[extropy-chat] Putting the tsunami into context

[Damien Broderick]

So far I haven't seen any theological explanations of the deaths from the 
Christmas tsunami. No Imam, to my limited knowledge, has decided that this 
means Allah is royally pissed off with terrorists. I'm reminded, 
inevitably, of events 250 years ago (when I was just a lad), and Europe had 
a brief crisis of belief when the earthquake of Lisbon, on All Saints' Day, 
1755, destroyed thirty thousand people in six minutes. (I see that latest 
data for the current horror is `Deaths Pass 140,000'.) Voltaire wrote:

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Les Délices, November 24, 1755

This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it 
difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful 
disasters in the best of all possible worlds-- where a hundred thousand 
ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying 
undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath débris from which it was 
impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, 
and the fortunes of a hundred merchants -- Swiss, like yourself -- 
swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is! 
What will the preachers say -- especially if the Palace of the Inquisition 
is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the 
Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to 
teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are 
burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike.

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Damien Broderick