigh, NC, for example, your best bet is to incite very large amounts of gayness somewhere in Florida. If you miss at first, adjust the location of your gayness until God hits the target. This isn't limited to gayness; anything considered sin by fundamentalist ministers works.

In an attempt to test the Islamic theory that earthquakes are brought about by women wearing immodest clothing, Boobquake was organised in April 2010. Somewhat predictably, Allah's wrath failed to manifest itself.

One of the best ways to invoke Divine Retribution is to use the "Texas Sharpshooter" fallacy on any applicable natural disaster. Did some hurricane just blow through Florida? Blame the gays. Another earthquake in Japan? That's because the Japanese don't worship Allah.