My first post since started this blog again

I had deleted the prior blog, titled Friendly Curmudgeon because I thought I had drifted from a focus on spiritual aspects of my life, with way too many political rants, and ravings about health care issues (I am a former pediatrician who now works in online medical education).

I missed putting my spiritual thoughts and insights online though, so on the way home from Meeting this First Day I decided to start it up again.

Today's thought: at Meeting a F(f)riend shared about the movie Oh God! starrign George Burns. When asked why there was so much suffering and pain in the world, "God" answered something like well I made you in my image with the intelligence to stop the suffering. I had been thinking about the sufferng imposed on humans by natural disasters, and praying for people in the Gulf, with hurricane Gustav bearing down on New Orleans. OK I thought suffering imposed by humans not being close to God, like war, domination by one country over another, but natural disasters why does God let us suffer? And after my friend shared, I realized that human intellegence can lessen the suffering from natural disasters. With advances in technology and science, God-given, we can predict the path of a hurricane and move people out of harm's way, at least this time. And we made levees instead of war (play on 60s Make love not war) we could even lessen the effect even more. Thank God for our evolved intelligence! Let us pray we continue to use it, and evoke nuclear disarmament, etc etc etc