Whenever there is a natural disaster, the media always turns to some religious representative to wallow in the suffering, to explain that God is with us, that there is some underlying fundamental reason for suffering, and that people shouldn't see the tragedy as any reason to doubt their faith.
And the media always accepts that position with only the mildest of criticisms. Even the formidable John Humphrys of Radio 4's Today programme today gave the Bishop of York, John Sentamu, an easy ride as he sat quiet during the bishop's hopelessly incoherent diatribe. The worthy bishop was wrestling with a question that Humphrys put to him: how can a merciful god be responsible for such devastating disasters? For a bishop you'd think the question would be easy.
Of course it's a fair question and one which cannot be answered by the religious. The worthy bishop wriggled all over the place talking about the goodness of Christ, and the munificence of nature, and the power and beauty of the world, and all that stuff. But what he couldn't do was explain the actions of a supposed all-powerful deity causing disaster. You have to be a deluded theologian to wriggle out of that.
Haiti lies on the edge of the Carribbean tectonic plate and one of the fault lines which has been stable for the last three centuries or so, gave way to the pressure of plate movement. It was around 10km down in the ground that the quake occurred. That has nothing whatsoever to do with ideas about mythical super-beings, omniscient gods, or anything of the kind. This is a geological process which is well-understood but difficult to predict.
Whenever there is a disaster of some kind, it is natural that the media will focus on the human aspects of the story, the suffering, the relief effort, the economic and social consequences, and will try to convey the sense of human loss.
But to have a religious representative pontificating about the goodness of his mystical deity and coming over all pious about his sympathy towards the suffering people of Haiti, is not just irrelevant, but somewhat insulting. Attempting to gain publicity for religion at a time of such enormous suffering is opportunist and cynical at best.
And far from being a reason for deepening faith in religion, such disasters ought to help people realise that there is a material world, subject to physical laws and it operates quite independently from any mystical super-beings.
Such disasters show very clearly how utterly irrelevant religion is to the real practical interests of living people. If the religious bodies want an all-powerful god in charge of everything that happens in the universe, let's see them step up to the plate and claim responsibility on his behalf, instead of wriggling incoherently to evade it.
