Was this man's leg injured because he failed to protect it with a Bible?

Actually, if there was REALLY divine intervention, the damaged parts of the Bible might have fallen out, spelling out the names of the shooting suspects. As yet, they can’t arrest anyone because they don’t know who did it.

Although this might sound blasphemous to the followers of Phred Phelps and/or Eric Rudolph, I think his chest would have been just as well protected by a pocket copy of Das Kapital or The God Delusion.

@Seek_Kolinahr

Is that you wearing the FSM wig and the traditional Neanderthal marriage T-shirt? Hifuckinglarious!

Why, yes it is! I’m also reading Christopher Hitchens’ “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”.

I have to admit that it could be luck/ happenstance, but since it was a Bible, our Holy Book, people will see it as Divine Intervention.

One would think that God would have sent the kids to pick on some heathen nonbeliever and spare the man two major injuries. That’s some lazy intervention.

Message from God: for my absolute protection, cover yourself with the Bible, literally.

I would have been impressed if it had been a single page from the bible. As @Brian1946 points out, it could have been any book. Books have a tendency to stop bullets.

@Seek_Kolinahr: “That’s some lazy intervention.”

Nearly all supposed interventions appear to be lazy or unfair.

Moral lesson, according to @hominid: always cover yourself with books, or at least a lot of papers, wherever you go.

The real intervention occurred the night before. I have been looking for the story but can’t find it right now. Basically what happened was that the bus did not break down, no one was shot or stabbed and everyone got home on time. It wasn’t a big story but a happy one, thank God.

@Jaxk Was there any Bible involved?

@Jaxk Ah, so God took a night off, and look what happened.

Lazy bastard.

^^ You’d bitch if you were hung with a new rope.

Nope, not even!

@Seek_Kolinahr: “Lazy bastard.”

Around 4300 people will die today (and every day, for a total of 1.6 million per year) due to a lack of access to safe drinking water. God is asleep on the job. Oh wait, but the bible guy on the bus. He woke up for that guy? Why?

The headline of the story is wrong. It was the Old Testament and the New testament. So it’s hard to know if it was Moses that did the saving or if it was Luke or Peter or Jesus.

But let’s pose this another way.

Suppose the poor schmuck had “The Users Guide to Pedophilia” in his pocket instead of the bible. Would he have died? Would the headlines read “Child Porn Saves Man From Gunshot”?

Would the policeman say “it sure is a good thing that the man is into kiddie-porn, because otherwise he would be dead”?

Silly religious claptrap.

If his pocket carried his iPhone with Guerrilla glass inside they would have used it in an advertisement.
It is nonsense but confirmation bias will explain it.

He’s lucky it was the bible and not Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is all of one hundred pages. Maybe, if that.

There’s a scene in the movie Heist (David Mamet, 2001) between Delroy Lindo and Sam Rockwell. They’re shooting the shit in the front seat of a car while casing the getaway route from their next job: a load of gold courtesy of Swiss Air. Rockwell is driving and he looks nervous.

Lindo: Sometimes adrenaline gives people the shakes, some might think it’s cowardice, so maybe you want to pray about it.
Rockwell: I’m not a religious man.
Lindo: There’s nothing wrong with prayer, man. Back in Nam, we had this little motherfucker who always carried a bible next to his heart. We used to fuck with him about it, but that bible stopped a bullet.
Jimmy: No shit.
Lindo: Hand of God, that bible stopped a bullet, would of ruined that fucker’s heart. And had he had another bible in front of his face, that man would be alive today.

Funny but as long ago as ancient Greece, Plato reports that in the trial of Socrates for heresy, the learned philosopher mocked the religious beliefs of the Athens town leaders by noting how often the Gods are off target with their lightning bolts and wreck their own temples instead of killing the miscreant who doesn’t pay them sufficient hommage.

If the fathers of the Catholic Church had been able to track down and burn every copy, we would know nothing about such ancient doubts in deities. Clearly, the Pope and his thugs understood how such information could lay threat to their revenue stream. But I guess God wasn’t on their side either, because they missed some copies in the book burnings.

@elbanditoroso Just guessing the bullet stopped somewhere in the Pentateuch, so if Moses had actually written those first five books as the Bible claims, then he’d be the saint to credit. But the reality is the Pentateuch was written by multiple, anonymous authors.

@Espiritus_Corvus – That is friggin’ hilarious.

@ETpro

Actually, I thought of you earlier, when I was browsing Amazon. I’ve got this book on my “to track down” list. Thought it might be a good addition to your Goodreads account.

Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World

The real luck in this is that the crims did not have any actually powerful gun with them.
Anything more than a pea shooter and any book will be utterly inadequate as bullet protection.

One thing Christian should stop saying.

So, he was saved from death because his chest was covered, but he didn’t have FULL COVERAGE, so he still sustained some injuries. So, if he had Obamacare, would he have been fully covered, or is that only good for treating injuries after they happen?

@Jonesn4burgers – good observation

@Judi Number 11. :)

I think we said “Count your blessings” quite a bit so people associate it with good. I try not to use it much personally.

Update on this story

The sonofabitch made the whole thing up. That is why they couldn’t find the perpetrators. There were none.

@Judi Thank you for sharing that link. The majority of my friends are American Christians, especially on Facebook. They do not seem to understand that when they make comments that include any form of “bless” that they may be hurting or offending their friends. They seem clueless to the fact that it could even harm their own reputation.

I have one dear friend, she would call herself a Christian but is very laid back and not at all preachy, is pretty damn down to earth, however, she often says, “I’ll pray for you” if I am stressed about something. I just take it in stride , she respects my non-belief and knows I am more of a philosopher type. I’m not offended but, sometimes I do think to myself ” Oh brother!” lol

@Coloma Like you, I tend to brush it off, if even think about it. The closing of a letter or e-mail of “Have a blessed day” no longer bothers me. What irritates me is when friends post that they are blessed because they had a great day or won a sports game or are in remission from cancer.

Don’t they understand that these sentiments can be hurtful? This means that my very Christian father and sister may not have been ‘blessed’ by the same god and died of cancer at an early age. Why would that be? And shouldn’t credit be given to the researchers and doctors who aided them in getting to the point where they are now in remission?

This just irks me to no end. I keep biting my tongue, but maybe it is time to reach out to these friends and shed a little light on how their casual use of the word ‘blessed’ can be construed from another’s perspective.

@Seek You are an intelligent person, so my guess is that you already know the answer to your question. The police officer quote is with regards to the bullet to the chest. There was intervention…a book. The arm and leg wounds are brushed aside since a bullet to the chest more often than not results in a quicker death. Plus, the man survived.

^ Plus, plus, the man was lying off his arse. He was a fraud, looking to cash in on the anti-black sentiment caused by the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin thing in order to pay his property tax debt. All of his injuries were self-inflicted. See my post above for the update link.

I must have missed something. How in hell was all this going to help him pay off $100K in county property taxes?

Kind people on the internet setting up a donation fund for him.

@seek You are kidding. That actually works? What a country of, a Confederacy of Idiots!

@Espiritus_Corvus
It worked for Zimmerman the negro hunter.

And his ex-wife.

Come on, it’s so easy to set up a PayPal account and say “Please help me fight my legal fees/medical costs because someone did me SOOO wrong!”

With the way Americans are so hot/cold over issues like that, someone’s always ready to vote with their bank account to let it be known publicly that they sympathise with the perceived victim’s plight.

Too bad all those sick dolphin pods that I’ve been seeing immediately off your coast since the oil spill can’t get PayPal accounts. Maybe if we convince these idiots that BP stands for Black People, huh?