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This is... a very bad example to choose here. One man's "obvious nonsense" is another man's treasure. I do, in fact, believe that everything happens for a reason.
What reason can you divine for the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? If God does indeed work in mysterious ways, this one has to be the most mysterious of them all. Unlike many calamities which can be said to have a proximate cause rooted in human activity, this one was pure Nature’s Wrath. The only part any person played in it was having had the misfortune to live in, or even to have visited, the vicinity. Nearly 230,000 people dead in the course of a single day. Many of them Christians, no doubt, whose prayers appear not to have availed them.
These are all basically the problem of theodicy written over and over. Nature's Wrath has a long history in Jewish lore of being God's wrath. God created nature, remember.
As to the reason - I don't know! Nobody truly knows the answer to theodicy. Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it. Others say evil exists to help teach us to become good. Still others say that we couldn't have free will without evil existing in the world.
There are many answers. All I know is that I believe that God allows evil in the world for a reason.
Even this interpretation implies that bad things don't happen for "a reason" in a cosmic sense, but just because demons want to fuck shit up out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
To a widow, I can't imagine that "the reason your husband died is because demons were fucking shit up in the south Pacific for their own amusement and God was powerless too intervene" would be much warmer comfort than "the reason your husband died is because he got shot by a mugger and the EMTs didn't get there in time to save him".
It is indeed a reason, there are active agents in the world that are evil, and want to hurt us. That's a reason even if you don't think it's a good, or comforting one.
But what advantage does this worldview have over a secular one? You're just adding in extra epicycles that have zero impact on the bottom line.
Secularists: "Your child died of cancer because the universe is random and indifferent to our suffering."
Religionists: "Your child died of cancer because there are demons out there trying to fuck shit up for their own amusement. There is a God who cares very deeply about your child's welfare, but even though he definitely exists, is benevolent and is powerful enough that 'omnipotent' might be a reasonable characterisation - he nevertheless allowed the demons to cause your child to develop terminal cancer, or was unable to prevent them from doing so. I appreciate that, in practical terms, this looks indistinguishable from a universe which is cold, uncaring and absent of God."
I really, really do not understand why "your child died of cancer because there are demons out there who want to hurt you for no reason" is meant to be comforting (in the "everything happens for a reason" sense), but "your child died of cancer because the universe is cold and indifferent and sometimes bad things happen to innocent people for literally no reason" isn't. The former just sounds like a poetic framing of the latter.
Epicycles are good, actually.
There have always been atheists. There has never been a long-lasting atheist society. Maybe some of us are able to productively deal with a cold, uncaring universe that grinds us to dust for having the temerity to exist, but it seems that most can't, and epicycles give their minds something useful to work with; help them function.
I guess this is that "postmodern religion" thing I've heard so much about. "Religion is a pack of lies - believe it anyway"?
No worse a lie than equality, representative democracy, trans-anything, blank-slatism, pacifism, deindustrialization, fiat currency...
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