Glenn Beck of FoxNews horrified and angered many when he suggested the Japan earthquake could be the work of a vengeful God. Most of us vehemently deny such a possibility.
Beck is merely the latest in a long line of religious zealots to link various afflictions and natural disasters to God's supposed displeasure with humanity. Perhaps the most deplorable was the suggestion in the 1980s that AIDS was God punishing homosexuals.
We react against Beck and the like because we associate such positions with hate and religious bigotry. Yet it is unfortunate if this causes us to resist our instinct for deeper thought about the progress of humanity and our own place within it.
Moments of calamity are ripe for reflection, for believers and unbelievers alike. For religious believers, science alone does not explain the creation of the earth. Therefore it's unlikely that they will accept purely scientific explanations for the partial break up of the earth in an earthquake.
In the Quarterly Essay published last week, David Malouf gives a nuanced reading of the position that Beck has bastardised, harking back to the days when religious belief was the norm that reconciled us with fate.
When we were in the hands of the Gods, we had stories that made these distant beings human and brought them close. They got angry, they took our part or turned violently against us. They fell in love with us and behaved badly.
This refers to a pre-Christian theology that was overturned by the all-loving Christian God. But it does reflect a sense that fate was negotiable, as it continued to be within the Christian world view. Malouf says: 'We had our ways of obtaining [the Gods'] help as intermediaries. We could deal with them.'
Malouf's point is that although 'the chief sources of human unhappiness, of misery and wretchedness, have largely been removed from our lives', the result is that happiness remains elusive. Science and economics rule, and we have lost our power to negotiate. He says: 'The Economy is impersonal. It lacks manageable dimensions. We have discovered no mythology to account for its moods.'
And if religion has been displaced, so has poetry. Malouf recalls Shelley's assertion that poets were 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. Malouf argues that poets opened the way to institutional change by uncovering new possibilities that were capable of firing the mind.
Actually Malouf is not addressing the past. He is suggesting that poets are perfectly