Divine Retribution is the explanation offered by Plato (Crit. 121c) for the destruction of Atlantis in a manner which for us is reminiscent of the biblical tale of Noah and many other flood stories. Some modern writers such as Maxine Asher have promoted this concept of godly reprisal. However, there is one important element missing from Plato’s narrative, namely, the salvation of a chosen few. The idea that the entire story of Atlantis was concocted by Plato as some form of parable is incompatible with the elimination of both (bad) Atlanteans AND (good) Athenians (Tim.25d). Consequently, if Plato was not relating some form of invented morality tale, we are entitled to fall back on the probability that he was transmitting a story with a core of historical truth.
The idea of a god on a punishment spree arose more recently when both Christian and Muslim survivors attributed the tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean on December 2004 to divine retribution for the wickedness of man. This modern knee-jerk reaction may explain the inclusion of similar sentiments in so many ancient flood stories.
William Lauritzen is a leading advocate of Atlantis having been located on the Sunda Shelf where Indonesia is located today. He provides a more rational explanation for the tsunami tragedy in a new eBook(a) where he explains that the unstable geology of the area which caused the recent tragedy also destroyed Atlantis.
The following year the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in new Orleans was once again credited to the whims of a bad-tempered divinity.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti produced a further stream of ‘divine retribution’ claims, among which were those from American evangelist Pat Robertson, who attributed the cause to the ‘satanic’ voodoo beliefs of many Haitians and somewhat surprisingly from the well-known movie actor Danny Glover who claimed that the earthquake was god’s response to the failure of the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen!!!
All these nonsensical claims demonstrate that god has either an appalling sense of justice, executing good and bad with equal vigour or that he/she/it does not exist at all. Tectonic fault lines and their attendant hazards exist irrespective of the moral behaviour of people living in their vicinity. Similarly, hurricanes sweep into the Caribbean and the southern United States every year bringing death and destruction, not because the people in the area are inherently evil, but because particular meteorological conditions exist in the region that cyclically generate hurricanes.
It is fairly clear then that a fault line existed in the vicinity of Atlantis, a fact which should help to identify or at least eliminate some suggested locations. Coincidentally, a BBC documentary How the Earth Made Us, aired today, highlighted the fact that many of the most important ancient cities were sited near fault lines in order to exploit the mineral resources that are frequently to be found associated with them.
(a) www.earth360.com.
(b) http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html
