Belief in God and praying when natural disasters happen

[CeruleanBelt]

I'll preface this by saying I'm an atheist but id love to have a reasonable, polite discussion with some believers of any religion - as an example of what i want to talk about - with all the devastating flooding in the USA, loads of comments across social media are offering prayers.

Why would a good god who will respond to prayers in the wake of such devastation not have stopped the floods in the first place? What useful help do people (collectively) feel will be offered by god?

Or is it more about giving comfort to other religious people who are suffering to let them know that people are thinking about them in a way that matters to them?

To me it seems incongruous to offer prayers as a response to something that god should have had the power to stop. What am i missing here? (Apart from belief in god?)

Personally I don’t think natural disasters occur as a result of being in an imperfect world at all. That’s a strange thing for a Christian to think in my view!
They are a natural phenomenon because of how our amazing natural world works.
Eg hurricanes. We need winds and weather. Without them the sun’s heat would not be distributed around world (it would be boiling and uninhabited at the equator and icy elsewhere), we would have no water cycle and therefore no crops.
Everything in the natural world is intertwined, it works perfectly, or at least it would if humans hadn’t mucked it up with climate change and inequality.
God doesn’t interfere - the Bible tells us he’s tried in the past but we muck it up again (a consequence of having free will and making wrong decisions). His knows we make wrong decisions (he’s been human himself- Jesus), he understands us and loves us even when we get it wrong. Like a father he guides us (see the teachings of Jesus) but he leaves it to us to find our own path. Whether that path leads to him or not is our choice. He gave us free will so we can choose what we do in life and in death.

I have actually, big CS Lewis fan, Rowan Williams, even read the bible, I have tried to believe, so not ignorant, I just look around me and actually see. It would be comforting to have this particular delusion.. but I can no longer manage it.

You know nothing about me.. nothing!

A Jewish perspective is that G-d created the planet but humans are guardians and are meant to improve on it.
We also have agency and free will...some disasters are man made (climate change) or become more disastrous because of where humans choose to live.

Also, we don't know the ultimate plan and things that seem bad, may with an overview such as G-d has, be for the ultimate good in ways that seem impossible to us.

Jewish people do pray for people usually by reciting psalms, or specific prayers for healing, but more emphasis is put on practical help - sending search and rescue teams, cooking meals or donating goods and money, developing science and technologies to ameliorate the impacts etc.

But sometimes, awful things happen, people have accidents (man-made) etc etc. Our job is not to know why, but to do what we can to make the situation better.

So the suffering is good for us?

This is another offensive idea that I just don't buy. And I don't understand why anyone would want to believe that either - although of course it's a great tactic for an organisation that wants to control people, hoard all the wealth in a society and exploit people, which was pretty much what the church and the nobility tended to do in the good old days. The witch hunts were often like that too - all about seizures and forfeitures of lands and wealth. Exploiting people is easiest when you get them to go along with it.