Wilde Lettuce in his letter Understand those who see God's hand in natural disasters referred to two biblical incidents as examples of God's wrath, presumably that of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and one of the 10 plagues that was inflicted upon the Egyptians (the death of their firstborns) to intimidate the Pharaoh into freeing his Hebrew slaves.

I am not too sure what he meant by his assertion that 'these are facts'.

Did he mean those 'facts' pertain to us being taught the biblical tales, or - perish the thought! - that the two biblical events were factual?

If he referred to the former, I agree, but if Wilde Lettuce had been asserting the latter, may I remind him that according to the dictionary, a 'fact' is defined as 'what really happened' or 'a truth known by experience or observation'.

Not stories written a thousand years after the alleged events, without any modern archaeological findings, records or evidence to support those ancient recollections.

Christian theologians agree that the Old Testament was written around 600 - 580 BC, when the Hebrews were undergoing their first Diaspora in Babylonian captivity. There have been so many inconsistencies in the books of the bible that we have to acknowledge that the original authors were writing from faith rather than historical evidence.

It was not only the killing of the Egyptian firstborns that is factually questionable, but also that of another biblical event, 1,500 years later, when Herod conducted a more or less similar exercise in

Bethlehem to eliminate the new born messiah.

There has been no known record of any such slaughter, bearing in mind this was a period when Greeks and Romans with their tradition of immaculate historical recording were already in the region.

Then there were recognised borrowing from regional myths. Personalities such as the Sumerian Utnapishtim, the Greek Deucalion, the Chaldean Xisuthrus, the Zoroastrian (Persian) Yima, and the Babylonian Atrahasis were their countries' respective 'Noah' with the same lifeboat, the Ark, preparing for and saved during the eventual same great Flood, brought down by God.

Wilde Lettuce suggested that 'the sooner we accept them, the easier we can understand the mentality of people who put God behind every natural disaster and calamity'.

I am afraid I don't agree, for why should I accept ancient tales as 'facts' when they aren't? It's one thing to have faith, but it's another to spin articles of faith into articles of facts. Now, that would be unfaithful ... to the facts, that is.

Another reason is that we shouldn't allow such people to exploit the name of God for their secret agenda, namely to terrify people into believing that God would smote innocents in a frivolous manner unless they did what these 'prophets' decreed, for that has been the real objective of these false prophets.

If we succumb, then we would become slaves to these self-acclaimed prophets, and not God Himself.

I recall from my religious lessons that God only speaks to men through a prophet, and the last Prophet was Muhammad (pbuh). Do we have faith in our religious teachings, or do we seek new prophets?