This story was bound to come out sooner or later, I guess:
Faiths ask of quake: “Why did you do this, God?”

“This is an expression of God’s great ire with the world,” Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar told Reuters. “The world is being punished for wrongdoing — be it people’s needless hatred of each other, lack of charity, moral turpitude.”

Pandit Harikrishna Shastri, a priest of New Delhi’s huge marble and sandstone Birla Hindu temple, told Reuters the disaster was caused by a “huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth” and driven by the positions of the planets.

Azizan Abdul Razak, a Muslim cleric and vice president of Malaysia’s Islamic opposition party, Parti Islam se-Malaysia, said the disaster was a reminder from god that “he created the world and can destroy the world”.

Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, a leading British Muslim cleric from Leicester in England said: “We believe that God has ultimate controlling power over his entire creation. We have a responsibility to try and attract god’s kindness and mercy and not do anything that would attract his anger.”

In all seriousness, shit like this really makes me sad. It’s analogous to a kid who’s completely dysfunctional, where his parents are just totally abusive, but the kid always comes back with, “No, those beatings were bad, and I know I’m bleeding, but I must’ve done something wrong. I’ll be better next time.” Only in this case, it’s worse, because there are no parents. Now that’s REALLY fucked up. It connects up to that story from The Onion way back. But at least with that story, there was simply detachment and a complete absence of thought, as opposed to this stuff from Reuters, which seems to be complete self-loathing.

Welcome to Nihilism, Inc.