Greece - The number of dead from a fire which ripped through a Greek coastal town reached at least 81 on Wednesday as frantic relatives tried to track down people missing from the inferno and officials began the grim task of identifying bodies, Reuters reports. Hundreds of people were trapped in the eastern resort of Mati on Monday night as flames whipped around them. Many jumped into the sea to survive but others died from suffocation.

The Greek anti-terrorist service was investigating suggestions that the blaze - one of several throughout the Attica region - was started deliberately, a security source said. Arson is often thought to be behind some fires in a crude attempt to clear forest land for building.

It’s not clear how it's possible that someone can cause a fire by being an atheist, but one person thinks that this is quite possible. Bishop Ambrosios of Kalavryta, a leader in the Greek Orthodox Church, has his own version of why this horrible fire hit Greece. According to the Bishop, the fire can be blamed entirely on Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras because he’s an atheist.

“Prime Minister Mr. Tsipras, who was in Bosnia, was forced to immediately stop his official visit there and return to Athens immediately! He will go to Halandri at the Business Center! What to do there? It will just once again show his hypocrisy! He ignores, you see, that he and his Staff, the atheists of SYRIZA, are the causes of the general disaster! By their atheism they excite the wrath of God!”

A senior cleric has said that Greece’s “atheist prime minister” was to blame for the devastating wildfires that have claimed at least 74 lives since Monday. “Atheist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras draws the wrath of God,” Bishop Amvrosios of Kalavryta in the Peloponnese wrote on his blog Tuesday.

The Greek Orthodox Church responded to the outrageous rant by basically shrugging it off:
- In a statement Tuesday, the Archbishopric of Athens said Amvrosios was “only expressing his personal opinion.”

This is not the first time Amvrosios blamed Tsipras for some catastrophe that happened in Greece. Last November, after floods claimed the lives of two dozen people and at least a thousand buildings and houses, he also blamed Tsipras.

He (Amvrosios) complained that television stations included politicians, engineers, meteorologists  and other “experts” to discuss the circumstances surrounding the tragic weather events, but not a single man of the clergy was invited on a panel of experts to explain that above all, such weather phenomenon were matters of God.

Obviously, Amvrosios can have his own opinion, but in cases like this, when Amvrosios blames one man for fires with a fatal outcome, even he is obliged to take responsibility for defamation as a senior cleric of the Greek Orthodox Church.

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