Lisbon, in 1755 suffered a similar fate to that of the countries surrounding the Indian Ocean today. An offshore earthquake of about the same magnitude of the one off Sumatra, and resulting tsunami destroyed much of the city. European freethinkers took it as good evidence that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God could not exist, while others, frightened by sudden death, converted to Christianity.
Do recent events reinforce the atheist conclusion? How could an all good and all powerful God be the cause of the terrible suffering and pain we have witnessed in the last few days? Non of the standard explanations of free will, sin, or pain for the sake of greater goods, seem capable of justifying the ways of God to man.

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LONDON (Reuters) - It is one of the oldest, most profound questions, posed by some of the most learned minds of every faith throughout the course of human history.


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It was put eloquently this week by an old woman in a devastated village in southern India's Tamil Nadu state. "Why did you do this to us, God?" she wailed. "What did we do to upset you?" Perhaps no event in living memory has confronted so many of the world's great religions with such a basic test of faith as this week's tsunami, which indiscriminately slaughtered Indonesian Muslims, Indian Hindus, Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhists and tourists who were Christians and Jews.


In temples, mosques, churches and synagogues across the globe, clerics are being called upon to explain: How could a benevolent god visit such horror on ordinary people?


Traditionalists of diverse faiths described the destruction as part of god's plan, proof of his power and punishment for human sins.


"This is an expression of God's great ire with the world," Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar told Reuters. "The world is being punished for wrongdoing -- be it people's needless hatred of each other, lack of charity, moral turpitude."


Pandit Harikrishna Shastri, a priest of New Delhi's huge marble and sandstone Birla Hindu temple, told Reuters the disaster was caused by a "huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth" and driven by the positions of the planets.


Azizan Abdul Razak, a Muslim cleric and vice president of Malaysia's Islamic opposition party, Parti Islam se-Malaysia, said the disaster was a reminder from god that "he created the world and can destroy the world."


Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, a leading British Muslim cleric from Leicester in England said: "We believe that God has ultimate controlling power over his entire creation. We have a responsibility to try and attract god's kindness and mercy and not do anything that would attract his anger."


END OF TIME?


Many faiths believe that disasters foretell the end of time or the coming of a Messiah. Some Christians expect chaos and destruction as foretold in the Bible's final book, Revelations.


Maria, a 32-year-old Jehovah's Witness in Cyprus who believes that the apocalypse is coming said people who once slammed the door in her face were stopping to listen.


"It is a sign of the last days," she said.


But for others, such calamities can prompt a repudiation of faith. Secularist Martin Kettle wrote in Britain's Guardian newspaper that the tsunamis should force people to "ask if the God can exist that can do such things?" -- or if there is no God, just nature.


"This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike," he wrote. "A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however."


It is a question that clergy have to deal with nearly every day, not just at times of great catastrophe but when providing consolation for the daily sorrows of life, said U.S. Rabbi Daniel Isaak, of Congregation Neveh Shalom, in Portland, Oregon.


"It is really difficult to believe in a God that not only creates a tsunami that kills 50 or 60 thousand people, but that puts birth defects in children," he said. "Often the first question people ask on an individual basis is that question that that Indian woman asked. Why is God doing this to me?"


In one modern view, he said, God does not interfere in the affairs of his creation. Disasters like the tsunami occur for the natural reasons scientists say they do.





"This is not something that God has done. God hasn't picked out a certain group of people in a certain area of the world and said: 'I am going to punish them,"' he said.

"The world has certain imperfections built into the natural order, and we have to live with them. The issue isn't 'Why did God do this to us?' but 'How do we human beings care for one another?"'

Greek Orthodox Theologian Costas Kyriakides in Cyprus expressed a similar view.

"I personally don't attach any theological significance to this -- I listen to what the scientists say," he said. "God is always the fall guy. We incriminate Him completely unjustly."

(Additional reporting by Michele Kambas in Cyprus, Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Reuters correspondents in New Delhi and Kuala Lumpur)

Per the Christian belief man has a free will....and God will do what he wants....but everything is not an act of god or an act of man.....

some things just happen..........

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"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

If there is a God, I would have to support Lincoln's view. "The judgments of God are righteous in the all together."

