You've probably met people who rendered their own lives miserable and poor through selfishness and distrust. More, probably, than who rendered their own lives miserable and poor through getting ripped off when being too trusting. In my own experience they are abundant.

My closest friend, (I set him up with his wife), lost his job in the financial crisis and then had his life ruined by a severe illness that’s still crippled him. He lost everything. My wife is a nurse, one of her friends at work lost her sister to cancer, her husband was killed in an accident and now she has terminal cancer. She has a young daughter.

How often on the news do we see third world countries devastated by natural disasters like tsunami, volcanoes, storms and floods. I remember the famines in Africa.

I particularly remember the aids epidemic and the way conservative Christian politicians in the US particularly said it was gods justice. Government spokesmen made jokes about it in news conferences. They thought it was funny.

I was otherwise a Thatcher/Reagan conservative, but I’m not forgetting that, ever. It’s what made me realise no political faction has a monopoly on the truth or morality.

I'm not sure if you think I'm saying that selfishness causes cancer or volcanoes? That's obviously nonsense. And all political factions are pretty selfish; that's what makes them factions. (Though some are so selfish they remain insignificant because they can't join coalitions and keep splintering after growing to some small maximum size.) So I don't think any of this is relevant to the question.

The question is whether, as the quote claims, the poor generally experience better life outcomes than the rich due to divine intervention. I would claim that the actual evidence is overwhelmingly that this is utter nonsense.

Furthermore the number of bible believers that actually impoverish themselves in order to avoid divine punishment is extremely tiny, so it seems to me that they don't believe this either.