Is God More Powerful Than the Ghost of Normal Fell? Let's Find Out.
There's a preacher named Rocky Twyman who is presently traveling around the country praying, which in itself isn't particularly unusual. It's where he's praying and what he's praying for that are maybe just a little bit silly:
Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower pricesUmmmm, yeah.
Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.
Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer...
"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59...
...he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.
"God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That's all they have to say."
...he says his prayer for gas-price relief from God is sincere.
"I've seen him work miracles in my life," Twyman said. "He told us that all we need to do is ask and believe. He can do it, and he will do it, but we have to ask him to do it."
I'm a relatively empirically-minded individual, so I think an experiment is in order. While Twyman is praying to the Invisible Man in the Sky to lower gas prices, I'm going to make supplications to the ghost of Normal Fell to raise them. Fell, who was most famous for playing Mr. Roper on the 1970's hit TV series Three's Company, died in 1998. As far as I'm aware, no miracles have been attributed to him and nobody attaches any particular spiritual significance or beliefs to the deceased actor. He appears to wield no particular supernatural powers in the afterlife.I hypothesize, however, that he's at least every bit as powerful as the deity to whom Rocky Twyman is praying for lower gas prices. By praying to him daily for gas prices to go up, I will test whether or not he is actually more competent at effecting change in the physical world through supernatural intercession. If the price of gas continues to increase overall during the next 30 days, we can conclude that the ghost of Norman Fell is, in fact, more powerful than Twyman's Jehovah of the Gas Pump.
Considering that the price of gas has been increasing by 2¢ per day here in Worcester, Norman Fell may already be at work!
