Do I think more or less of Mother Teresa after the publication of her diaries? Answer: I think the same (which is quite highly), though in a different category. I think less of those who use her experience of the absence of God as proof for the non-existence of God.The two have nothing to do with each other. I welcome her honesty, her eloquence, the passion of her soul-searching, and regard the disclosures as signs of pathos: how sad the she, who sought so hard, did not find, or receive.

If and as she proceeds to sainthood--on a track that does not concern us non-Roman Catholics--she can still be a model with whom many will identify. The absence of the experience of God or the experience of God is a classic theme with which many can identify. I once wrote a whole book, "A Cry of Absence," taking off from writing by perhaps the most noted theologian in 20th century Catholicism. He wanted us to concentrate on a "wintry sort of spirituality," and not just market summery, sunny, everything-solved spirituality. Such wintry sorts are all over the Bible and the pages of Christian history.

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This one is easy.

Why does a merciful God allow human-caused and natural disasters to happen.

Answer: I don't know.

I doubt whether there's ever been a natural disaster in which it's not been natural for thoughtful believers to ponder the question, and there are libraries full of answers, none of them informed, because humans do not know the mind of God.

Their answers cancel each other out, or are based on contrived reasoning of intellectual sleight-of-hand.

This does not mean that there's no value in discussing the theme: it helps us sort out other aspects of our experience of and witness to God.

Whatever else believers in the Bible find in the book, it all stops back with the observation that "he makes his rain to fall and his son to shine on the just and on the unjust."

Where biblical authors do address the issue, it can get pretty scary, as it does in Isaiah 45:7, Yahweh speaking: "I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe." And in the Book of Job we get three chapters of "who do you think you are?" questions when we want final solutions to our existential problems.

When good things happen, the believer is licensed to give thanks, but claiming to know why a hurricane cloud blew where it did or our team or army won--that's tricky, because then "when bad things happen" one cannot skip out and say that someone can know the "why."

Not having the answers in the ultimate sense has not deterred (us) believers from expressing belief. They, we, have instead to be more humble about what we claim--and do what we can to prevent man-made disasters.

Most scholars of religion have abandoned the word "cult" in the senses that it came to be used a couple of decades ago and on occasion still is. When the Unification Church, the Divine Light Mission, the Hare Krishna group, and scores more were attracting especially the offspring of well-off suburbanites, nonplussed parents and others were threatened, and needed a term to describe the movements that produced the threats. They reached back for "cults," and for some years a stream of books appeared with the word 'cult' on the cover.

Where draw the line between a cult and everybody else? It became clear that the word was almost always used pejoratively: "we" good people are secular or we belong to a standard-brand denomination, church, temple, mosque, while "you" bad people brainwash others and do strange and secret and scary things. Again, where was the borderline? To anti-Catholics, the formation of monks and nuns was cultic; to anti-Baptists, becoming "born again" meant entering a cult. Eventually it became clear that everyone called someone a cult, and the word served few clarifying purposes.

Earlier the word had been "sect," a term which began innocently but came to be used to dismiss others. 'Sect' was less condemnatory than "cult," but it still wasn't nice. To this day some headlines will refer to a mainline church as a sect, but wins no points for doing so.

When words get tired and nothing-but-misused or confusing, people who like to use words with conceptual priority and good manners shelve them. The usual and most nearly neutral term was "New Religious Movements," NRMs, which worked for those that were new. Of course, many claim ancient ancestry, but are simply "new to us." If we need an all-purpose categorizing term, the NRM concept will have to serve. "Denomination" works for those that become mainstream, but not all in them like to be called that, either. All categorizing and cataloguing terms have to be handled with care.

In his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James noted that in order to understand phenomena we must catalogue and label and categorize, but must also know that we miss something. Thus, if you could interview a crab, he said, the creature would protest being categorized as a crustacean: "I am not a crustacean. I'm a crab. I'm not even only a crab; I want to be taken for MYSELF, MYSELF." Give his or her SELF a chance to define herself, is the best advice.

Meanwhile, goodbye "cult." It's been non-nice to know you.

"Atheism is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." Oops! That first word was supposed to be "Religion."

Never mind. The two cancel each other out. But since "religion" came up as a topic, we can play with "atheism" as a substitution.

Most societies and polities throughout history were shaped or influenced by some form or other of religion: Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Native American, etc. They were all mixed bags, since everything human is some sort of mixed bag.

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