kevin Abel wrote:Ad Milton was approaching FL, I started getting prayer messages on Facebook. It feels like believers in prayer use disasters as an advertising tool. It's as if they look downward to these events to start blasting out their hearts icons and prayer hands. Maybe since it didn't effect the Miami area I'm spoiled. I don't know why the people about to be hit don't drive away or take a vacation for a fee days until it passes. If something is out of my control, ill be praying and crying, but God must be busy making sure gravity exists and planets rotate stars without me asking it to make the weather change.
I think you can credit that to the current theopolitical climate. Which is based in large part on the idea that you can "make your own reality".
Donald Trump, in addition to enjoying the works of Adolf Hitler, supposedly got a lot of his inspiration from Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's
The Power of Positive Thinking.
It was a popular book in the 1960s, my father had a copy, but I never read it and I don't know if it really carried the concept to the modern extreme or not, but there is no book that cannot be weaponized, so…
It is written that you if have merely as much faith as the size of a mustard seed* that you can speak to a mountain and command it to leap into the sea and it will do so. If that's true, I'm sorry to report that I've seen more faith in a single crate of TNT that in any multiple-jet-owning televangelist or fire-and-brimstone preacher. Much less their congregations. Their main bent seems to be more in the line of forcing Jesus to return by destroying the planet and encouraging war in the Middle East. There are bibical injumctions about forcing God to to anything, but then, they don't seem to have read that part.
So, we have a segment of the population who have conflated religion and politics, despite the injunctions of the Founding Fathers. And they're all set to prove their faith by standing their ground at Ground Zero for the storm. Ironically, since the storm almost invariably misses the predicted target point, they mostly survive, thus "proving" their faith, even while carnage ensues somewhere else. Including, alas, a lot of South Florida hit by un-naturally strong tornadoes.
So they persist, proclaiming miracles even as dead babies are pulled out of the flood waters. Waiting for the Rapture (joke's on them. It happened and they didn't qualify).
---
The mustard seeds in my spice cabinet run about 0.5 mm in diameter. Or maybe 1/20 inch in Freedom Units. I'm have faith if you could do an E=MC^2 to them, a single seed could obliterate a mountain.
