Several days after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, the BBC (Africa Service) sounded out different people on the kind of help they thought was appropriate. Western media organisations (including the BBC) are often accused of seeking out stories and expressions of opinions that portray Africa in a negative light.

More likely, an inferiority complex makes a lot of Africans touchy in the face of criticism. Yet, as if deaf to the accusations, the BBC sought out Pastor Martin Sempa, who runs a born again Christian outfit at Makerere University. How did the pastor think the Christian community in Uganda could help the Haitian people?

The problem with Pastor Sempa, of course, is that he thinks like Pastor Martin Sempa.

The tragedy is that he does not even contemplate the possibility that he may be very shallow. Shooting from the mouth as always, Sempa promptly castigated the Haitians for their voodoo and witchcraft, implying that he believed the earthquake was a divine punishment they deserved.

As for any help, Sempa dismissed the idea out of hand, noting that his outfit collected only Shs300,000 (about $160) every Sunday, so there was nothing to give to the Haitians, except prayers.

Presumably, he meant prayers for Haitians to see things Sempa's way; because it would be hypocritical to pray that other people help Haiti.

You could not consider yourself a fairly normal person without being appalled. Uganda has a raft of spiritual leaders whose voices would reflect the compassion so many Africans felt for the hapless Haitians.

There were also the ordinary people who, with much less than Sempa's Shs300,000 per week operation, would have wanted to know how they could help. But the BBC left out all these people and broadcast one of those voices through which the Christian experience is degenerating into a monstrosity.

The likes of Pastor Sempa or the American radical, Pat Robertson, have probably not paused to reflect that the huge rocky plates that are creeping and grating and colliding in the belly of the earth have been going about their ways - in total indifference to the fate of humans - for billions of years. So indeed is the rest of the incredibly vast universe.

We have no evidence of God except as part of human thought. If the suffering of humans can be given a divine interpretation, the indifference of the universe can also be said to reflect God's desire.

And the scale of the universe is so much greater than man's spiritual quest and his little moral operations. Man dare not beyond the tiny perimeter where exploration will take his inquisitive heart.

The fury, the cold, the heat and the distances out there will never be for his encounter. And when man becomes extinct - as he surely will when his luck runs out - the universe will go about its ways, in total indifference to the record left by his brief existence.

The geological event of the Haiti earthquake is in the context of that greater universe. The suffering of the victims is in the context of the human experience.

If we link the geological event to a moral (human) cause - namely, the "wickedness" of the Haitians - then we have surrendered to an arbitrary and indiscriminate justice instead of trying to understand how the greater universe works.

In the process, we achieve the opposite of what we want; we block the flow of empathy with (and the extension of kindness to) our fellow humans.

The racial and ideological fascists who meted out so much pain and death in the 20th century also thought they were divinely inspired.

Pastor Sempa and his ilk may not have the bombs to exterminate those whose spiritual experiences and moral preferences are different, but the fantasy that there is a God out there doing this grim work for them has the colour of that fascism.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator and artist