God Owes Us an Apology

(This is an article by Barbara Ehrenreich that I read in the lastest copy of The Nation and I thought very interesting. Would love to hear everyones opinion on it. It's long but very thought provoking and a fast read).

God Owes Us an Apology:

The Tsunami of sea water was followed instantly by a tsunami of spittle as the religious sputtered to rationalize God's latest felony. Here we'd been placidly killing each other a few dozen at a time in Iraq. Darfur, Congo, Israel, and Palestine, when along comes the deity and whacks a quarter million in a couple of hours between breakfast and lunch. On CNN, NPR, Fox News, and in newspaper articles too numerous for Nexis to count, men and women of the cloth weighed in solemnly on His existence, His motives, and even His competence to continue as Ruler of Everything.
Theodicy, in other words -- the attempt to reconcile God's perfect goodness with the manifest evils of His world -- has arisen from the waves. On the retro, fundamentalist, side, various men and women of the cloth announced that the tsunami was the rational act of a deity enraged by (take your pick): the suppression of Christianity in South Asia, pornography and child-trafficking in that same locale, or, in the view of some Muslim commentators, the bikini clad tourists in Phuket.
[...] Of course, God exists, seems to be the general consensus. And, of course, He is perfectly good. It's just that his jurisdiction doesn't extend to tectonic plates. Or maybe it does and He tosses us an occasional grenade like this just to see how quickly we can mobilize to clean up the damage. Besides, as the Catholic priests like to remind us, "He's a 'mystery' " --though that's never stopped them from pronouncing His views on abortion with absolute certainty.
[...] God has a lot to account for in the way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has He ever shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A tsunami hit Lisbon in 1755, on All Saints Day, when the good Christians were all in church. The faithful perished, while the denizens of the red light district, which was built on strong stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last fall's hurricanes flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida while sparing sin-soaked Key West and South Beach.
[...] If He so loves us that He gave his only son etc., why couldn't he have held those tectonic plates in place at least until the kids were of the beach? So much, too, for the current pop-Christian God, who can be found, at least on the internet, micro-managing people's careers, resolving marital spats, and taking excess pounds off the faithful -- this last being Pat Robertson's latest fixation.
If we are responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then God should be, too, and I would propose, post-tsunami, an immediate withdrawal of prayer and other forms of flattery directed at a supposedly moral deity--at least until an apology is issued, such as, for example: "I was so busy with Cindy-in-Omaha's weight-loss program that I wasn't paying attention to the Earth's crust."
It's not just Christianity. Any religoin centered on a God who is both all-powerful and all-good, including Islam and the more monotheistically inclined versions of Hinduism, should be subject to a thorough post-tsunami evalution. As many have noted before me: If God cares abou our punny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn.
[...] If there is a God, and He, She, or It had a message for us on 12/26, that message is: GE your act together, folks--your seismic detection systems, your first responders and global mobilization capacity--because no one, and I mean no One, is coming to medi-vac us out of here.

-Peace to us all-