Tsunami horror story: how God and the media struggle to cope

SOMETIMES we used to give our secondary school religion teacher a hard time by asking difficult moral questions.

One of our favourites was why God, who apparently was so good and fatherly, often visited the worst natural disasters on the poorest regions of the world where people were already suffering, would be less equipped to deal with them and where, as a result, the fatalities and devastation would be greater.

He struggled at times to find a response and his answer to this one was particularly contorted. He accepted that earthquakes, tidal waves and the like were natural phenomena and, therefore, acts of God.