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01/12/2005:

"Faith Divides the Survivors and It Unites Them, Too"

HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka - Next door to four houses flattened by the tsunami, three rooms of Poorima Jayaratne's home still stood intact. She had a ready explanation for that anomaly, and her entire family's survival: she was a Buddhist, and her neighbors were not.

"Most of the people who lost relatives were Muslim," said Ms. Jayaratne, 30, adding for good measure that two Christians were also missing. As proof, she pointed to the poster of Lord Buddha that still clung to the standing portion of her house.

The earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 150,000 people reached from Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim majority nation, to India, the world's largest Hindu one. It hit Thailand's Buddhist majority and Muslim minority, and this tiny island country, which is mostly Buddhist but has sizable Hindu, Muslim and Christian populations.

Across nations and religions there has been a search for explanations of not only why the tsunami came but why it killed some and not others - and a vibrant, sometimes virulent cottage industry is supplying them.

Some discern a lesson that humanity should unite, citing the bodies of people of all religions tumbling together into mass graves, while others see affirmations of the rightness of their own path. Amid sympathy, there is judgment; beneath public compassion, a private moralizing.
Full Article: nytimes.com