Rite and Reason: Sometimes before answers can be found, the right questions must be asked and there are certainly questions well worth asking following the tsunami tragedy in Asia, writes Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
"What sort of God would have let this happen?" is an example of the wrong question.
Firstly, it is a perfect example of narcissism. The questioners convert an international human tragedy of mind-staggering proportions into a maudlin expression of their own spiritual angst. This question escalates self-indulgence to new heights of obnoxiousness. Those who shape their lives according to the doctrines of secular fundamentalism take an evident delight in stating the usual "Where is God now?" questions after tragedies, especially those natural ones that can't be blamed on human actions.
But while the casualties can't be blamed on human actions, many of them can certainly be blamed on human inactions. I know that it is nowadays considered distasteful to attribute any complicity in a problem to the victim. It is as if being a victim today, automatically confers moral virtue, but being that delicate can cost us truth.
The simple truth is that American seismological specialists in Pasadena, California, and elsewhere, were horrified that no warning systems are in place in these Asian countries. Remember that there were several hours of warning available.
"A warning centre such as those used around the Pacific could have saved most of the thousands of people who died in Asia's earthquake and tsunamis," said the US Geological Survey.
Some countries have pleaded poverty, but that is not an adequate explanation. We are not talking rocket science here. We are talking about sirens on poles. This is first World War technology and very inexpensive.
In 1953 nearly 2,000 Dutch people drowned when the North Sea breached a dyke and flooded part of Holland. Within a few years they had begun the world's largest civil engineering project and Holland has never been flooded significantly since.
Sadly, this is far from the first time that some of these nations have faced natural disasters in which people died by the tens of thousands as the result of monsoons, typhoons, flooding, and earthquakes. Yet few warning systems exist, let alone sea walls and evacuation routes.
On December 26th, 2003, over 30,000 victims perished in the Iranian earthquake at Bam. To explain the vast death toll inflicted by an earthquake no stronger than that which struck the Californian town of Paso Robles a few days later, Iranian authorities pleaded poverty.
It costs considerably more to engineer large-scale nuclear capability, as Iran has done, than it costs to fit buildings for safety in an earthquake-prone zone. The problem is not poverty, it is priority.
Here in the US, the standard bearer of western civilisation, we have two deeply embedded cultural imperatives. Both flow from the Bible with which our founders were familiar and by means of which they sculpted their world views.
Our first distinctive cultural imperative is to render ourselves less vulnerable to nature. We believed we were following Divine will when we developed medicine and medical technology to dominate disease. We found insecticides to protect our food supply, and we built dams to control rivers.
We took seriously the commandment in the Bible, "And God blessed them (Adam and Eve) saying 'Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it'."
We never understood "subdue the world" to mean obliterate nature, or despoil the environment. We knew we were pleasing God by making ourselves safer and more secure and this knowledge lent added urgency and meaning to our efforts which then seemed to be blessed.
Not by coincidence did the overwhelming majority of these scientific and technical developments take place in the West.
Western civilisation's second distinctive cultural imperative is the importance of preserving human life. This too derives directly from our biblical roots and distinguishes us from the peculiar fatalism toward death found in so many other cultures.
Together, these two values enshrined in the West in general and in America in particular, are chiefly responsible for the vastly diminished impact that natural disasters inflict upon our society.
Earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and yes, tsunamis happen. It is called nature, which is not benign. God also gave us intelligence and commanded us to make ourselves less vulnerable to nature.
God isn't to blame for the deaths in the Asian disaster. Many are attributable to slowness in adopting the western values that promote technical and economic development along with profound respect for each human life.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin is president of Toward Tradition, described on its website www.towardtradition.org as "a bridge-building organisation providing a voice for all Americans who defend the Judeo-Christian values vital for our nation's survival".