Fundamentalist Christians incessantly seek to explain catastrophic weather as the wrath of God. The Rev. Hagee posited Hurricane Katrina as God’s wrath on New Orleans for supporting such a decadent lifestyle, such as Mardi Gras and Gay Pride. Pat Robertson has been fond of declaring that the paths of other hurricanes are God’s finger of wrath tracing through the immoral and sinful among us.
Hand in hand with the lunacy that God uses weather to smite the sinful is the lunacy that by thinking hard enough, the invisible man in the clouds will read your thoughts and do your bidding. So we get what we had here a couple weeks ago, which is Focus on the Family praying for torrential rain of "biblical proportions" during Obama’s acceptance speech on Thursday.
The last couple weeks of weather in Denver involved severe thunderstorms, an occasional tornado, and a nearly daily rain event as microbursts and massive cumulus clouds come off the front range. Then on Tuesday night, I watched the weather report. A cool front moved across the front range ahead of a high pressure system that dried things out. The weather for Obama's Thursday night acceptance speech? Perfect. I sat outside on the deck, had a drink, listened to Obama’s speech on the TeeVee and enjoyed the comfort of a gentle evening breeze with the stars overhead.
For the fundamentalist Christians, this is also known as the Vending Machine God. Put in your prayers and out comes your wish. Only sometimes your wish gets hung up on the screwy vend-o-matic thingy and leaves the prayerful wanting.
[Update - 31 Aug 08]: The GOP convention is having to be reorganized because Hurricane Gustav is preparing to make landfall in New Orleans on Mon./Tues., the same city the Bush administration watched drown nearly three years ago this week.
Even though I'm an atheist, and I assign no significance whatsoever to the weather events relating to the DNC or the GOP, I can't help but enjoy a little schadenfreude at how things have worked out. Irony, thy name is Hurricane Gustav.