There's no point trying to fix him. A church that calls itself "destiny" obviously doesn't have much room for the concept of redemption.
Although his comments were insensitive and probably didn't provide one extra meal to newly homeless people - the sort of thing Jesus was into - they at least came from a semi-coherent metaphysical worldview.
Not so those who took the opportunity to look for human or possibly interplanetary causes for the quake.
The community that recently rebranded and now calls itself "truth seekers" rather than "conspiracy theorists " was not slow in putting on its collective thinking cap.
Many innovative thinkers noted the presence of the seismic testing ship Amazon Warrior, which does what it says on the label, near Kaikoura.
"If you were planning to do seismic blasting off the coast of a Country," noted the uncensored.co.nz website, "the best time to do it would be with the full moon wouldn't it? So that people only discuss that as the possible reason."
Maybe. Except that people didn't only discuss that as the possible reason.
Anything but, actually.
Others knew the aim was to get rid of those pesky inhabitants of Kaikoura who were standing between the evil masterminds and their thirst for oil.
"Kaikoura was clearly the target - now destroyed, and the basin is full of the precious oil for the foreign bankers and the only thing stopping them was the people of Kaikoura," reasoned Uncensored.
The main problem with this is that the world is not short of oil.
If anything it is dangerously flush with untapped reserves, reducing reasons to do something about cutting back consumption and dealing with global warming.
Oh, and Kaikoura hasn't been "destroyed".
And obviously if that was all the evidence for a conspiracy you could disregard it, but you'd be forgetting something: "We now know why John Kerry was making a short notice/unexplained trip to NZ right in the middle of a fierce US election."
Indeed we do - to reinforce defence ties and spread the word about climate change.
Either that or travelling to the South Pole for a secret meeting with his intergalactic overlords.
"Any country that is in the way of an oil pipeline, has valuable and strategic resources, or threatens to drop the $US dollar standard - is in danger of being chemtrailed, HAARP zapped and attacked with earthquakes and extreme weather events," according to thecontrail.com.
You have to admit, it has been nippy for November, but our assault on the US dollar doesn't seem to be having much impact.
Comments flew thick and fast on old-fashioned Green MP Steffan Browning's Facebook page, "Feels like it is too coincidental was it testing? Will the media look into this?"
Hello - what do you think I'm doing?
This sort of theorising fills a need for explanations hitherto provided by the sort of religion Brian Tamaki represents.
If bad things aren't divinely done or man-made, then the universe is an indifferent place where we have little control over our destiny.
And so it is, so best we get on with making the most of those lives and helping each other out when bad stuff happens.
