It’s natural for human beings to try to understand natural catastrophies, but I’d argue that it should be equally natural for us to decide that such understanding shouldn’t try to cover the moral dimensions of these disasters. If we venture into the world of moral reasoning we are at risk of turning into monsters:

Martin Marty, professor emeritus of religious history at the University of Chicago, has written his 55th book, “When Faiths Collide,” which he says should land in bookstores this week.
He’s been an ordained Lutheran minister since 1952.
“It’s only natural to repose yourself in the will of God,” he says. “If you’re a believer, then you must believe that God, somehow, is a presence in all of this. But God didn’t tell anybody that you go through life without disasters.”
Still, talk of religion’s role in the disaster irks Marty. Following the devastation in Lisbon in 1755, priests roamed the streets, hanging those they believed had incurred God’s wrath. That event “shook the modern world,” he notes, changing people’s idea of a benevolent, all-caring God.

Yet some on the American political right are not shying away from moral judgings in the wake of the recent tsunamis. Bill Koenig, a self-described Christian fundamentalist, sees them as God’s revenge against anyone who harasses Christians:

On his Web site Watch.org, Bill Koenig writes: “The Biblical proportions of this disaster become clearly apparent upon reports of miraculous Christian survival. Christian persecution in these countries is some of the worst in the world.” Eight of the 12 countries hit — Malaysia, Burma, Bangladesh, Somalia, Maldives, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia, he says — “are among the top 50 nations who persecute Christians.”
Koenig, who lives in Alexandria, Va., and started the site in 1996, sees the South Asian disaster as an example of Christian exceptionalism. “What happened, and we see this happen over and over again, was that Christians, supernaturally, have been able to escape from harm’s way,” the self-described Christian fundamentalist says. ” ‘For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be,’ ” he says, quoting from Matthew 24:21.

Where do you think he would have been in 1755? Probably on the streets of Lisbon with his own little bit of rope.

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (which is wingnutty though it might not sound so from the name), has a slightly softer take on the moral meaning of the deaths in the tsunamis:

The fact of the matter is that what — we can’t figure out exactly, as mortal human beings, what is exactly at work. Job certainly didn`t understand it in the New [sic] Testament. Talk about Murphy’s Law. Everything that could have gone wrong for that guy went wrong.
But what did it do to his faith? He kept his faith in God. There are strange things that happen. But we do know one thing: that Catholicism in particular is a theology of suffering, as Cardinal [John] O’Connor once said. Cardinal O’Connor once stunned the Jewish community by saying that the great gift of Judaism was the Holocaust. He didn’t mean that to insult Jews.
What he was saying was this: There is no greater suffering than what Christ did. He died on the cross, but that’s a source of optimism. That`s a source of redemption. So, I think we have to look at this in a positive sense. In one strange sense, then, what’s happening to these poor Asian people is their gift to the world. It makes us think about our mortality and about salvation and about redemption. That’s what we should be thinking about.

It sounds like telling a bereaved relative that someone’s death was meaningful because those still living can change their diet or lifestyle and not end up dead in the same way. Or that it was meaningful because others can now ponder over the fact that they themselves are still alive.
No, the only moral answer to such musings is to say, loudly and clearly, that to seek some moral meaning in the mass deaths of so many of our fellow human beings is in itself immoral.