Why did God kill Haitian babies?

Isn’t it heartwarming to see Christian organizations and Christian volunteers working hard to help earthquake survivors in Haiti? How nice. How charitable. How Christian. How insane.

Yes, insane. Isn’t it crazy for Christians to be helping Haitians? After all, wasn’t it their god who turned Port-au-Prince upside down in the first place? If God runs the world and controls every little detail—as many Christians claim—then surely he caused the earthquake. He must have made it happen or, at the very least, chose not to stop it from it happening. Either way, he is responsible. Clearly it was his choice for thousands of Haitians, many of them babies, to suffer and die. If not, he would have lifted a magical finger to prevent it, right? So that leads us to a curious point: why have some Christians been trying to undermine their god’s work by saving Haitians and lessening their suffering? Isn’t it un-Christian to work against God’s work?

One has to sympathise with fundamentalist Christians in the wake of major natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake (as well those Muslims and Jews who see the hand of God in everything). Their minds must be tormented by the jarring contradiction of a good and loving god who buries babies under tons of concrete.

Oh, I know, I’ve heard all about how disease, tsunamis, and earthquakes are our fault. We deserve them because some goofball named Adam ate an apple back in the day. We have to inhabit a dangerous and deadly world today thanks to his fall from grace. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Because of a single dietary rule infraction by Adam many thousands of years ago, Haitian babies deserve to have buildings fall on their heads in the year 2010. What else but religion can so twist and deaden a mind to a state where something like this makes sense? Only the madness of faith can lead someone to excuse the brutal death of a child by citing some imaginary prehistoric “crime”. How about if I come to your house, drop a concrete block on your puppy, and then tell you it was justified because the world’s first dog bit somebody thousands of years ago? Would you be cool with that? Didn’t think so.

How can decent and sensible Christians make sense out of their “God of love” being behind the sort of merciless destruction Haiti suffered? Do a minimal amount of thinking and it’s plain to see that something is seriously wrong here. The best the preachers ever come up with in their attempts to explain such events is the pathetic “God works in mysterious ways” copout. Yes, crushing thousands of children to death because “He so loves the world” is mysterious indeed. Even worse, some preachers say these things happen because God wants to test people’s faith. I suspect the value of that lesson may have been lost on the babies who slowly and painfully bled to death in the rubble that was Port-au-Prince.

True to form, American preacher Pat Robertson stuffed his foot in his mouth once again when he attempted to explain the Haiti disaster. He stated with certainty on his television show that Haitians had made a pact with the devil in order to escape slavery more than 200 years ago and God was still punishing them for it. How nice. Even as babies were dying agonizing deaths, Robertson was busy excusing it all away.

Ridiculous as Robertson’s claim is, let’s go ahead and accept for the moment that some evil fallen angel with a chip on his shoulder once struck a deal with a bunch of slaves and this angered God so much that he cursed Haiti forever. If this is the case, why haven’t Robertson and others who believe this nutty story paused to ask themselves why their God felt it was appropriate to entomb babies and leave them to choke to death on dust and dirt as punishment for something their distant ancestors did so long ago? What sort of justice is that? What sort of a god would do that? It’s not like we don’t know better. If powerful human leaders kill people because of their ancestry or do anything that even approaches the level of barbarism suggested by Robertson’s Haiti scenario, we condemn them as genocidal madmen.

I have heard some Caymanians in the past claim that the popularity of voodoo in Haiti led God to curse that nation and condemn it to severe poverty. No doubt, some Caymanians probably tried to connect voodoo and divine curses to the earthquake as well. Again, this is an absurd thing to believe, but even if it was true, good-hearted Christians should be disturbed. So what if some adult Haitians are naïve enough to believe in voodoo? How exactly does this justify impoverished children starving or babies dying in an earthquake?

Hopefully, events like this tragic earthquake will erode a bit of confidence in some believers. Maybe, in the cold shadow of more than 200,000 dead Haitians, they will reconsider their admiration for a god who is so cruel and indifferent to human suffering. Perhaps some Christians will even go so far as to consider the likelihood that a loving god who would bury babies beneath fallen buildings does not even exist in the first place. Let’s hope so, because our world needs a little less religion and a lot more humanity these days.