A Tsunami in Samoa! It MUST be the end of the world!

September 30, 10:58 AMIndependent ExaminerBrian Trent

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Tsunamis have scientific explanations...

 With the greatest sadistic glee this side of Jonestown, messages are popping up in emails and chatrooms about an a tsunami in Samoa which has killed at least 1,100 people (numbers are expected to rise.) 

The civilized world is in rescue mode, help is pouring in, and a disaster area has been declared. Meanwhile, some people are screaming about sea gods coming to punish us all.

These are the same ignorant mob-maniacs who cried “Apocalypse” at the Indonesian volcano in 2007, that year’s drought in the Midwest, at last year's Chinese earthquake, and at every other natural disaster which occurs on Earth. Why? Because there are hurricanes, and earthquakes, and wars! Oh my! Surely these things have never happened before in human history!

This is one of those days when I look closely at my wall calendar and wonder if it really is 2009.

While we’re watching the news and wishing the best for Italy, may I suggest that we rewind the clock 1,928 years. It’s August of 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupts and buries the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under a sea of hot ash. People are swallowed whole by the rushing lava or sealed alive in caves to suffocate on poisonous fumes. Had there been mass media, it would be dominating every toga-clad news cycle.

Predictably, many people alive at that time blamed the calamity on Zeus. “Pompeii must have been wicked!” the doomsayers chanted. “Zeus has punished them!” Since geological science hadn’t been born yet, assigning divine character to natural catastrophe was the best explanation going… despite the insult it poses for the innocent victims of Vesuvius. Many a priest was certain to benefit from shouting this kind of hysteria – “Obey the gods, or your city too will be punished with fire and brimstone!”

But of course, volcanoes erupt. Earthquakes happen. And so do tsunamis, hurricanes, and volcanoes. Geological and meteorological violence are part of our planet’s character… the creaks and moods of a living world. Now that we realize that it isn’t the year 79, we can perhaps face the facts.

Right now a tsunami has has hit Italy. Scientifically, we know why tsunamis happen. But the event is proving once again that civilization’s fundamentalist plague is alive and festering… in fact, give it 24 hours here on Examiner and watch the comments. Rabid, these people point a gleeful finger to televised images of a natural event and claim it’s an advance shot of the Apocalypse.

I think it’s a tad shameful that there are those who two thousand years after Pompeii still cling to an outdated view of the cosmos. They keep predicting the end of things, they're constantly wrong, but they keep hopin'!

Volcanoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes are just a part of life on this world, as are other and more deadly things.  There is a ticking time-bomb in Yellowstone National Park – a supervolcano swelling the ground and preparing to explode. It does this every 600,000 years. These kinds of eruptions alter global climates, and the last time one erupted it nearly exterminated the human race – bottlenecking our population. This is serious business and will require serious, scientific, and rational responses.

Instead, I foresee the end-of-worlders screaming triumphantly about the end of the world. Just like they do now.

But guess what?

The world will never end.

Perhaps when the sun goes nova, but that’s a long, long time off and if human civilization is somehow still around then, we’ll have likely achieved a technological level that can address even that.

It is the power of human reason that is the greatest power in the universe. We have measured the distances of stars, figured out the size of the world using sticks and shadows, split the atom, built dams, brought irrigated life to deserts, launched space probes, made medicine, and fought back, time and time again, against the brutal predations of nature.

It is irrationality and the mental condition behind Apocalyptophiles that has continually tried holding us back, exploiting tragedy, and gleefully singing songs of destruction like Nero while Rome burned.

Back during the Indonesian tsunami disaster, the generosity of our fellow humans – Christians, atheists, Jews, Wiccans, Hindus, and all the staggering pluralistic diversity we enjoy in America –helped out for those in need. The outpouring of that aid was tremendously moving: roughly three in 10 Americans gave money/supplies. It’s a tribute to humanistic principles, and a good sign of things to come… because tragedies will happen again. There are rocks floating in space that will eventually impact Earth. There are those large volcanoes even now cooking up magmatic violence.

The human race has come very far, but it’s really time we move past the screeching idiocy of the end-of-worlders. Every time a tragedy happens we hear them, we see the glittering-eyed zealotry of Final Judgment advocates and how it becomes a chorus of hate, intolerance, and ignorance. During the Bubonic Plague in Europe, church leaders blamed it on the Jews.

On Jupiter there’s a hurricane that’s been raging for three hundred years and is roughly triple the size of Earth. Rest assured that if there were human colonies on the king of planets, Al Qaeda and Falwellian representatives would be chalking up its devastation to their respective heavens.

Two thousand years ago, a Greek scientist said “People think epilepsy is divine because they don’t understand it. But I propose that someday we will know what causes epilepsy, and in that moment it will cease being divine. So it is with everything in the universe.”

It’s two thousand years later, my friends. Maybe we can finally see the wisdom in that, and not to the chanters of Pompeii.