It’s a question I’ve asked before (perhaps most notably here).

I’ve also asked slightly different versions of the same question before (perhaps most notably here and here).

I have yet to receive a good answer from a Catholic or any other variety of Christian.

Instead, events this year have only further sharpened my questions.

Consider:

Archbishop Of Port-au-Prince Monsignor Serge Miot Killed By Haiti Quake (Ruth Gledhill/The Times; Jan 13)

The Archbishop of Port-au-Prince is among those killed in the huge earthquake that devastated the city.

The body of Monsignor Serge Miot, 63, was pulled from the rubble of his offices, according to missionaries from the Saint Jacques Society.

The diocese’s vicar general, Benoit Seguiranno, is also missing following Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude quake in Haiti, which is largely Catholic.

[NOTE: According to the CIA World Factbook, Haiti is 80% Roman Catholic and 16% Protestant.]

Father Andre Siohan, a missionary of the French Saint Jacques society, wrote in an e-mail to the Missionary International News Service Agency from Port-au-Prince: “Nou atè nèt” (in Creole, “We are on our knees”)….

He added: “I went to the city centre this morning to visit the other religious communities: the area is completely devastated and there are thousands of victims. It is terrible. We are all well, but some of our seminarians are missing. Some are injured, but some are maybe dead. Pray for us.”

Father Pierre Le Beller, who returned to France after serving around 30 years in Haiti, told the missionary agency by telephone: “Our confrères, some seminarians, friends and neighbours of the Pacot area are currently sheltered in tents in the gardens of our house, damaged by the quake. We fear an extremely elevated number of injured: the real emergency is that of treating them.”…

The Caritas Centre in the central Saint Antoine neighbourhood, a facility for the assistance and reintegration of street children, which he founded and has dedicated his life to for many years, was devastated….

The earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, was the strongest to hit Haiti for 200 years and was followed by two strong aftershocks….”

Legendary Brazilian Aid Worker Among The Victims Of Haiti Earthquake (Andrew Downie/The Christian Science Monitor; Jan 13)

A Brazilian doctor whose work helped save the lives of tens of thousands of children through a Church-run network that provides basic health care and support to infants was among those killed in the Haiti earthquake.

Zilda Arns was in Haiti to support the local volunteers of the Pastoral da Criança (Children’s Pastoral), a group she founded in southern Brazil in 1983.

The group teaches uneducated mothers the importance of healthcare issues such as breast feeding, vaccinations and proper hydration, and then instructs them how to pass on that knowledge to friends and neighbors in Brazil’s most impoverished communities.Today, the Pastoral is one of Brazil’s most respected organisations and Arns was one of the nation’s best-known faces.

The group is present in 42,000 Brazilian communities, with 260,000 trained volunteers attending to 1.8 million children under the age of 6. In those communities, the infant mortality rate is 11 per 1,000 births; in Brazil overall it is 22.5.

“There is absolutely no doubt that the Children¹s Pastoral program revolutionized public health here, which was then based solely on government health services,” said Cesar Victora, a epidemiologist who worked with Arns for more than two decades.

When UNICEF looked to set up a new children’s health program in Brazil, her brother, then a bishop, asked the 75-year-old paediatrician Arns to come up with a proposal and she used the parable of the loaves and fishes as inspiration.

“God told people to organise and they were fed,” she said in an interview last year. “We organised the communities, we identified the leaders in those impoverished areas, and we told the ones that wanted to work as volunteers in multiplying knowledge and solidarity that we would teach them how to do that. I knew if we did it right we could save millions of lives.”…

Arns herself was extremely devout and alongside the diplomas and awards that cover the wood-panelled walls of her office are religious icons and photographs of churchmen, including one of her with Pope John Paul II.

Her faith helped her through her own tragedies. Her first born child died just three days old and her husband drowned while rescuing a girl from rough seas in 1978. One of her five other children died in a car accident in 2003….

