Is the lord here just a dick? Why would he do that?
Compare to the older stories of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, made mankind less dependent upon the gods, and was thus consigned to eternal torture.
Tyrants hate collectivism more than anything.
Accidental or not the implications long term are of a cycle of overthrow and self fulfilling prophecy.
— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”Is this how you see your god?
God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.
My take on this question is that regardless of "why" this is an objective historical phenomenon—look at the USA today, clearly the hearts of Trump supporters (and the Resistance) have been hardened. Any account of God has to take the observed world as a datum, and the data say that before destruction, the leaders of a nation are stricken with hardness of heart.
Similarly, God suffers monsoons to blow and so forth and so on. That's the data. Today we are again we see that God destroys Towers of Babel. So it goes.
In your example, if that happened to you (monsoon knocked down trees, your houses and a couple of your children) - then you would for sure have an emotional reaction, and those emotional reactions would absolutely not see monsoons as "pressure differentials with no choice". (Well unless you block all your emotions, which many people do of course.).
You would need to figure out an emotional reaction to that situation. That might be anger/grief unto the monsoon (as an extension of god), or if you processed it and grew spiritually from it, you might see it as god (through monsoons) trying to teach you something, and then everything there in between. However, you would still not in any of those cases see monsoon as pressure differentials. At the very least your emotional intelligence wouldn't. (Then there is a question of whether you listen to it or try to block everything and live like a robot, which some people opt to do, but that only works for a while.)
But until life makes you actually interact with those situations, then it's easy to ignore the emotional reality and see the world (or any part of it like a monsoon) as dead mechanical force with no consciousness.
IME the Christian god serves more as a means to an end for controlling and/or dilluted rulers. Being an abusive, often absent, manipulative, and bigoted father that god is unlikely to help anyone emotionally.
Regardless of "belief" in Christinity, it is clear to me at least that any such simplistic interpretation as "god was just a dick", is at the very least, missing the point of the stories. There is a much more deep and logical meaning in many of those stories, which becomes very obvious when you get presented to it, and that's before you even start tapping into the spiritual/existential/metaphysical content of the stories. It makes much more sense even as simple life wisdom.
To present an overly simplified answer, I will say that typically (and this is a typical occurrence in the stories, where god does something painful or creates an obstruction), when something like that happens, the phrase "god did it", does not refer so much to the fact that christinaity tries to make up this god character and give him some lines to make him look a certain way, in order to tell some message.
Instead, "god did it this way" refers to god being everything, the universe, including the human societies: god is not something above human world as a guy in the sky (in fact bible never presents that image, it's more something from monty python), god is the personfification of the world and everything that happens in it.
And what happens in it is that sometimes people feel pain, do stupid things, sometimes tragical (appearing so) events happen. That's just the fact of life. Christianity does not triumphantly claim that "god did it" as any form of justification, it simply describes that since those thing do obviously happen, that means the universe, the world, the society - the god (all those things combined) make those things happen. And then the rest of the story is presented in such a way as to understand how humans can act in relationship to those underelying realities. How they can respond to and understand what is happening in the world.
"I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me."
From this statement it is very clear to me who God is and that is not the Universe, society nor the father of time.
I disagree that this is how the Bible presents God, but I wholeheartedly agree that interpreting some stories in the Bible while treating God as you have describes has value in the lessons that they teach.