What do you do in times of drought? According to the Governor of Georgia, you pray.
He joined lawmakers and ministers on the steps of the state Capitol to pray for rain.
While public prayer vigils might raise eyebrows in other parts of the nation, they are mostly shrugged off in the Bible Belt, where turning to the heavens for help is common and sometimes even politically expedient.
“Christianity has more of a place in the culture here than in some other region,” said Ray Van Neste, a professor of Christian studies at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. “And it’s only natural, in a way, for the public to pray for rain.”
But it doesn’t end there…
Perdue isn’t the first governor to hold a call for public prayer during the epic drought gripping the Southeast. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley issued a proclamation declaring a week in July as “Days of Prayer for Rain” to “humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty.”
This begs the question of what the fuck the is the Governor doing? Why is he leading prayer? Or better yet, asking for people to pray?
“We need to try a different approach,” said Rocky Twyman, who organized the concert. “We need to call on God, because what we’re doing isn’t working. We think that instead of all this fussing and fighting, Gov. Perdue and all these others would come together and pray.”
“What we are doing isn’t working.” Is there really all that much can be done besides conservation? My Meteorology isn’t all that great but I thought the processes required for rain don’t shift much from human interaction. I know that global warming shifts weather patterns, and more places will have drought and more places will have flooding from Global Warming and these two scenarios will be less spread out. So in that sense humans have an impact. But in the immediate short term, there really isn’t much human interaction is going to do.
And why the fuck is the Governor leading this prayer. He has every right to pray himself, but what is he doing on the capitol lawns asking for and leading prayer. Is it too much to ask for high level government official that understands the constitution?
In this case, it just seems that prayer is a way to shift responsibility from people to God. I know no one is claiming that, but I have always seen religion as a way to shift responsibility for ones actions. Besides that, I don’t really care if people pray. I have never found it useful, no matter how much I used to believe, or how bad my life was. I never got anything out of prayer, no one answered my calls, and no one fixed my life but myself. So I guess my path in life has lead me to to different answers.
Posted on 11/15/2007 at 06:16 AM 
Go ahead and laugh, webs, but every time someone has prayed for rain, in all of human history, it has rained. Eventually.
Before someone gets all punctilious on my ass, I will also say that I happen to know that no one has ever prayed for rain in the Antarctic, or on the Moon. Of course, the way things are going, it might rain in the Antarctic someday again…