When the BBC reports stories with a religious angle, no matter how trivial it is, the theists usually get an easy, uncritical ride. Consequently, in this BBC News piece about why god allows natural disasters to happen it is good to see holes being picked, albeit in a fairly gentle manner, in the drivelly arguments religious people are wont to spew to anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot.

Employees of the church of England, that domain of mild, incoherent and woolly thinking, have given some typically vague responses when asked why their god would allow the earthquake in Haiti to occur. I quote from the BBC article:

Faced with this question, Archbishop of York John Sentamu said he had "nothing to say to make sense of this horror", while another senior clergyman Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond "not with clever argument but with prayer".

These responses avoid answering the question in a really base and duplicitous manner. What else could one expect expect from senior members of the drivelly and confused waffle-mongering Anglican church?

There are plenty of other examples of theists’ bonkers reasoning and avoidance of giving straight and meaningful arguments. How about this laughable attempt by some theists to define their frankly pathetic beliefs in a manner which avoids saying anything definitive or concrete about them: Others say their talk of God is supposed to acknowledge … a thread of meaning or value running through the world, or perhaps something ineffable. Utter crap, obviously, but then so is the whole idea of religious belief. If people are fool enough to to subscribe to the preposterous idea of there being any form of god, I suppose one cannot really expect consistent and articulate arguments from them about their theism.

The final paragraph in the article clearly encapsulates one of the many problems theists still have:

But, as for those who believe in an all-good, all-powerful agent-God, we've seen that they face a question that remains pressing after all these centuries, and which is now horribly underscored by the horrors in Haiti. If a deity exists, why didn't he prevent this?

Edit: I’ve recently heard from theists that all religions share a common thread of compassion. This news article really demonstrates that such a thing either does not exist or if it does it is routinely ignored. Might religious people be somewhat hypocritical? “Do as I say not as I do.”