According to the Media Matters blog, Beck said, "I'm not saying that Jesus is coming, I'm just saying things are changing. The world, I mean literally, the world is moving under your feet. I mean, could there be a bigger sign...." Later, he picked up on the theme, intoning he was "not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes," and he's "not not saying that, either."
Voltaire's "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster" protested against the cruelty of this kind of theology 250 years ago.
Pat Robertson made a similar statement blaming Haiti's recent earthquake on a putative pact with the devil made by Haitian revolutionaries more than 200 years ago:
via People for the American Way's Right-Wing Watch (which in turn credited Username4242's Kos Diary for bringing it to their attention).
Beck's and Robertson's theistic racism reminds me of both the Catholics and Protestants who blamed the "faithlessness" of the people of Lisbon (and North Africa, I imagine) for the devastation caused by the earthquake of 1755.
It was this cruel form of theology to which Voltaire addressed his "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster." which I find chillingly apropos today.
The poem begins:
UNHAPPY mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, "All’s well,"
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: "You do but illustrate
The Iron laws that chain the will of God"?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
"God is avenged: the wage of sin is death"?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
(translated by Joseph McCabe, Watts and Co., London, 1911, the full translation is available via WikiSource)