History Main / TheScourgeOfGod

* Eric from ''Film/TheCrow'' is a far more altruistic example than most, with the sinners in question being some of the most depraved, murdering, raping sadistic scum you're likely to ever meet, and he even helps a drug addict who he justifiably sees as more a victim than anything..

* ''Manga/DeathNote'''s Light Yagami claimed constantly to [[AGodAmI be a god of justice]], and the bulk of his victims were criminals, however he had the bad habit of killing anyone who tried to stop him too... or that annoyed him. He also ''used'' to have [[EvenEvilHasStandards standards]], such as not writing the names of people that had killed in self-defense, or the names of people who had done their time and made a commitment to being functional, law-abiding citizens, but by the end, those standards had gone out the window.

** Even after his defeat at Blackwater, all of Stannis's enemies fear and despise him, and due to his reputation as a reclusive but efficient military commander, various characters are shown to fear or respect him, sometimes to a level beyond his actual abilities. While he himself [[Naytheist never considers himself a god-sent scourge]], his men, thanks to Melisandre, see him as the future savior of the world. [[spoiler:It's to the point that, even when he's marching on Winterfell with a freezing, starving, outnumbered army stuck in the snow, about to face a qualitatively superior foe, his enemies are still terrified of him, from Cersei spending half of ''AFFC'' worrying that he's plotting all her misfortunes to the Bolton men in Winterfell whispering among themselves about how screwed they are when he shows up.]]

* Many Christians, especially Conservative Christians, believe that Adolf Hitler's war on Europe was divine judgement.

* The infamous Westboro Baptist Church believes all natural disasters and actions committed by people to be God's will. In fact, many Christians hold this belief. They believe things like earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, car crashes, and mass shootings to be part of God's punishment for society's growing acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, other religions, divorce and remarriage, and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking the selling of Swedish vacuum cleaners]]. Their funeral protests are just their way of saying "[[JerkAss thanks]]".

* The UsefulNotes/JewishRevolts resulted in the Second Temple of Jerusalem being destroyed by the Roman Empire, which was viewed by both Jews and early Christians as God's punishment but for different theological reasons: the Jews believed God was chastizing them for neglecting to study the Torah, while the Christians viewed it as [[ValuesDissonance just punishment for rejecting Jesus as the Messiah]]. This solidified the split between Christianity and Judaism as the former started out as a Jewish sect, but became its own separate religion over time. More recently, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have suggested that the Holocaust was a punishment God sent for others' lack of strict observance. This has gone down about as well as you'd expect in other quarters.

A close relative of KarmicDeath, except that victims of the Scourge of God generally aren't [[AssholeVictim Asshole Victims]], instead being "guilty" of comparatively minor foibles. One is left with the impression that the BigBad, whomever they are, is the arbiter of some decidedly twisted justice, and that those who perished are somehow supposed to have deserved their fate. Occasionally, the "guilt" of these crimes can spill over to the innocent as either a parable for these original sins being so bad that others suffer too, or to include an AnyoneCanDie vibe.

* ''Literature/TheScholomance:'' As revealed in book 3, all mals are a planet-wide karmic response to the use of [[BlackMagic malia]] by wizards. If every wizard went completely pure-mana (not even using the kill-bugs-and-rot-wood level of malia that most wizards can use without JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope), new mals would eventually stop being born and wizardkind would be safe.