It’s so annoying when tornado victims don’t follow the script, isn’t it?
Wolf: “…we’re happy you’re here; you guys did a great job. And I guess you gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord? For that split-second decision?”
Survivor: “I… I… I’m actually an atheist.”
Wolf: “Oh, you are! … But you made the right call.”
Survivor: “Yep; we are here. And I don’t, I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord”
Wow, and she doesn’t seem at all angry at God, either. Darned atheists, don’t they know the script?
Cuttlecap tip to Anonymous, via twitter.
Yay Rebecca! What an amazing way to out yourself to everyone.
Damion, whence this impression she had been closeted until that point, and how do you know her name?
The obvious response to someone who accosts a survivor at the scene of a disaster and asks if he’s thanked THE LORD for his survival is “If you can look at this [indicating the devastation] and believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, you’re stupid, crazy or both.” You’c forfeit your five seconds of fame, but it might just jolt the reporter, who probably doesn’t believe in Sky Daddy either, out of his belief that he has to pretend to believe.
Or, simpler, “Why should I be grateful for him sending a tornado to demolish my town?”
Reminds me of the famous lines about the San Francisco Fire in which one of the surviving structures was a whiskey warehouse:
“If, as some say, God spanked the town
for being over-frisky
why did He burn His churches down
and spare Hotaling’s whiskey?”
If, as Wolf says, those in the path
should voice a miracle claim
Should they be thankful for His wrath?
Or merely His poor aim?
I saw that.
This is CNN and Wolf Blitzer interviewing a tornado survivor and one of the questions is “Do you thank the lord?”
If this was Pat Robertson tv I’d understand, but CNN? Really?
Wolf – I give that a F for an interview question.
John Morales @2,
Damion Reinhardt is the treasurer of Oklahoma Atheists. Maybe he knows her in person.
THIS JUST IN!
LORD FINDS OUT WOMAN NOT THANKFUL
THREATENS ANOTHER TORNADO
PRAISE HIS MERCY
yes, she did Wolf.
Now if only the rest of the people in Oklahoma could realize that too…
Scr… Archivist, maybe so, and thus has justified basis for claiming she’s outed herself on that video.
(Or maybe not, and he is speculating)
PRAISE HIS MERCY
Or ELSE…
Considering all the people who didn’t make it, and that if he existed the whole thing would be his doing in the first place, thanking him would be kind of a dick move.
I agree Christoph, but those people who do thank the Lord (like that elderly man in another interview who survived with his disabled wife while their entire house was destroyed and several of their neighbors killed) don’t apply reason. They insist that the LORD did not send this Tornado. When you try to figure out their logic by asking them, they’ll slip off into “Christians are good people, and did you know how much we are persecuted, and besides you don’t know the Bible, you’re a meaniehead…”. Besides not even registering the cognitive dissonance in their own refusal to think about the plain implications, they completely miss the irony that the Bible they claim to know better states explicitly that the LORD most certainly does send disasters.