Natural Disasters and God

With all the recent focus on natural disasters and the terrible toll in human lives. I have an interesting question on my mind. That is how the do the devout masses reconcile their faith and belief in an interventionist deity with the toll in human lives and suffering?

Now in one sense this is an uninteresting question that can be simply dismissed with at few pithy words. Something along the lines of: "God works in mysterious ways". "His ways are not our ways". "We cannot know the mind or the plans of God". Et cetera, et cetera blah blah blah. But I think that these attempts at dismissing the question raise considerable problems of their own. And that there are yet other, more interesting insights that can be gained by addressing this idea.

(Also, I will use God/Deity in the following to refer to all interventionist deities. Not just the Judeo-Christian God.)

The first thing I want to look into is whether or not god is causing or allowing natural disasters to occur. On the one hand God may be actually causing natural disasters to happen. If this is the case then why? It could be that God is simply using natural disasters to kill people. Why would God do that? Because of some offence given? Then why kill indiscriminately? There are many other far more precise and targeted ways of killing people you don't like. Especially when you're omnipotent. If god is killing in such an indiscriminate fashion then surely God is not benevolent. One of the key properties of such deities.
Maybe God is not actually causing the natural disasters but simply allowing them to occur and not intervening. But then we have the same problem as above. If God is supposed to care. Why allow people of all kinds to die it such large numbers. If God can intervene and save us why does he not?
Perhaps he does not intervene because to do so would have consequences that could prove to be worse? No. That just doesn't make sense if God is omnipotent.
What if God is not causing the disasters but simply unable to prevent them from occurring. If this is the case then God is not omnipotent. Thus loosing another one of those key properties it is said to have.

So in essence. Either your God is a mean evil fucker who enjoys the inflicted suffering of his creations, or refuses to prevent it. Or it is a weak, impotent nothing that is unable to prevent the suffering.

Now I don't buy any of the rationalisations that attempt to resolve these problems while still maintaining an omnipotent and/or benevolent God. To wave the question away by saying that the mind of god it not to be known by us (or some equivalent). Is ridiculous and dishonest. These explanations are given by people who make it their lives work to understand and interpret the mind of God. Not only that but they have been doing it for a long, long time. Do they mean to tell us that a few thousand years (in some cases) of this pursuit has yielded nothing of any value? How can they say that God is this, that and the other and wants x, y and z from us. Then turn around and say we cannot understand what God wants or how God thinks?
To my mind, this kind of blatant dishonesty and upfront nonsense is an insult to any intelligent, thinking person.

Another thought I have is that any God that demands so much in the way of worship and obedience. And at the same time casually decides to exterminate hundreds of thousands of people in a single random stroke. Some of whom were no doubt devout followers. Is an irrational lunatic not deserving of a even the smallest amount of my energy or time.    

There is no God. Natural disasters and the devastation they bring are the result of physical forces naturally operating on and within our earth. Is it really so hard to believe that the universe in which we live is completely unconcerned about our existence. All the evidence points to this conclusion. I am perfectly happy with the reality of our situation. We are insignificant. Basically nothing in an unimaginably large expanse of nothing. It isn't necessary to derive meaning or purpose by the invention of a supernatural parental figure.