"Because of the House of the Lord I will seek thy good"

So what is the response of religion to distaster? To blame God? To reject the notion that the universe is "Intelligently Designed"? To accept the disaster as some punishment from God that is part of some Divine Plan? Or to accept that we call Things That Happen "acts of God" for a reason that reflects both on our psychology and our theology, chant Psalms 22/23, 27, 120/121 and 130 (*) and then, to follow a Hassidic teaching, forget God even exists and help our fellow humans as if there is no Divine help available for them whatsoever.


(*) And perhaps, though the tone is wrong for a tragedy, it may be informative to, when considering the social and governmental dimensions of what failed, to read Psalm 122.

DAS, in response to this post.

And Tena asked, here:

Well Robert, maybe this will be the silver lining? Maybe this country will finally wake up again?

Or are there too many people who resented the hell out of, say, Johnson's Great Society, who really don't care? I don't know. I hope not, but my god we've had all these years and all we have now is the dismantling of all of the mechanisms that were supposed to go at least some way toward remedying our poverty.

And our poverty is worse than ever.

Mr. Tena and I have a friend who has a place (trailer, actually) down on Cedar Creek Lake. We used to go down there frequently and in order to get to the highway going southeast, you go through south Dallas, which is predominantly African American. Once because the freeway was backed up, we got off and took some back ways into downtown. Oh Robert, I will never forget it.
I knew it was bad, but not as bad as we saw. I kept saying "How can we let people live like this?" Richest nation on earth, they say. For what? It's all a lie. I just don't know anymore.

What the hell have I done about it? What can I do? I'm asking.

What are our responses?