There is no distinction, which is what makes this doctrine of "magical cause and effect" unspeakably evil in application.
If we were to say that God is capricious and cruel, so as to sometimes cause cancer in a child for no reason (or because He "wants the child with Him in heaven")... well, that's just our tough luck to live under the jurisdiction of such a being. But in the end it's not much different from saying we live in a godless universe of cause and effect that sometimes has capricious and cruel results beyond our power to prevent. It's just our tough luck that way too.
Or we can say that we live in a God-created universe that's randomly contaminated with floating bits of original sin or whatever. God has no desire for these bad things to happen and does not make them happen, but for whatever reason has decided not to intervene to prevent them, so when one of them comes along and instills a tumor in an innocent child -- again, tough luck for us, but we can only shrug, do our best to avoid or fix the bad things, and make the best of what life brings us.
But when we say that the innocent child's cancer is the deliberate magical cause and effect result of someone else's misdeed -- not an actual cause and effect, such as if someone had poisoned the child with a carcinogen, but divinely ordered magical cause and effect to punish the wickedness of some person who may or may not even be associated with the child, by the child dying of cancer -- then we've entered a moral wasteland.
In the moral wasteland, every misfortune is someone else's fault, even if the one at fault has no way to know it and might not have had any ill intentions.
In the moral wasteland, any action no matter how overtly harmless -- blasphemy, unsanctioned sex, naughty thoughts -- can be said to cause horrible consequences to someone else. That justifies any measure to prevent those sins, as self-defense. No matter how harsh the measure or how arbitrary the designation of the sin.
In the moral wasteland, allowing gay marriage in California might cause drought or sickness in Utah, and so must be prevented at all costs.
In the moral wasteland, God is not so much cruel, as hapless. He doesn't want to give the child cancer, but somebody masturbated and now some warped system of magical justice ("Divine Law") says He has to.
In the moral wasteland, religious freedom cannot be permitted if it can be prevented. Every heretic, every apostate, every atheist is a bull in God's china shop who can bring down God's wrath on the good people for failing to punish them. (God will, however, cut the good people some slack if they temporarily lack the power to carry out a full-scale crusade, as long as they do their best as their abilities permit.)
If there were a Satan, there's little worse he could do than lead as many people as possible into that moral wasteland.
Respectfully,
Myriad
