# A prayer for the victims of God' s disaster **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 28, 2006, 11:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534 "2006-05-28T11:48:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![devilsknew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@devilsknew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/devilsknew)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2006, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/21 "2006-05-29T05:34:43Z")
It was the screams of the damned that moved the earth. Past the crust deep in Earth’s core is a molten hell… souls trapped in molten iron and gravitas. The lake of fire. People who lived near Volcanoes realized Hell and developed that mythos. I’ve seen bottomless blue holes, but never a lake of fire. Does gravity change as you approach the earth’s molten core? I wonder…maybe God is gravity. Gravity can effect time… maybe Gravity is God. ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2006, 6:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/22 "2006-05-29T06:51:16Z")
[QUOTE=Revtim] The “mysterious ways” canard is obvious handwaving and smokeblowing to my eyes. [/QUOTE] It’s worse than that; if one thinks about it for more than two seconds, it completely invalidates the basic reason to have a religion in the first place. If God’s mind is unknowable, if his plans and intentions are beyond human understanding, then how the fuck are we supposed to know how to behave in the world to avoid a retaliatory smiting? ---
**Author:** ![Homebrew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c89c15/32.png) [@Homebrew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Homebrew)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2006, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/23 "2006-05-29T14:31:59Z")
[QUOTE=Cervaise] It’s worse than that; if one thinks about it for more than two seconds, it completely invalidates the basic reason to have a religion in the first place. If God’s mind is unknowable, if his plans and intentions are beyond human understanding, then how the fuck are we supposed to know how to behave in the world to avoid a retaliatory smiting? [/QUOTE] You don’t even try to avoid a smiting. You learn to welcome it. “Thank you, sir, may I have another” ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2006, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/24 "2006-05-29T16:08:43Z")
[QUOTE=Revtim] Well, if you’re serious, the answer (IMHO, but I’m quite sure) is that it’s a series of random events that God is not responsible for. [/QUOTE] To elaborate on this: Some events have simple, well-understood causes. These events never get blamed on God. Rather, we say, “That happened because…” [whatever the cause was]. Other events don’t have simple, well-understood causes, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have causes. Just because the cause isn’t obvious doesn’t mean that God did it, for some mysterious reason of his own. That would be a “[God of the gaps](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps)” way of thinking, using God as an easy explanation for anything we don’t otherwise understand. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2006, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/25 "2006-05-29T16:20:56Z")
[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink] Some events have simple, well-understood causes. These events never get blamed on God. [/quote] Not true; God gets the credit for _good_ occurences all the time, well understood or not. He even gets credit for good things that humans do; I can’t count the times I’ve seen someone rescued by firefighters, say, resulting in people talking about how “God saved him”. He only gets credit for _bad_ events if the person saying so is claiming the victims deserved it. ---
**Author:** ![Cat\_Whisperer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cat_whisperer/32/4839_2.png) [@Cat\_Whisperer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cat_Whisperer)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2006, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/26 "2006-05-30T00:18:23Z")
[QUOTE=Der Trihs] What choice do people have ? Stable places are also dead places; you don’t see such things as balancing stones in fertile farmland. It may be earthquakes here, volcanos there and flooding somewhere else, but habitable places tend to be places prone to disaster. [/QUOTE] That doesn’t seem accurate to me, from my Western Canadian perspective. The worst things that happen here are occasional floods in river valleys (no one ever sees _that_ coming), occasional bad storms, and occasional tornadoes. We don’t even have many **bugs** here. And if you look at a map of the world, Western Canada is _big_. One thing that’s bugged me since I thought about it is people thanking God for saving them from a disaster that killed others. I guess God really had it in for those other schmucks. :rolleyes: You know, there are nearly six billion humans on this planet. I’m finding it harder to get worked up about a couple thousand dying who are so far out of my monkeysphere - especially ones living on a ticking time bomb. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2006, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/27 "2006-05-30T01:14:51Z")
[QUOTE=featherlou] That doesn’t seem accurate to me, from my Western Canadian perspective. The worst things that happen here are occasional floods in river valleys (no one ever sees _that_ coming), occasional bad storms, and occasional tornadoes. We don’t even have many **bugs** here. And if you look at a map of the world, Western Canada is _big_. [/QUOTE] Thousands of years ago it got ground under by glaciers, like the rest of the polar regions. One could say you got your major disasters all at once, instead of bit by bit. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Cardinal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cardinal/32/4000_2.png) [@Cardinal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cardinal)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2006, 7:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/28 "2006-05-30T07:15:10Z")
Despite all the glib and funny posts, I have to chime in here and say that as one of the most churchified Dopers here, I have an entire speech prepared (which is not that well receieved at many churches, either) about how God is NOT in control; that is, He’s not pulling moment-to-moment puppet strings, and the disasters and calamities of the world are not of His personal doing. To say they are is frankly blasphemous. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2006, 9:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534/29 "2006-05-30T09:05:01Z")
[QUOTE=Der Trihs] Yes and no. There’s nothing stopping you from taking steps to lessen the force of the disaster; one reason there are so many high-casualty disasters in the Third World is that they are either too poor or too corrupt to take the proper precautions. Something to keep in mind whenever some rightwinger goes on a tirade about the Evils of Regulations, by the way. Lax building codes are a good way to have a high casualty rate from earthquakes, for example. [/QUOTE] For once I agree with **Der Trihs** _makes note on calendar_. And you can factor in Third World poverty directly attributable to First World greed - not that this is the sole cause of such poverty, but every time we in the privileged West enjoy some cheapo foreign goods produced at slave wages in some remote sweatshop that we don’t actually have to see and worry about, we have helped to keep some funny-looking strangers in poverty. It’s not much of an excuse that our actions are attributable to ignorance and apathy rather than deliberate malice. Even in case of “natural” disasters, there tend to be a whole host of things humans could and should have done better before there’s any need to blame the Almighty. ☹ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prayer-for-the-victims-of-god-s-disaster/358534.md?page=1)