I'm not baiting anyone. And we're not turning the thread into a discussion about religion. Take out our posts to each other, and there are still 700 or so people taking about todays event. We're just having a sub-discussion within the thread... it happens all the time.
Look, even if you want to use the biblical account of the flood as a comparison, God gave the world decades of warning.
Some Christians might see Revelations as a 2000 year-old warning, no?
It didn't come as a bolt out of the blue after some antediluvian court decision made Him mad over the weekend.
I don't think anyone suggested Terri's (pending) murder was the only sin God might be punishing humanity for. I mean, somebody might have, but I haven't seen it. More likely, He's keeping a scorecard and every nation has something awful to answer for. There are no innocent nations, whether they're Christian, Buddhist, Islamist or Marxist. If you believe in the Christian Bible and its God, you believe in God's wrath and its inevitability. How and when it will come, even the most devout Christian will tell you, is anyone's guess.
But that wasn't your initial objection anyway. You said, in so many words, that people who believed God would use earthquakes to punish man (for whatever reason) were kooks and fruitcakes... even though their faith teaches them that God flooded the earth to do just that. That smacked of a smear against Christianity as a whole.... at least to me it did.
Of course, my graduate degree at a secular institution might have erased all that early training.
I do think that people who think earthquakes are God's punishment are kooks and fruitcakes. As someone who is familiar with the pictures we can see seismically far under the surface, there have been countless of earthquakes over geological time. Billions. I can see the evidence of them.
I don't know of any evidence in the bible that indicates that God causes them. Maybe I was asleep in class that day.
Look at the post directly after yours. If you support that, we don't have much more to discuss.
well said.