I’ve posted about this topic before after the tsunami. And, of course, with Katrina and Rita and the earthquake in Pakistan and (fill in blank), it’s still obviously a fresh and newly painful topic.

I just came across this little snippet today on Dixon Kinser’s web site. He’s taking a Theology and Ethics class from a Catholic professor and this was a snippet from his notes on natural disasters and the like:

This kind of tragedy (or natural evil as the Catholics like to call it) throws in our face a problem of theology and ethics that the tradition has been unable to “solve� for 2000 years. That problem is, if God is good why did God let something like this happen?

It’s a good question that (Monti contends) leads you to two places: Either, God is all-powerful and bad (therefore he sends or doesn’t send hurricanes, does or doesn’t stop Hitler etc.) or God is not all-powerful and good. Given these two choices (Monti says for effect) I’ll take a less powerful, but good God.

Because, it’s not that God isn’t all-powerful. It’s that we have conceived of power through an industrial revolution framework and therefore see all power as cause and effect. What is God IS all-powerful, but power doesn’t mean what we think it does? (emphasis mine)

I wholeheartedly reject that God deals in death and suffering. Calvinists, ever logical to the end, draw the conclusion that He has to, or He would not be God. And in my opinion, Calvinism is responsible for some of the most schizophrenic and creepy Protestant behavior out there as a result. Any diety that demands love while apparently arbitrarily dealing in reward and pain from a removed position of omnipotence is a deity that in my mind will end up driving it’s followers ’round the bend. I’m convinced of this from having watched the process happen at ground level.

But this take is fascinating. What if the baseline assumptions and structures that Western thought brings to the table are hopelessly inadequate to answer it? It’s clear that the Biblical writers had some other kind of relationship with God — something that wasn’t Calvinist or anywhere near a hyper-rational approach, something that allowed Job to say after losing it all in calamity after calamity “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away — blessed be the name of the Lord”.

“What if power doesn’t mean what we think it does?” What indeed? Pondering on this…

An incredible “embedded” camera’s eye look at giant hornets attacking a bee’s nest for honey and larvae to feed their own young:

Click here to view the carnage

(via kottke.org, source of many good things)

I am truly in awe of the creative and disgusting lengths that boredom will drive a human being to.

Behold the 30,000 calorie sandwich.

That’s enough calories for 15 days of an normal human diet. And check out the ingredient list… It’s truly a monument to the American convenience diet. All in all, a cultural masterpiece (if not necessarily all that edible).