Indianapolis wackaloon Charlotte Thompson recently had the misfortune of stray gunfire tearing into her car. Worse yet, her two great-granddaughters were in the car with her. Luckily, no one was killed in this incident.
As illustrated in the story, let me describe the path of the bullet: through the car door, through her great-granddaughter Shyann, through a purse containing a Bible, and into a watermelon.
Keeping that path in mind, absorb the following quote from Thompson.
Came through the door, hit her, then it went to the Bible, she said. The Bible was sitting on the seat between the two girls. It went in here and come out here and it shredded my Sunday School book. The word of God slowed the bullet so that it didn’t kill anybody.
Right in the watermelon. Didn’t come out of the watermelon, Thompson said. The word of God and the Lord’s power saved. He sent the bullet into the watermelon.
The little girl recovered from her injuries, and I’m very glad of that. However I hope she has a better physics teacher than her ignorant great-grandmother had. In keeping with the principles of inertia, friction and resistance created by the door, the Bible, and a human abdomen slowed the bullet, not “the word of god and the lord’s power”. The fact that this woman even toys with the notion that there was any divine intervention is laughable or infuriating, depending on how much you have to deal with this sort of bullshit on a daily basis.
To falsely teach her great-grandchildren by reinforcing this nonsense is a form of neglect. She is failing to properly educate these children by attributing physical occurrences to the supernatural. Telling kids that ‘thunder is actually angels bowling’ is harmless enough, because I don’t know that the tellers of such tall tales actually believe the stories, and the children will eventually learn about the temperature differential caused by a bolt of lightning. To lead them to believe that God slowed down a bullet to keep anyone from getting killed is plain stupid, and may lead to resistance when the time comes that someone tries to teach them what really happened that day.
By the way, wouldn’t it have been a little more convenient if God had slowed the bullet down before it pierced poor Shyann? Why didn’t God make her carry the watermelon? I know why. Because God doesn’t exist. He is a phantom. Acts are attributed to him when the attributee is too ignorant to know the real cause.
If you haven’t seen the movie Pulp Fiction, watch the clip below for a theatrical replay of this scenario. There is some harsh language, so it’s not quite work safe.