“Please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t believe God did it and I don’t believe God is mad at Haiti.”
If God didn’t do it, who did?
We really can't speak for God either way on this circumstance. Maybe He did and maybe He didn't. Pain inflicts the just as well as the unjust, but it's not our job to determine that. Our job is to react in ways that please God, so it's a mute point that isn't relevant to us.
In the grand scheme of things, I object to the concept of heavenly intervention, on the principle that it is a psychological “crippling crutch”, and that it is an offense, of sorts, against “higher powers”, a blanket term I will explain.
It is an essential principle of paganism that through subservience and ritual, their gods will reward and punish their followers and non-believers. This both anthromorphizes and debases their gods over time, so they end up looking like stunted and fickle, petulant children, who argue and fight among themselves, while cruelly abusing their followers.
Monotheistic God has no competition. There are no other gods to challenge God. It is a singularity, and cannot be compared to, or described in comparison with, any other thing. This is why there is such a strong prohibition against graven imagery. It debases our understanding of God.
The thing that God does is to state that God exists. “I AM THAT I AM”.
According to the old Hebrew tradition, God created the universe in a “hole in God”, solely to see if there is anything at all that is “not God”. It is a mirror, that when complete, ceases to exist, and everything again becomes God.
So how does man fit into any of this? How does man do anything? This question has bugged the heck out of philosophers since ancient times.
Obviously man can do things, and many mysterious and powerful things, but they are all in the realm of man. This is our playground, with rules that apply to us, and pretty much anything we want to do we can.
We live, we make children, and we die. But we are far from being in charge of the playground. We do not rule the sea, or the air, or the ground we walk on. There are a vast number of species of life that also live here. So we have a little part of the playground which is mostly in our control, to some extent or other.
Or at least we think it is. And because this is freely given to us to play in, we assume it is ours, and constantly complain that we want more, and better, and importantly, we think we can persuade whoever is letting us use it, to give us more and better.
Yet it’s our playground. If we want it, we need to make it ourselves.
Please note that those who try to make it themselves often succeed, but those who want it to be given to them seldom do. And being gifted with all these great abilities to do things, doesn’t it seem a little rude to still want some higher power to do them for us?
If you are a normal, healthy 20 year old adult, what would your parents say if you asked them, begged them, every morning to still tie your shoes? What kind of parent would never eventually say, “No. Tie them yourself!”?
Gaia did it.