Tsunami!

My God. Well, I'll say that anyway.

"The carnage is incomprehensible," George Bush observed. To say the least. The intensity of human misery and suffering has not been seen like this in a long time. There are those (smug?) postmodernists and other secularists who say this is proof of a non-existant God, or at best, a vicious one as found here. Please. To pin this on God is lunacy, or at best, ignorance.

If we're to point fingers as to how this monsterous loss of life could have been prevented, let's look in the mirror first. There's no stopping earthquakes at least not today. Perhaps there will some day. Afterall, who 200-years ago would have imagined the intense power available in the unseen and unknown atom? I won't attempt to predict the future other than to say it will be more bizarre then we can dream of today.

But how to prevent this magnitude of death? Why would God allow that to happen? The answer is, He didn't. We did. For how long have we humans known about the dangerous places of the Earth? Krakatoa ring any bells with anyone? Same general part of the Earth and pretty much exactly the same place geologically speaking. In the Pacific Ocean, there are tsunami warning centers and ocean floor sensors intended to prevent exactly this type of calamity. Hawaii, Japan, and elsewhere are wired to the gills watching for this monster from the deep. The Indian Ocean has no such system. And why is that? Why is that when Man has known for a long, long time how dangerous the eastern part of the Indian Ocean can be. The animals in Sumatra, India, etc. were smarter than us for the love of God. The Earth shook as it was designed to do, and the animals ran for the hills. Humans greeted the shaking with indifference at worst (warned no one), morbid curiousity at best (out come the camcorders). Knowing the dangers of this part of our home, why do we allow such risk Guardian, the UN, the EU, and yes, the USA?

As we left Eden to "subdue the Earth," how good a job have we done in that respect? That word "subdue" has never implied an easy task. In fact the very word itself implies God knew what misery was waiting for us this side of Eden now that we "knew it all." What teenagers we can be sometimes. Reading the Guardian's rage reminded me of things I've heard from my teenagers or made me remember the stupid things that flew out of my own mouth not so long ago. This is just another misery of our choosing, Guardian. A lot of people dropped the ball on preventing, or at least minimizing, the human toll this particular natural act wrought. Nature isn't cruel, it just is. Humans carelessly ignoring Nature and the dangers it can bring IS CRUEL. The only consolation is perhaps there won't be a next time. I say perhaps because Krakatoa declared how dangerous the area was and yet we choose to still live there without much regard for the consequences. You want to rage against someone for all the death this earthquake brought, start with the UN and work your way down the chain of nations that either knew or should have known the danger that waited for us deep beneath the waves. Put that rage to good use, lobby for a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean, and stop acting the fool.

Revelations says God promises a New Earth and a New Heaven free from this kind of sorrow wait for us. Until then, suck it up and deal with what we choose for ourselves. For the immediate moment go here to help. But stop pointing that silly finger unless it's at us. Blaming God is cowardice at worst, laziness at best.