We Need a Meter to Gauge the Richter Scale of Sin : Earthquake: Some events recall teachings that we bring bad fortune on ourselves. We start to wonder what we did to deserve it.

The connection between misfortune and sin is a tenuous one for most of us, most of the time. But it has been indelibly impressed upon the psyches of most people that the consequence of wrongdoing is punishment--the worst kind of misfortune, since we bring it on ourselves. We know this is true because our parents laid it down thus, and they generally enforced it.

We go to great lengths to forget or overcome such early training, but it is to little avail, as we discover during a real crisis like the recent Bay Area earthquake. For those traumatized by the event, and for those like myself who actually suffered little from it, there is the gnawing sense that we are not altogether free from some causative connection to the quake.

Prophet-psychologists like the Rev. Billy Graham are very aware of this human tendency to repression, this assumption of guilt when under stress. In Santa Cruz County, after the quake, Graham said, “God didn’t bring on this earthquake.” But he went on to make the old connection between what you do and what happens to you. If there were no sin in the world, he said, there would be no earthquakes and no suffering.

The residents of Watsonville, where he spoke, were not reassured. Some publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the reverend’s remarks. But Billy Graham probably didn’t mean that the people of Watsonville were any more sinful than people elsewhere, even if that seems to be an implication of the earthquake-sin connection. He might simply have meant that earthquakes are, generally speaking, the wages of sin.

This is logical enough, if imprecise. But that is just the problem with this connection--its imprecision. In the age of atomic clocks and supercomputers, most of us rightly want to know just exactly what we did, individually or collectively, that resulted in a 7.1 earthquake with an epicenter in the Santa Cruz mountains northwest of Watsonville.

For answers we should not look to Billy Graham, who is astute enough in a general way about morals, but who always gives a certain emotionalism to the subjects of sin and redemption. Nor should we ask much of Oral Roberts, for another, whose financial accounts and borderline solvency make him a risky adviser in matters where figures are concerned. As for some other high-profile prophets, perhaps the less said the better.

No, what we need is a true scientist of sin, someone with a fine sense of the apocalyptic, but also one with his or her eye on the moral Richter scale, as it were. Someone to give us a clue as to the safe limits of sinfulness, at least in terms of earthquakes.

How about insider trading, or other forms of financial chicanery that make Wall Street seem so dubious lately, from the perspective of Watsonville. Apparently it doesn’t even rate an earthquake, for Manhattan hasn’t had one for a long time.

Or pride? That was a major offense by medieval standards, yet the lords of of Wall Street sit in their towers, apparently secure from natural disasters, while the people of Watsonville, many of them still living in tents, are about to lose the single church steeple that gives dignity to their humble skyline.

Are the fleshpots of Monterey Bay the scenes of some particularly grievous sins, that their residents should be linked in common disaster with Oaklanders or San Franciscans, whose peccadilloes are more famous? And should Los Angeles and Hollywood, which, as former President Reagan said last week, could use some moral revitalization, be excluded? Billy Graham has left us no clues, only the stern admonition to go and sin no more.