Mick Hartley

First comes the earthquake; then the tsunami; then, with some delay but the same awful inevitability, the Word From On High, as interpreted by His Earthly Representatives:

The Sunday edition of the Internet newspaper News Mission reported Yoido Full Gospel Church senior pastor David Yonggi Cho as saying, “The earthquake makes me wonder if this was not God’s warning.”

In an interview the newspaper, Cho responded to a request for comments on Japan’s difficulties following its largest earthquake in recorded history by saying, “Japan sees a lot of earthquakes, and I think it is regrettable that there has been such an enormous loss of property and life due to the earthquake.” He went on to say, “Because the Japanese people shun God in terms of their faith and follow idol worship, atheism, and materialism, it makes me wonder if this was not God’s warning to them.”

“I hope that this catastrophe can be turned into a blessing and they take this opportunity to return to the Lord,” he added.

Cho also said, “We in Korea look at Japan and think that at this juncture, more than a physical earthquake, it is in need of a holy spiritual earthquake.”

Cho plans to depart for Japan on Monday to participate in an assembly on Tuesday and Wednesday to celebrate the 34th anniversary of the founding of its Japan branch, the Full Gospel Tokyo Church.

Just what the Japanese people need.

At least there's some consistency in this view of a vengeful god, like a playground bully with omnipotent powers. It gets harder to work out why he's then worthy of worship, though, except out of fear, since benevolence clearly isn't among his most notable characteristics. 

A.C. Grayling gets to the heart of it:

If they believe that their god designed a world in which such things happen but left the world alone thereafter and does not intervene when it turns lethal on his creatures, then they implicitly question his moral character. If he is not powerful enough to do something about the world’s periodic murderous indifference to human beings, then in what sense is he a god? Instead he seems to be a big helpless ghost, useless to pray to and unworthy of praise.

For if he is not competent to stop an earthquake or save its victims, he is definitely not competent to create a world. And if he is powerful enough to do both, but created a dangerous world that inflicts violent and agonizing sufferings arbitrarily on sentient creatures, then he is vile. Either way, what are people thinking who believe in such a being, and who go to church to praise and worship it? How, in the face of events which human kindness and concern registers as tragic and in need of help – help which human beings proceed to give to their fellows: no angels appear from the sky to do it – can they believe such an incoherent fiction as the idea of a deity?

These horrendous natural disasters are the point at which the psychological urge to see meaning and agency in everything – the urge that underpins religion – is stretched to absurdity, or (above) obscenity. Of course we've seen this before. And we'll see it again.