There is nothing quite like the sight of massive destruction to elicit talk of God. We heard it last week out of the mouths of Southern California fire victims and evacuees from Canyon Country to Escondido in the US.

“I hope God is good to you, Don,” said one man in Santa Clarita to a neighbour who had lost his home.

“I think it’s God’s deal,” said a San Diegan who had just escaped what he described as a wall of flame.

As she was being evacuated from the small town of Julian, one woman said she guessed it was “all in God’s hands” now. Another, whose home burned to the ground, plaintively asked, “OK, God, what else?”

But what exactly does God have to do with the tragedy of charred bodies, charred houses, charred hillsides?

Even as scores of victims evoked a deity, others had reason to deny the idea that any power other than man’s could have wreaked such havoc.

By all accounts, Americans are a religious people. But they’re also big believers in individual will. And sometimes their culture of can-do-ism clashes with their faith in a higher power.

People tend to see God as a primary cause of any given incident when they’re overwhelmed by events or whenever no other temporal explanation satisfies them. But, although you’re likely to hear talk of God as the disaster unfolds and the flames are still hot, it quickly disappears as soon as the blame game starts.

Fire ecologists were tsk-tsking: People shouldn’t have built where they did, or government shouldn’t have allowed it. San Diegans were taken to task for not paying for a county fire department, and a chorus began, California was still woefully unprepared for the inevitable.

For all their profession of religious belief, Americans seem to have an oversized need to understand the human cause of any event — some rational cause for every effect. They don’t accept the notion of the unavoidable, the incomprehensible.

A 1992 study that surveyed survivors of a flood that resulted in the loss of 14 lives and $180 million in property damage found that two-thirds of respondents assigned blame to human and technological failure rather than Mother Nature.

Sure, blame might bring you some satisfaction. It may even help you get some help in the restoration process and shame authorities into being better prepared the next time. But it also creates a climate of recrimination, which only adds bitterness to sorrow and prolongs the tragedy. Worse, it fosters the notion we can avert all bad things.

By all means, we have to take responsibility. Our governments and those assigned to protect us have to take responsibility. But to presume that enough blame and consequent preparation for the next time means we can avoid all disasters is as foolhardy as it is arrogant.

For centuries, people understood natural disasters as forms of divine retribution — God or Mother Nature punishing man for his transgressions. I guess in a way we still do.

LA Times