December 17, 2004

God's been busy in Kentucky, allegedly. They say The LORD works in mysterious ways. In Louisville that must be true. In my first link YHWH gained an advocate when a "disgruntled" fellow student opened fire on her public high school's prayer circle. Another instance involves a house fire two kids had to be rescued from.

In the second link, please note the article's next-to-the-last sentence, where God is credited when a kid had to be driven to school so his mother could witness and report a house fire, as opposed to, say, not letting the fire happen in the first place. I wonder if the local mainstream media -- these cited are Louisville's daily newspaper and its CBS-affiliated TV station -- realize the implications of this tradition of "reportage". (These two recent stories are just examples of something they've been doing a lot here.)

posted by Big Davey 20 years ago
  • Really. Somebody needs to consider the meaning of "omniscience". I, for one, look forward to the news articles blaming "that bastard, God" for the recent rash of hurricanes, terrorist attacks, puppy slayings, and, well, anything bad.
  • Still, his son seems nice
  • i like that there are kids out there who feel god is the sort of being that will shoot them, just to prove to them that they can take a bullet. that's the sort of higher power that you have to respect. love the lord your god, or He will pop a cap in thine ass. because He thinks you're strong enough to deal with that. bitches.
  • Oh, y'know, it makes people feel good to think that they've been touched by an angel or something -- it reinforces their superstition that they're personally selected by The Big Guy to play some little role in his wondrous creation, and that he approves of them. But I wince when I read things like this now, simply because of how much prevalence these beliefs have in America these days, and how supremely creditable they're held to be by people who are making some crucial choices. The highest levels of American government are saturated with the mythology of a "personal" God, as are many people, and groups of people, who support the administration and its acts and policies. A person's thanking God for -- whatever -- shouldn't weigh any more than thanking lucky stars, or Vishnu, or the supreme deity Dumb Luck. It's a way of placing a random occurrence into a greater context. It shouldn't matter to anyone but the speaker. It's fucked up that the confluence of Politics and Religion here, now, has made me automatically suspect the character of most people I hear speaking about God -- Until I catch myself, I assume that their politics are "naturally" far to the right. Sometimes that assumption turns out to be correct; sometimes (at least in this city) they're as left as I am; but more times it turns out that they're just parroting what they've been taught to say, and may in fact have no politics at all. The articles linked in the OP are interesting because they mention teh God thing almost in passing. Similar feel-good lines appear in lots of articles; it always sounds humble and inspired. It bugs me that when I read things like this my evil twin mutters "Oh yeah? What other misconceptions you got goin' on?"
  • Maybe saying "god's will" makes some folks feel better because "pure chance" is too terrifying a concept for them. frogs, funny you should say that. I got an email from my dad recently in which he describes the born-again christians' god as a cross between Vlad the Impaler and Santa Claus.
  • ...equivalent of six blind men all describing an elephant based upon the part they happend to grab ahold of.
  • shouldn't that be "from which two kids had to be recued?"