Slate: "Send a Message to God - He has gone too far this time"

In the wake of the tsunami disaster, it's time for believers to take a more proactive role in world events. It's time to boycott God.

Centuries of uncritical worship have clearly produced a monster. God knows that he can sit passively by while human life is wantonly mowed down, and the next day, churches, synagogues, and mosques will be filled with believers thanking him for allowing the survivors to survive. The faithful will ask him to heal the wounded, while ignoring his failure to prevent the disaster in the first place. They will excuse his unwillingness to stave off destruction with alibis ('God wasn't there when the tsunami hit' - Suketu Mehta) and relativising ('for each victim tens of thousands yet live' - Russell Seitz), even if those excuses contradict God's other attributes, such as omnipresence or love for each individual life.

Where is God's incentive to behave? He gets credit for the good things and no blame for the bad.

Ah, the difficulties of radical monotheism.

That's the problem, after all. When Christians, Jews, and Muslims proclaim that God is one and that there is one God, it puts us in a fix when the world goes to hell. How do we explain evil when the one and only God is good?

Heather Mac Donald's piece in Slate is angry, sarcastic... and important for people of faith to read. We might not have pat answers for her accusations against God (or rather, she rightly would not accept from us any answers that are merely pat), but we have an obligation to take those charges seriously. The question of evil and suffering in the world demands our honest and humble engagement. Mac Donald's essay dares us to wrestle with that question.