One of the single biggest points of failure in Western Christian mythology is the insistence on defining what is good or bad in terms of material outcomes.
For example: Tornadoes are bad because they shred people’s homes and businesses. This is wrong, of course. Tornadoes a gift from God that allows atmospheric pressures to equalize, preventing radical and massive shifts in climate conditions that are too extreme to imagine. The problem with people’s houses and businesses is that they build them in places tornadoes are common, and don’t bother to fortify them against harsh conditions — places like Moore, OK.
God didn’t send tornadoes to tear up their lives and property. God sent tornadoes to keep natural conditions in balance, as He defines it. Idiots who don’t listen to God have placed their lives and property in His path and dared Him to tear it all up. A sensible policy would be a building code in Moore that requires above ground structures have no less than foot-thick reinforced concrete walls with a design basically like a Quonset hut, and very few windows of bullet-proof glass. They would all be oriented so that the general storm tracks from SW to NE would strike the curved side of the building, not either end.
Granted, such destructive tornadoes come on average only once in five years, but that doesn’t excuse being complete idiots and ignoring the long record of weather patterns in this area.
Human existence on this earth has storms because we humans in the Fall surrendered our management of natural processes and found ourselves now hapless victims of unguided nature. This is not the norm; it wasn’t supposed to be like this. But now that we are fallen, there is absolutely no means to taming those natural processes. The next best hope we have is to face the uncertainties of a fallen existence with the help of divine revelation. That excludes the silliness of both, idolatrous worship hoping to placate nature deities, or deifying human reason as the means to discovering secret control mechanisms that actually don’t exist.
Praying for God to stop the tornadoes is asking for trouble you cannot imagine. Panic stricken prayers for God to spare your house in the storm may be answered, but don’t hold God accountable for your failure to listen to His Word.
The heart-led path of moral awareness would teach us not to build houses in places like Moore, OK, unless we were ready to invest in resistant structures. It teaches us to observe natural rhythms and how stuff happens so we are at peace with natural processes put in place by our Creator. The storms ran across Central Oklahoma long before people started building houses here.
Summary: “Play stupid games (with nature), win stupid prizes.”