Praying Amid The Tornadoes

Can you pray a tornado away? Prevent them in the first place by praying? Doubtful, but some people think so.

One of the huge tornadoes in Indiana last week

But it's probably a great idea to pray like hell when a tornado is bearing down on you, just in case.  

We've seen the whole range of prayers during last week's bout of tornadoes in the Midwest and South.

To make this doubly religious, the storms hit mostly in the Bible Belt of the Ohio Valley and the South. There seemed to be different qualities and poignancies of the prayers.

I guess I'll start with the worst example, with our old friend Pat Robertson. He said the tornadoes came because there is a lack of prayer in this country. Which is insulting, because many of the people hit the hardest by the storms are devout, and surely prayed for salvation amid the terrible winds.

Would God really randomly kill devout people because less-than-devout people elsewhere in the country don't pray enough?  God spared the people who don't pray and instead gave the devout terrifying, painful deaths in the tornadoes?

I wonder if Robertson thinks that family of five who died in Indiana during the tornado deserved to die in the tornado. The family was last seen, huddled in the hallway of their mobile home, praying as the tornado bore down on them.

There's also an interesting video that's gone viral on YouTube that shows scary, whirling clouds that appear to be turning into a tornado with a woman praying in major explanation points, urging Jesus to steer the tornado away. Watch it:



The tornado indeed misses the praying woman, but to be honest, it looked like it was on a trajectory to miss her anyway.

Even if she was able to pray away the tornado, it looks like the prayer  veered off and hit her neighbor's house. Is that what God intended?  Maybe the neighbors were heathens anyway.

Lastly, there are a number of people who believe it wasn't God creating and controlling the tornadoes. It was the U.S. government, which apparently has nothing better to do than create repeated weather disasters it has to spend billions of dollars cleaning up after.

The people who blame the government say there's something called HAARP that is behind every bad storm. 

It's unclear why these people think the U.S. Government is creating all these expensive, deadly disasters. It would seem to be counterproductive to me to unleash these storms, but what do I know?

I dunno. My own theory as to why these tornadoes happened is probably too mundane to excite people. What I think is a storm, the jet stream, moist unstable air and cold air happened to mix in just the right way to cause this tornado disaster. In other words, it was a random, natural tragedy. I know, boring as hell.

Deal with it.