simpleton

In the ongoing effort to find somebody to blame for the Boxing Day tsunamis, one obvious culprit has been overlooked: Neptune, god of the sea, who was responsible not only for delivering the monstrous waves but for the earthquake that caused them.

My own moral clarity was initially fogged by a misapprehension that blame for the original earthquake rested with Vulcan, god of the underworld, and thus that Neptune was only partly responsible. (It's why I refrained from commenting for three days after the catastrophe.) But once you understand that Neptune is to blame for the whole megillah, all the smaller questions resolve themselves: Was it the fault of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii? Of the Axis of Stingy? Was it global warming? Isn't President Bush somehow at fault? Or do we detect once again the shadowy hand of former President Clinton? Shouldn't we really be blaming the victims for wearing outlandish Muslim garb?

It's time to put aside these petty squabbles. Once we acknowledge that Neptune's fingerprints are all over this mess, we can, as the sage Pat Paulsen once urged, stop sticking our bayonets into each other and start sticking them into space.

Space may be the best place to assign blame, since our various earthbound culprits haven't amounted to much. The early-warning conspiracy theory conjured images of a legion of Murray Hamiltons refusing to close the beaches during the holiday rush, but this pseudo-scandal faded quickly. And while it would be striking to see Global Warming finally delivering on its apocalyptic promise, the jury's still out on that one too. President Bush is never shy about speaking on behalf of The World (see, for example: "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power," "We strive to advance peace and democracy and to safeguard these ideals around the world," "We are safer and the world is better off because Saddam is sitting in a prison cell," "We're sometimes faulted for a naive faith that liberty can change the world," and "All the world can rise to this moment."), so technically I have no problem blaming him for everything from volcanoes to misplaced housekeys. But there's a disappointing dearth of fault to find in Bush's behavior either before or after the tsunami. It also turns out that it's a lot easier to find attacks on real and potential Bush blamers by the President's defenders—as well as his champions, advocates, supporters, minions, and flunkies—than to find actual cases of people blaming Bush for tsunami-related issues. That's good: Why waste time with the President when the real perp, a buck-passing, blame-shifting, responsibility-shirking, my-way-or-the-highway, need-to-know-basis, insane, paranoid, capricious, genocidal tyrant is once again getting ready to skate, with a chorus of cheers and thanks from his supporters?

That (if we disqualify Neptune on grounds of disbelief) would be God. The tsunami has unleashed torrents of both political finger-pointing and religious soul-searching, but so far nobody has bothered to connect the two. The God question has centered on theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the attributes of God with the order of the world, and specifically to explain the existence of evil and misfortune. How, goes the oft-asked question, can the all-merciful and all-powerful fella do something like this? The answers have ranged from the thoughtful to the mushmouthed to the objectionable, but the real problem is the question itself. If Siamese twins or Treacher-Collins Syndrome aren't evidence of absolute cosmic randomness or active malevolence, why is a tsunami? If the argument is that this massive loss of innocent life causes the faithful to doubt, then why should you maintain your faith in the face of kids with progeria, Chediak-Higashi syndrome, osteosclerosis, or Gaucher's disease? Is it a simple question of numbers, and if so, do you know how many children die of malaria every year?

And why should the hand of God even be taken into consideration? When claims of divine intervention are made—a bleeding statue, say, or a case of stigmata—the Catholic church seeks to exhaust all possible natural explanations before considering the possibility of a supernatural hand. (For reasons too lengthy to be considered here, miracle verification can't really be called scientific, but it is an honest effort to apply skeptical principles to divine claims.) Why then, should anybody see God at work in a case where the natural explanation is readily available? "Scientists who leave God out of the equation have a simple explanation for the tsunami," writes Kenneth Nguyen in the Australian paper The Age. But scientists aren't the only ones who leave God out of all sorts of equations regarding all sorts of natural events; when it's raining, believers take umbrellas like everybody else.

At GetReligion.org, Jeremy Lott dispatches the theodicy question with extreme prejudice: "I'd issue some kind of grand retort here," Lott writes, "but...this stuff just does not move me. That people are rotten, or that the earth shakes, it seems to me, do not count for much against the possibility of a good and loving God whose actions in this world are not always easy to discern or explain." If the world-weary tone sounds odd coming from a believer, it's probably because the theodicy question makes so little sense. Unfortunately, few others are willing to avoid giving answers. This story in the Calcutta Telegraph offers emetic explanations from major world religions:

"This is an expression of God's great ire with the world," Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar said.

Pandit Harikrishna Shastri, a priest of New Delhi's Birla temple said 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".

These sorts of hateful explanations have received enough retorts that there's no reason to rebut them again. As a Catholic chauvinist (though alas, no longer a Catholic!), I wish I could claim better from the good ol' RCC. Unfortunately, this article by Father Paul Stenhouse talks a good show before falling back on the riddles and evasions Ron Rosenbaum condemns, with more emotion than logic, in a celebrated New York Observer column. Stenhouse takes it even further, however, into an unseemly display of triumphalism:

THE French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel noted that the mysteries of suffering and evil are often used as arguments against the existence of a loving God. However, more people, he says, are turned towards God by suffering than away from him.

He also comments for the benefit of those of us who live in the so-called First World, that if there is one single conclusion forced on us by the history of mankind, it is that the growth of faith in God is not hindered by misfortune and suffering, but by satisfaction.

Nobody could begrudge tsunami survivors their choice of spiritual comfort, but with a God who uses the kind of evangelism Stenhouse admires here, it's hard not to cite Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate: "Worship that? Nevuh!"

Though I hesitate to give any kind words to Anglicans (those J-V Catholics), a column this week by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been widely mischaracterized as an expression of the Archbishop's lost faith. In fact, Williams' column (reg. req.) is one of the few intelligible comments made on this matter. All logic may be against asking the theodicy question, but Williams understands that all emotion is for it, and the question will not be satisfied by easy bromides or church propaganda. Williams considers the same question of belief among the victims that Stenhouse cites, but with a more modest conclusion:

The odd thing is that those who are most deeply involved—both as sufferers and as helpers—are so often the ones who spend least energy in raging over the lack of explanation. They are likely to shrug off, awkwardly and not very articulately, the great philosophical or religious questions we might want to press. Somehow, they are most aware of two things: a kind of strength and vision just to go on; and a sense of the imperative for practical service and love. Somehow in all of this, God simply emerges for them as a faithful presence. Arguments "for and against" have to be put in the context of that awkward, stubborn persistence.

What can be said with authority about these terrible matters can finally be said only by those closest to the cost. The rest of us need to listen; and then to work and—as best we can manage it—pray.

Williams may be trying to sneak an argument for faith in under the guise of admiration for the believers, but he touches on something important: The search for answers is a luxury. It is similar to the effort to assign blame for the catastrophe in that both seek to impose order on a disordered world. Blamethrowing and theodicy are both arguments from design, and may even be necessary in an environment where increasing portions of both new and old media are taken up with opinioneering and instant position-taking. But you can't have an opinion about a natural disaster. Unless you blame Neptune.