After the second earthquake, more weird explanations came up. The weirdest (to me) is the angry God, bursting out in a rage, killing thousands of innocent children and making many orphans because we and/or the people of Aceh and Sri Lanka had been bad. This version came from otherwise intelligent people who proudly say many tenfold times per day (do they really think about the words they say?) that God is the most gracious and most merciful. Yet they can not stop themselves from transposing some very judgmental and sometimes narrow views plus the lowest of human emotions (rage and anger) on our God. The worst thing still is that these wild explanations are sometimes abused to push extreme (as opposed to moderate) ideas into the people�s mind through inducing fear. (Nobody would would have any difficulties to change these far fetched interpretations just a little bit to make people believe the exact opposite of what these people want us to believe -which underlines the danger of overinterpretation of events-)
Why can we not humbly admit that we do not understand why this happened?
Just as the two year old playing with a box of matches who gets upset and despondent when the box of matches is taken away from him (for his own good), we may get upset and despondent when we see what has happened in Sumatra. Just as the two year old can not understand why he is treated in such a �cruel� way, we -with our limited human brainpower- may not be able to understand why our God felt He had to make this part of His master plan with the world.
Humility is still a good thing. Let us truly mean it when we say that God is the most gracious and merciful. Let us accept we can not understand everything. Just as we understand many years later that is was a real good thing that the box of matches was taken away when we were two, we may see the reason for the current happenings after our own death more clearly.
We are learning almost every week a lot about life and religion. I am definitely open for other concepts and points of view.
Maybe just two cents worth of wisdom
