When to blame God

never.

Now let me explain.

There are doctrinal reasons and pragmatic reasons not to blame God.

Ill start with the pragmatic reasons.
Blaming people-- anyone, (including yourself and God) is a self defeating behavior.
If there is something about your life that you don't like, placing blame will make it worse. It makes it worse for at least three reasons:

1. Once you can attach your unpleasant circumstances to someone else, it fuels emotions of hatred towards them. Fueling hatred will make you more unhappy. So unless your goal is to be more unhappy, its pretty ineffective to do something that will cause you to feel hate and be more miserable.

2. It directs your attention to the problem, which distracts your mind from the solution. If there is something in your life that you dont like, focusing on that thing in non-productive ways will enlarge your experience of it. If being happy is your goal, try to think about things that bring you happiness. Try to think of ways to make your life more happy. Engage in activities that make you happier.

3. It feeds the mindset of an external locus of control. When you blame someone it deepens your beliefs that circumstances outside of your life determine your existence. If you have that belief system, you are less likely to engage in activities which may change your circumstances and improve your life. Whether or not it is true, you must strive to have an internal locus of control. You must strive to believe that you are the one who determines your existence with the agency that God gave you. To blame someone is to give that power away and effectually "nuder" your potential.


Doctrinal Reasons

1. God doesnt take away peoples agency (freedom to choose)

You were fired because your boss exercised their free agency to fire you. Don't wrongfully assume that God took away the free agency of your boss and took over their body and forced them to fire you. Don't blame God for something He didnt and never would do. So when your boss fires you, dont say "when God closes a door, he opens a window"-- because God didnt close that door-- your boss did. And if someone hires you somewhere, that is not God taking over their bodies to force them to hire you! So don't attribute your next job to God either. Its not God. God doesnt take over peoples body and remove their agency to make things good or bad for you! I think that 99.9999% of things that are attributed to God are just people exercising agency in a free environment.

HOWEVER! I do believe that God, or angels or the Holy Spirit or whatever, has the capacity to communicate with people and give them guidance and direction. I'm a spiritual person-- of course I believe that is possible! I'm not going to close my mind off to that. So, you can thank God when that happens, but be sure its actually from God first because I think people "get direction from God" that is actually their own brains. Although I am a spiritual person, I am also a VERY skeptical person, and I personally think that peoples own thoughts are often attributed to Gods divine direction. Then if it goes south, they blame God or something or take some weird complicated twist on it.

2. God is effectively "Gone away" for a time (in this parable God "went away" for a while.
https://www.lds.org/scriptures/nt/matt/21.33-46
While he was gone, he let people mess up everything.
I don't know what this means that he "went away". I just know that for some reason, he kind of fades out of the picture for a while and then comes back later to set things right.
I don't know how often God does this, or why He does this, or where He goes, or if He actually goes somewhere, but for whatever reason, in this parable-- he symbolically is gone away. Some people feels like He does this a lot and for a long time. I just don't know the answer to that. Whatever he is doing, it must be important. I can blame Him for "leaving", but I'm sure He has a better idea of what he has to do than I do. Blaming him for the bad stuff that happens is not productive and not His fault.


3. God does not intervene because somehow it would mess things up.
https://www.lds.org/scriptures/nt/matt/13.24-30%2C36-43?lang=eng#23
(He doesn't pull out the tares because it would damage the wheat).

I dont know how exactly God's interference would mess things up, but somehow it does according to this parable. I have thought about this a lot and tried to understand it. This is what I have come up with so far.
Agency is the freedom to act and to be acted upon. True moral agency requires some ability to have predictable consequences in an environment with predictable rules (the rules of nature/physics). If someone chooses to do something mean or bad and God suddenly defies the laws of nature/physics and steps in to hit them with a lightning bold or something... he has violated the laws upon which true moral agency can exist. He would have essentially robbed people of agency. Which is something that he doesn't do. Based on that, God really can't do a whole lot to make your life worse or better without sacrificing your agency... which he wont do. But I think that He can and will intervene to direct people in good ways to seek for that direction in their lives. That is how I think God intervenes. Not by taking away agency or breaking the laws of nature, but by speaking peace and love to peoples hearts and minds and directing them towards good.

There are some circumstances where people were doing so many mean/bad things that they were effectually destroying other peoples agency to even be able to choose good, and mayeb in those circumstances, if there is no coming back from it, maybe he will intervene directly.

I dont have all of the answers, NOT EVEN CLOSE. But based on these scriptures and my personal experiences, this is what makes the most sense to me today. It may change tomorrow.