Did God cause the destruction caused by Sandy?

Of course he did – right after he jammed your head so far up your ass that right now you can take a look around for polyps and save some time and money before reversing your case of cranial rectal inversion and setting about using a jack hammer to remove the impacted fecal material from your ears in hope of restoring your hearing. I would wait for you to finish before continuing, but I simply don’t have that kind of time.

Can we see that it’s the wrong question? Can we see that, the antiquated, pre-scientific world views of the biblical writers notwithstanding, there is no reason to believe that God is the direct cause of anything, though over the centuries God has been the inadvertent cause of all kinds of evil inflicted on the world by people deluded enough to confuse their own projections onto God for anything one could reasonably expect Divinity to affirm? Can we agree that no reasonable view of our world – and certainly, no matter what our specific view of God might be, it would be hard t argue that God has no contact with our world – can afford to ignore the teachings of science? To attempt to ignore science is to return voluntarily to the state of cranial rectal inversion that caused us to ask absurd questions about whether God caused Sandy in the first place.

The Christian Church is all but dead – a different thing than Christianity being dead – because it has been more concerned with perpetuating itself than speaking the truth and so has entertained questions about God causing natural disasters rather than dismissing them as the nonsense they are and moving forward as a community to discover new and enlightened visions and versions of the mystery many of us call God. Is there something that binds us together? Absolutely – but it doesn’t take much common sense to see that a being that wrought devastation and destruction wouldn’t have the power to bind us together! If you want to see the hands of Divinity in natural disasters you must look to the first responders; the victims, neighbors and family members working together to recover; to the agencies such as the Red Cross who seek to help people; and thousands of others working together in common cause to move beyond the disaster. If you want to see God, look to the interconnectedness of everything and everybody – and then you won’t be tempted to ask silly questions about the role of God.