"How Could God Let This Happen?"

The question that arose instantly, among people all over the tsunami zone, after the December 26 disaster.

"God is always the fall guy," Greek Orthodox theologian Costas Kyriakides in Cyprus told Reuters.

Indeed, this has proved to be so among those of all religious stripes.

In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, imams blamed the catastrophe on lay Muslims who were shirking their daily prayers.

Others said Allah was angry that Muslims were killing other Muslims.

In Israel, Sephardic chief rabbi Shlomo Amar called the disaster "an expression of God's wrath with the world - the world is being punished for wrongdoing."

In Sri Lanka, Buddhists wondered which political leader had angered the sea gods.

Sulayman S. Nyang, a Muslim and a professor of African studies at Howard University, said, "God uses nature to remind humans not only about humanity, but sinfulness as well."

In medicine, when there are many remedies for a problem, none of them are really effective all the time.

For example, there are over 100 diferent cures for hiccups, in both the medical and lay literature.

The only thing certain about any one of them is that none of them work with certainty.

If one did, like good money driving out bad, the other "cures" would fall by the wayside.

Similarly with theological explanations for natural disasters: when there are many, there is none.

You might even, if you were prone to the sort of magical thinking I've been accused of — with good reason, I might add — my entire life, extrapolate this way of looking at things to the world as a whole, and your place in it.

That is, nothing you do is really logically explicable, regardless of the reasons you furnish for your actions and behavior.

Ingmar Bergman said, "Explanations are clumsy rationalizations with hindsight."

Bill Broadway wrote the following story for today's Washington Post Religion section about the differing responses to the tsunami.

Divining a Reason for Devastation

Followers of Various Faiths Differ on Natural, Supernatural Explanations for Tsunami

Catastrophes often leave religious leaders fumbling for explanations.

But there has been no shortage of reasons given for the South Asian tsunami that killed more than 147,000 people, many of them children.

In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, the hardest-hit area in the world's most populous Muslim country, imams blamed the Dec. 26 tsunami on lay Muslims who were shirking their daily prayers and following a materialistic lifestyle.

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