Gov.: Twister Damage 'Wrath Of God' (death toll hits 28)

[phantom power]

(CBS/AP) The death toll from swarms of violent thunderstorms and tornadoes that devastated communities across eight states rose to 28 with the discovery of the last unaccounted-for resident in Tennessee, the governor said Tuesday.

"The wrath of God is the only way I can describe it," Gov. Phil Bredesen said after a helicopter tour of the damaged region.

He said Tennessee was up to 24 deaths and 1,000 homes destroyed by Sunday's storms. The latest victim was found in the rubble of a home in the community of Millsfield, officials said. Emergency crews were still out searching for possible victims, but no one else was known to be missing, Bredesen said.

(...)

"I have never seen anything like this, and I've been through several tornadoes. I'm used to seeing roofs off houses, houses blown over, these houses were down to their foundations, stripped clean," Bredesen said. "It really stripped the earth clean."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/04/national/main1467778.shtml

[Warpy]

1. When are all those good Christian folks sitting in the smashed

lumber that used to be home going to become outraged that their sins were great enough to call down the wrath of this man's god? When are they going to start resenting his implication that somehow they were bad enough to get hit while he was saintly enough to be spared?

Or are they just going to let this asshole blame them for causing their own destruction? Are they going to blame themselves because he said so?

Rebel, Christian soldiers! The time is WAY overdue!

[phantom power]

3. I find that atheism is helpful for cutting thru that sort of hoo-ha.

[Warpy]

5. Yeah, but if I were a believer in that situation

and that sanctimonious asswipe told me it was god's judgment on me for my sins, he'd be eating some of that lumber at both ends.

[phantom power]

7. Yeah. A *real* beam in his eye.

[greyl]

2. An unfortunate description

of an even less fortunate event.

[phantom power]

4. I expect a lot more religious fervor...

as climate change starts to squeeze us all harder. It will create a social/political climate ripe for massive religious demagoguery.

[Tanuki]

6. Figure of speech

I am pretty sure Bredesen meant that metaphorically, and not in the literal sense that Jerry Fallwell and others have used in attributing disasters to God's wrath. Bredesen is a native New Yorker and a graduate of Harvard, and is not a fundamentalist.

[phantom power]

8. Don't stop us, we're on a roll...

[dcfirefighter]

9. The wrath of the FSM! n/t