I should have expected this. Gays are responsible for their sexuality but God is not responsible for the world.

Note from God to attorney: "Keep that man on the jury."

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All's well that ends well even if people suffer in the meantime?

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Man is responsible for his own actions.......

good or bad........

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"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

I suppose liberals caused the quake to take the shine off Christmas.



Here's an eyewitness account of the 1755 Lisbon quake and tsunami:

http://www.oldandsold.com/articles27/volcanoes-earthquakes-7.shtml

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Lincoln is an excellent case study - not only did he preside over the worst war in our history with 600,000 dead, he lost two of his sons as well. His rationale that from all this horror came a greater good- the freeing of America from the sin of Slavery in such a horrible way that we would never go back to it, is really the only possible one that someone who believes in God can reach. What other conclusion can there be for the believer? Any other one points a God who is not "loving", meaning the basic precepts of Christianity itself are false.

It rains on the just and on the unjust.

I guess it depends on what we mean when we say, "God". If it's the almighty, everlasting, omniscient, omnipotent....well, that's a mighty big God to be second-guessing.

For example, if Josiah Willard Gibbs popped out of a closet and began explaining thermodynamics to me, or Albert Einstein slipped into the room and held forth on tensor calculus, I have no doubt that I'd be lost in the blink of an eye. Once the finished their explanations they might turn to me and ask, "Have you any questions?"

Now just to prove that I'm not as dumb as my slack-jawed appearance might hint at, I might say something like, "Uh yo, Dr. Gibbs and Dr. Einstein, what does that say about the "Big Bang"?

Gibb and Einstein were bright boys. But they were no where near as bright as an omnipotent, omnipresent Creator-God. So if ol' God popped out of the closet and explained to me all about life and stuff I might turn to him and say, "But why did all those people die, Mr. God?"

The symmetry between these two stories is this: I don't always understand why people do good or bad things, yet I am a man. Why would I ever expect to understand anything that God would do? I am a finite, limited, ephemeral bag of carbaceous chemicals.

I may be smarter than you're average congressman, but I do not understand thermodynamics, I do not understand tensor calculus, and I do not understand (nor am I likely to ever understand) God's purpose. If there is a purpose.

B

My solution is so much neater. There is no God. A tectonic plate, reacting to the cooling of the magma beneath it caused by the aging of the Earth, slipped against the Pacific Plate and fell 60 ft, pulling the island of Sri Lanka 100 ft west. The violent forces of the fall were transfered to ocean water, creating waves that killed what will probably turn out to be half a million people. If there is a God, he was busy elsewhere and was surprised by it as much as we were.

The big question is how these forces will affect the Pacific Plate. If God wacks LA next, I might start praying to Allah myself. I did read something on the net that we may actually see more activity in the Pac NW, for some geological reason. Apparently there is also much geological evidence that tsunamis happen there every 400 years or so, and they are due, as well.

This is a familair position on this kind of crap, and it is a total cop-out - articulate, but a cop-out nonetheless. The 'problem of pain' is at the heart of the ball of nonsense that is Christianity, and no-one has ever answered it in terms that an intelligent person can think of as reasonable.

There is no God. At least, no benevolent, interventionist, I-listen-to-your-prayers type of God, and all the fools who willfully believe in one such are simply that - fools. And lacking in intellectual moral fibre.

That straightfoward enough for you all? Tell me I'm wrong. Or at least rude.

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I pretty much agree with you, but I believe Lincoln has made the correct apolegia - if there is a God, he is not a personal God, he is not a God of individuals, and answer's no individual's prayer or plea. He makes single judgements that affect vast swaths of humanity, to right monstorous wrongs or to answer the united prayers of human masses. It is the only reasonable explanation for a Loving God who causes so much suffering and pain.

Just to add to the discussion, and because Lincoln did propose his own view of the relationship between God and man in the speech so eloquently, I will post it. Of course, one must note that God liked it so much he killed him three weeks later:

Second Inaugral Speech
Abraham Lincoln
Saturday, March 4, 1865
Fellow-Countrymen:

This second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war; seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Yes. But given the choice (which we do not have) between a cosmic great dictator with the morality of a five year old and nothing, I choose nothing. Many seem to choose the five year old. Some folk seem to have the need to cower and cringe for their supper.

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