Question

With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
In light of the current situation, may the Merciful One protect us and save us, there are a number of preachers interpreting the situation both on the “prophetic” plane (what it signals about what is to come) and on the moral plane—what areas we ought to strengthen ourselves in.
It seems to me that there are claims that in the past too, mutatis mutandis, people tended to interpret disasters in the world as coming because of the gods, but they did not necessarily draw from that a moral lesson or a guide for conduct. For example, they explained that the gods themselves were quarreling because of internal intrigues in their own kingdom, and that caused an indirect disaster here in creation…
In any case,
Regarding the preachers on the prophetic plane—I think this significantly strengthens the physico-theological and cosmological proof, because it shows that the human tendency is to interpret causes as stemming from a personal agent. Perhaps this is even a kind of Occam’s razor applied to the human being himself, who is a personal “subject,” and the tendency to ground things in what is familiar will naturally be relative to himself.
And as for the preachers who interpret things on the normative-value plane—it is seemingly unclear how they even dare derive norms from facts. Unless, as above, that is part of the same tendency.
Admittedly, one could say that this whole discussion suffers from tautology—for of course the religious preacher is a religious preacher, and this is his sacred mode of operation, and he drew his conclusions on the basis of prior assumptions not directly connected to what I wrote here. But I still have some deep feeling that there is nevertheless some revelation here about the way human beings think (though this is difficult in light of those who interpreted things in terms of gods without morality).