Tsunami reflections

Although, as George noted, this tsunami brought nothing new to the age-old problem of theodicy, yet, as Steve pointed out, this event does focus our minds on the issue in a forceful way. In his editorial on Jan. 1 in the NY Times, David Brooks indicates what can happen if we reject the notion of earthquakes as God's retribution/punishment and then fail to fill that void with an alternative theistic view. His editorial is in this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/opinion/01brooks.html?oref=login&n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fDavid%20Brooks but the most essential paragraphs are excerpted here:

"Human beings have always told stories to explain deluges such as this. Most cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In most of these stories, God is meting out retribution, punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than the old.

Nowadays we find these kinds of explanations repugnant. It is repugnant to imply that the people who suffer from natural disasters somehow deserve their fate. And yet for all the callousness of those tales, they did at least put human beings at the center of history.

In those old flood myths, things happened because human beings behaved in certain ways; their morality was tied to their destiny. Stories of a wrathful God implied that at least there was an active God, who had some plan for the human race. At the end of the tribulations there would be salvation.

If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the universe's main concern. We're just gnats on the crust of the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves."

Randy
Received on Mon Jan 3 21:27:02 2005