I will promptly respond to anyone who can pass this simple test. What did a gas pump in my truck have to do with the story I wrote?
You seem to be saying that because your truck sprung a gas leak right after the gas leak at the theatre. You consider that leak a boobytrap from god, intended to emphasize the lesson and get your attention.
Am I close?
Pretty close.
Obviously I didn't write the account in a very memorable way. Close as you are you have swerved around one of the most amazing parts of this intervention of God. I was talking on the phone with the city fire inspector and joked with him about how I was responsible for the 89 gas leak because of the prayer I had prayed on my daughters behalf. When I got off the phone, I walked to my truck, and couldn't get it out of the driveway because a gas leak erupted from a gas pump.
I don't suppose you are able to appreciate that this would not be a coincidence in England had it occurred there. Because they call gasoline (which is not a gas) petrol. Gas leak, petrol leak. Not the same thing. Thank the big guy the next time you talk.
I don't suppose you are willing to consider the possibility that you hang around near too many inept mechanics. I don't suppose that you are willing to consider that you missed a couple of his messages because you didn't' consider your flat tires (where air, made up of gases, escaped) to be a message. How about passing gas, radon gas in your basement, the outgassing of paint in your living room, the fact that they use gas to deliver the film to the studios, the batmobile uses gas, welders used gas when building the steel structure under the bricks at Aurora.
Gas is everywhere. Why would an omnipotent being only give you a couple of messages? And what the heck does gas have to do with guns. Oh, the rapidly expanding gas given off by the accelerated decomposition of gunpowder. I get it.
I went to three schools as a kid, a tech school and two colleges as an adult. Then Columbine got shot up. Was that a message from god that I missed because I was an atheist? I've been to the top of several skyscrapers, and while on the observation deck of several I saw airplanes flying over. Was that a warning about 911. And you commented on the irony of the 911 date. Phone engineers needed a three digit number that wasn't part of any existing phone numbers, and the calendar only has 12 months. Two numbers from that limited number show up at the same time. A guy who was in a 007 movie is on a flight with you and your phone comes up, an your phone number ends with 0070, and you are astonished.
This is all a case of not understanding statistical probabilities and the absolute inevitability of such similarities occurring. There are only ten possible numbers. An author chose one combination, your phone provider chose another, and they happened to match under a specific set of circumstances, and instead of being simply bemused, you think that it is a god talking to you. Hey, England was bombed by terrorists on July 7, 2005. Lets see. James Bond was a british spy. O7/07. Not quite the same, but that must have been what god was talking about and you missed it.
There are not an infinite number of single digit numbers. There are not an infinite number of fiction characters. There are not an infinite number of possible human interactions. There are not an infinite number of ways to heat a theatre or power a vehicle. There are not an infinite number of ways for cows to cross the road and nor an infinite number of ways for your headlights to fail (by the way, you don't have much luck with vehicles. Maybe that's god telling you not to drive).
You are reading too much into everything that it important for you to read too much into, and ignoring any and everything that does not fit with your assumptions. You are simplifying the social and political problems in our country, in that you are proclaiming that if we still had prayer in schools, by golly we would all be living just like they did in that documentary called "Leave it to Beaver". You want all to be simple because then your solutions can be simple. And you fail to understand that simple answers don't exist because simple problems don't either.
I grew up in the 50's. Pray and the bible were legal in schools.Was the mere fact that those things were legal enough to keep our country running straight and true? Lets see, in the 50's my neighbor murdered his mother-in-law by shooting her with a shotgun through a hole he cut in the ceiling (he got 7 years). A guy my mom worked with was arrested for exposure, a classmates brother was run over and killed by a drunk, another neighbors grandson was killed when a tree fell on the truck he was riding in, another neighbor died of tetanus, and somebody drowned a puppy in the pond across the street from my house. And I got stung by a bee, just like I did last year. It doesn't sound like America was incredibly different back then. You just think that it was, and you credit all the problems that have occurred since '62 to two legal changes.
Back in the 30's the St. Valentines massacre, where mobsters shot some other mobsters, took place in a theatre. I assume there were times when some mobsters killed other mobsters with a baseball bat. Theatre. Bats. Man. Looks like your parents missed the signs too, and we were still able to pray.Your god has been trying to tell us for a long time, I guess. He saw it coming.
It takes a lot of hubris for you to try to drag the rest of us down with your ideas of what is true and what is important. I am not for one minute suggesting that there are not problems in this world that need our attention. But for them to be fixed we need people with vision, not people wearing blinders who hawk silliness as undeniable truth.
And that this became apparent to you after the Aurora incident, 23 years later.
I was investigating any additional similarities Aurora had with the 89 incident and God boobytrapped my truck to affirm that it is a valid statement to make that God could and would cause a gas leak to make a point.
Thank you. You don't know how gratifying it is to be able to expound on a truly remarkable coincidence to someone who has actually read the account.
I remember reading a story in Readers Digest in the early 60's. It seems that a high school kid walked into a military surplus store with a buddy and the first thing he noticed is that there was a big pile of packed parachutes for sale. "Cool", he thought. His father had been a paratrooper, and hence he was very interested to see the kind of equipment his father had used during the war. He walked up to the pile of parachutes, picked the first one up, looked first at the front of it and then turned it around. There, written in ink, was his fathers name. It was his dad's parachute. This, if Readers Digest is to be trusted, is a true story.
We haven't had anybody shoot up a jump school or blow up a mall wearing puffy white nylon pants. It was just a coincidence. And that is what you experienced. However, for whatever reason, you have decided to attach significance to the story, so much so that you feel the need to occasionally take flak from others over the incidents. You seem unable to understand that a movie franchise that has made almost 4 billion dollars over the last quarter century is more likely to be involved in multiple incidents than, say, Groundhog Day, which was in and out of the theaters in just a few months. You want to attach importance to gas, as in gas, being similar enough to gas, as in petrol, to be the same thing to you. There aren't that many ages kids can be, but six seems like a magic number to you.
Its bad enough that we don't agree on religion or politics ( I read some of your blog as well). But we may as well be speaking two totally different languages if you are going to insist that obtuse events in your life in 1989 actually able to portend events in 2012. And that the connection is perfectly clear to you. If only in hindsight.
You did not go to the authorities in 1990 and warn them about an impending slaughter. And if you had, even the most ardent and christian cops among them would have laughed you out of the building.
To me, the discussion you are having with others about history are fairly unimportant, because as long as you are going to take the stance that your god was speaking to you via leaks and headlights, I have a heck of a time giving you credibility in any other area. Sorry, but I just can't do it.
