RE: What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?

I wished people invoked God's name in thankfulness when all is well just as often as they do in regrets when events occurs that we cannot understand and that we dislike.
 
Moorad

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From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu on behalf of Steven M Smith
Sent: Mon 1/3/2005 10:13 AM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?

Here is an interesting article from the Opinion Journal in the WashPost On-line:

Link: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006097 <http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006097>

Tremors of Doubt
What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?

Quote from article ...
"When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days."

_____________
Steven M. Smith, Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey
Box 25046, M.S. 973, DFC, Denver, CO 80225
Office: (303)236-1192, Fax: (303)236-3200
Email: smsmith@usgs.gov
-USGS Nat'l Geochem. Database NURE HSSR Web Site-
 http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1997/ofr-97-0492/
Received on Mon Jan 3 10:55:21 2005