A nice piece by the Guardian’s Steven Bates on religious responses to the recent Asian tsunami disaster. It centres on the somewhat unfair misquoting of the Archbishop of Canterbury in relation to his thoughts on the disaster. Although I am not religious (some would say religiously non-religious) I found the Guardian’s rent-a-humanist’s response somewhat crude:

But Fergus Stokes, a former priest turned humanist, said that Christians and other believers were trying to have it both ways: “Either God has a hand in the fishbowl, in which case you can pray to him, or he doesn’t.”

In some ways it’s a shame they couldn’t have found a more lucid advocate of non-religious points of view. But then is there really a way to represent non-religious people? Many, like I, may feel that a very important part of their world-view is that they cannot be typecast into an pseudo-orthodoxy of ‘humanism’, ’secularism’ or even the phrase I earlier used, ‘non-religion’. It seems awkward to suggest it but I believe it’s a valid point. It makes advocacy of viewpoints like these troublesome as through recognising that belief systems are discrete and individual it prevents mass organisation - but then this sort of mass organisation is in many cases what one might dislike about religious systems.

Here’s a longer extract from the article:

Guardian | ‘Where is God in all this?’ - the problem for religions:

“Confronted with the world’s greatest natural disaster for half a century, religious leaders yesterday strove to make theological sense of the tsunami and console congregations that might ask why God allowed the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean to shift so catastrophically on Boxing Day.

Christians stressed God’s presence with the suffering, Hindus reconciled themselves to fate, the Chief Rabbi composed a prayer and the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph.

Lambeth Palace complained last night that the archbishop’s words had not borne the headline that the newspaper chose to put on them: ‘Archbishop of Canterbury: This has made me question God’s existence’ - which would indeed have been an extraordinary admission from such a source. It insisted instead that Dr Rowan Williams had merely hypothesised that it would be wrong for Christians not to question what God was up to.

Dr Williams wrote: “There is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous. How dangerous do they have to be? How many deaths would be acceptable?

“If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God? Wouldn’t we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties… belief has survived such tests again and again, not because it comforts or explains but because believers… have learned to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift. They have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement.”

The same newspaper has questioned the depth of the archbishop’s faith before. Only four months ago it chided Dr Williams for admitting that the Beslan school siege raised questions about faith.”

(Via The Guardian.)