Over at Religion Dispatches Levi McLaughlin, a professor of religion who specializes in East Asian traditions, writes about Tokyo’s governor Shintaro Ishihara describing the tsunami that struck Japan as “divine punishment”:

Ishihara, a prize-winning novelist, stage and screen actor, and a populist hero of the Japanese right, has gained notoriety for his willingness to court controversy, but his take on the tragedy in northeastern Japan offended even his staunchest supporters. On March 14, just three days into the crisis, Ishihara told reporters that he saw the tsunami as “divine punishment,” or tenbatsu, a term usually employed in Japanese to describe a righteous and inevitable punishment of the wicked. For Ishihara, the tsunami produced by Japan’s largest-ever recorded earthquake was a means of washing away the “egoism” (gayoku in Japanese) afflicting the Japanese people.

While the Tokyo Governor said that he felt sorry for the victims, he concluded that “We need a tsunami to wipe out egoism, which has rusted onto the mentality of Japanese over a long period of time.”

Ishihara, who will seek a fourth term as Tokyo Governor in a 2013 election, apologized publicly the next day, following comments by Miyagi Prefecture Governor Yoshihiro Murai, leader of the prefecture closest to the quake epicenter. Murai condemned Ishihara and urged sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of victims suffering in northern Japan. Despite Ishihara’s expression of regret, his “divine punishment” comment lingers as the most widely known religious sentiment yet expressed by a high-profile Japanese public figure in reaction to the current crisis. It resonates with similar remarks made in the United States following disasters, such as those by Pat Robertson in 2005, who described Hurricane Katrina as divine retribution for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts upholding Roe vs. Wade, or the televised conversation between Robertson and Jerry Falwell on September 13, 2001 in which they characterized the attack on the Twin Towers as God’s punishment for American tolerance of “abortionists,” gays, feminists and the ACLU.

In his willingness to attribute this current natural disaster to divine influence, Ishihara joins the esteemed ranks of Glenn Beck, who was equally sure that a message was being sent but a bit less specific about what it was:
What God does is God’s business, I have no idea. But I’ll tell you this — whether you call it Gaia or whether you call it Jesus, there’s a message being sent. And that is, “Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.”

The need to believe that everything happens for a reason and that good will be rewarded with good while bad is punished by bad is called just-world bias, and it’s on full display here.  You could point out to Ishihara or Beck that the cause of earthquakes is actually plate tectonics which were set in place long before Japan was Japan, but the answer would almost certainly be “I know– and why do you think that was?  Why did it happen now?”

Well, for reasons someone with more geological knowledge than I could doubtless explain, but that simply pushes the question back another notch.  There has to be an ultimate explanation in this thinking, and “That’s the way the world is” isn’t good enough.  It’s not hard to sympathize with this desire to find reasons behind it all, because having reasons makes it easier for us to cope — or at least, it seems like it does. Psychologist Jesse Bering discusses in his new book The Belief Instinct how when life is uncertain and threats loom, people are not necessarily inclined to set aside supernatural reasoning simply because scientific reasons have been provided.  They can’t “turn off” the notion that events are the result of a cosmic will, especially when those events are special because of their rarity and enormous impact for the positive or negative.  Our means of conceiving of the thoughts and motivations of other people by taking their perspective is called Theory of Mind, and once it fully develops (for most people at about four years of age), it’s such a useful thing to have that we tend to, as Bering puts it, over-attribute agency.  We see it everywhere.  And when an unexpected tragedy happens, we scrabble for meaning and intention because that’s what we are so used to doing as a species.

For some of us, that translates into a literal belief that a specific agent–God– had a purpose in causing this particular catastrophe.  For others, that idea seems repellent.  We might be swayed by the idea that the event is all part of God’s plan, however, even if we don’t think he deliberately caused this disaster for a particular reason. Others have a vague sense of karma or of the universe testing us in some way.  As a non-believer I’m not immune to this sort of thinking.  I still think “Why me?” whenever something unusually positive or negative happens, as if there’s a reason aside from all of the physical events that led up to it.   But though most people are willing to reconcile things in their heads by interpreting something like an earthquake as part of the general workings of the world in some way (theistic or otherwise), attributing such a horrible thing to the deliberate machinations of God in response to human behavior is viewed by most of us as abhorrent.  And that, I would say frankly, is a good thing.