Praying For Rain On Obama's Parade

Here's a video from Focus On The Family's Stuart Shepard asking like-minded believers to pray for rain in Denver at Mile-High Stadium on August 28th.

Shepard specifically wants "torrential rain". What my father called a six-inch gully-washer. A chunk floater.

If you don't get the significance, that's when and where Barack Obama is going to be addressing the Democratic Convention.



Shepard claims he's doing this because “I’m still pro-life, and I’m still in favor of marriage being between one man and one woman. And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree.”

This guy wants you to pray for God to send rain at a specific time and place in Denver so Barack Obama's appearance at the Democratic Convention will be cancelled and that will increase the odds of McCain being elected and preserve marriage as between one man and one woman, disregarding the earlier biblical model of marriage as "one man and as many wives as he could afford".

I think I got that right.

Ok, let's stop there for a moment. Let's assume that there is a higher power. We could know this higher power as God, Jesus, Allah, Zeus, Thor, or the little girl on the planet Nekthar whose Grow Your Own Planet Earth Kit we all inhabit.

Take it a little further, and assume that the higher power cares about us.

Let's assume that this higher power cares so much that he/she/it occasionally intervenes in our everyday chain of cause and effect. We're not talking about The Blind Watchmaker of Richard Dawkins. This higher power wakes up in the morning busy, and stays busy.

Take another step. The higher power intervenes in response to prayer. We can influence this higher power if enough of us ask in unison, in the right way, for things the higher power cares about.

And then we have to throw in the assumption that the higher power is benevolent.

If such a scenario were true, would we have to pray for rain to prevent Barack Obama from being President? If a benevolent higher power was going to intervene in the Denver weather, wouldn't he do so because it was the right thing to do, and not because Stuart Shepard and James Dobson's Focus on The Family convinced enough of us to pray?

Or can you imagine Obama getting elected and after two years of horrific one-party government, with a Clinton on the Supreme Court and Al Gore as Energy Czar, and then we ask "God, how could you let this happen?"

And God says "Hey, I coulda made it rain in Denver on 8-28-08. But nobody asked me to."

Ridiculous.