And now Arns herself is gone, her life snuffed out by a natural catastrophe that her gOd either caused or stood back and did nothing to prevent.

If this is the way the Christian gOd treats his most devout nations and workers, who needs Satan?

But perhaps this tragedy – as mammoth as it is – has at least helped Haitians to come to their senses and realize the impotency and/or evil of the deity they’ve wasted so much of their time, money, and prayers on?

Ummm, not quite….

Haitians Praise God After Apocalyptic Quake (Michelle Faul and Mike Melia/The Associated Press; Jan 17)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: Drumbeats called the faithful to a Sunday Mass praising God amid a scene resembling the Apocalypse — a collapsed cathedral in a city cloaked with the smell of death and rattled by gunfire, where rescue crews battle to pry an ever-smaller number of the living from the ruins.

Sunlight streamed through what little was left of blown-out stained-glass windows as the Rev. Eric Toussaint preached to a small crowd of survivors. A rotting body lay in its main entrance.

“Why give thanks to God? Because we are here,” Toussaint said. “We say ‘Thank you God.’ What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.”

As Catholic and Protestant worshippers across the city met for their first Sunday services since the magnitude-7.0 quake, many Haitians were still waiting for food and water after five days and violence began to crack through….

At the roofless cathedral, elderly women worried the beads of their rosaries and prayed for the intervention of Our Lady Of The Ascension, to whom the 81-year-old church is named.

A military helicopter roared overhead, drowning out a hymn by the congregation. Above loomed the partially destroyed office of the archbishop who died nearby and another building whose blown-out walls had laid it open it like a doll’s house….

At the cathedral, the Rev. Toussaint described his own near-miraculous survival.

“I watched the destruction of the cathedral from this window,” he said, pointing to a window in what remains of the archdiocese office. “I am not dead because God has a plan for me.”

“What happens is a sign from God, saying that we must recognize his power – we need to reinvent ourselves.”…

Perhaps that reinvention ought to include the abandoning of a gOd who has been revealed to be so impotent, uncaring, and/or outright evil?

The Bible repeatedly ridicules those who cling to false gOds even in the face of such obvious impotence. Why shouldn’t Bible-believers in turn be ridiculed when THEIR gOd does so little to protect them from disasters?

And as if the Haiti earthquake wasn’t a clear enough message for Christians around the world to wake up and abandon their silly religion, they soon had it reinforced by this event:

Huge Quake Hits Chile (Roberto Candia & Eva Vergara/The Associated Press; Feb 27)

TALCA, Chile: One of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck Chile on Saturday, toppling homes, collapsing bridges and plunging trucks into the fractured earth….

Chileans near the epicenter were tossed about as if shaken by a giant.

It was the strongest earthquake to hit Chile in 50 years. President-elect Sebastian Pinera said more than 120 people died, a number that was rising quickly.

The quake shook buildings in Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires, and was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil — 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) to the east.

In Talca, just 65 miles (105 kilometers) from the epicenter, furniture toppled as the earth shook for more than a minute in something akin to major airplane turbulence. The historic center of town largely collapsed….

Collapsed roads and bridges complicated north-south travel in the narrow Andean nation. Electricity, water and phone lines were cut to many areas….

In Santiago, modern buildings are built to withstand earthquakes, but many older ones were heavily damaged, including the Nuestra Senora de la Providencia church, whose bell tower collapsed….

The largest earthquake ever recorded struck the same area of Chile on May 22, 1960. The magnitude-9.5 quake killed 1,655 people and left 2 million homeless….

Saturday’s quake matched a 1906 temblor off the Ecuadorean coast as the seventh-strongest ever recorded in the world.

According to the CIA World Factbook, Chile is 70% Roman Catholic and about 17% Protestant.

How many more signs of the evil, powerlessness, or simple non-existence of their gOd must Christians in general and Catholics in particular experience before they revise their beliefs and rituals accordingly?