Perdue's Prayers Fail to Raise Water Levels

It doesn't look like Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue's separation clause-shredding demand for divine intervention is having anything like the desired effect on his state's dire water situation:

Lanier flirts with new low

Reduced water releases won’t have an effect for months

As a record-setting drought continues to bake Northeast Georgia, Lake Lanier's water level on Sunday neared its lowest since it began filling up more than 50 years ago.

At 9 p.m. Sunday, the water level was at 1,052.76 feet above sea level, according to the U.S. Geological Survey Web site. The lake is now less than two inches above the previously recorded low of 1,052.66 feet, recorded in December 1981.

With no drought-busting rains in the forecast, the water level is expected to continue dropping. Some rain is expected Wednesday and Thursday, but not enough to end the drought.

"We were expecting (the lake) to reach its low over the weekend, but it looks like it's probably not going to happen until (today) or Tuesday," said Lisa Coghlan, a public affairs specialist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Mobile District...

The National Weather Service predicts a 40 percent chance of rain for the Gainesville area on Wednesday, with evening showers that could amount to a half-inch before midnight. Thursday holds about a 70 percent chance of rain that could deliver about one inch to some areas, National Weather Service forecaster Matt Sena said.

There is an approximate 18-inch rain deficit across North Georgia for the calendar year, Sena said.

"It’s a start," he said. "But we’re way too far behind for one event to make a significant impact. Hopefully we’ll get a little bit of runoff to make it into the lake."

Of course, true-believers can always insist that Jehovah was just waiting a few extra days to make it rain. I suppose one can do that when one starts off by positing a system that works in a sort of cosmic black box, nullifying any possibility of saying anything about the posited mechanisms of the system itself. It all sounds a lot like Intelligent Design Creationism, doesn't it? That shouldn't come as any surprise; IDC also maintains that nothing can be said about the posited designer. That applies as much to meteorological matters as it does to biology. It certainly points out the intimate philosophical connection between IDC and religion, and in this case the most superstitious form of religion there is. How far a leap back in intellectual history is it from supplicating a sky-god for rain to supplicating a sky-god not to strike one's hut with lightning bolts? "Leap" is too large; this isn't even a step.

Nonetheless, the truly superstitious will consistently refuse to consider the possibility that there's no link at all between their wishful thinking and an actual event. As Perdue himself put it,

God can make it rain tomorrow, he can make it rain next week or next month...

So no matter what happens and when it happens, the event will be chalked up to a mythical deity taking action at the request of his cult.

With this manner of thinking, one can claim to have motivated a given deity to have done anything at all at any time at all. This is the thinking engaged in by those professional athletes who point skyward when they score for their team. They may have been up to bat fifty times or had the ball thirty times and failed over and over; that's their own fault. As soon as they score a point, they chalk the event up to whatever it is they're pointing at up there among the clouds. This is the thinking of the lottery winner who has been playing for years but upon winning a hundred dollars tells his friends that his prayer has finally been answered. By that token, one could just as well claim indirect responsibility for ending the Cold War or building a new block of flats ("I prayed for years we'd get some affordable housing around here!") Of course, it is then equally valid for an anti-American Muslim to claim that it was his prayers that caused an earthquake or hurricane to strike the US. One can demonstrate exactly as much of a causal link (exactly none) between the prayers of one person and the prayers of another, so anyone can claim anything and there's no way at all to disprove the assertion.

That's a necessary element for the very definition of superstition, of course... but true-believers will never accept it. The only difference between a religion and a superstition, really, is the identity of the individual hearing the definition. A believer will define the same things as "religious" that a non-believer (even one of a different religion) will call "superstitious." Objectively, there's no difference at all. It's like asking for a definition of "right" and "wrong" without context; it's all in the eye of the beholder as soon as no empirical criteria are established. None of that is surprising; that's all just human nature. What is surprising, though, is that Americans can still not see that at this late date in history and so be taken in by a divine shell-game like that foisted upon them by Perdue, who is using a natural disaster as a vehicle for advancing a sectarian agenda as an agent of government. That's supposed to be unconstitutional, of course, but these days it's only a problem when the religion being advanced isn't in keeping with the one espoused by those who are charged with upholding the Constitution in the first place — a duty which the current Federal administration has abandoned entirely and proudly.

It's funny how a little drizzle can clear the air enough to make visible the way in which democracies sometimes die lingering deaths.

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Georgia Governor Prays for Rain. Nothing Happens. Big surprise.

As promised, Georgia governor Sonny Perdue led a mass prayer yesterday. About 250 true-believers showed up to join him in asking Jehovah to give them water, please, because the entire state is on the verge of turning into dust and blowing to Kentucky. That would be bad; there are face-biting rattlesnakes in Kentucky.

So these people prayed and sang and waved their hands in the air like Jesus just don't care (there's video available, but you'll have to watch a commercial first) and... nothing happened. Not a drop of rain fell from the sky.

A rational person would probably be thinking, "Hmmmm, that didn't work." Not Sonny, though. His reaction to the vast cosmic indifference that inevitably greets supplications and mystical gestures?

Gov. Sonny Perdue wasn't the least bit discouraged Tuesday after his hourlong state Capitol prayer vigil for rain ended with the sun shining through what had been a somewhat cloudy morning.

"God can make it rain tomorrow, he can make it rain next week or next month," Perdue told reporters who asked him if a miracle was on the way.

Or he could make it rain in a year or a decade or a century or... not at all. In fact, I'll go with that last option. We have a pretty good idea about how this whole rain thing works at this point in history, and here's a tip: mumbling and gesturing at the sky has no part in the process, and no spirits, ghosts, goblins or unicorns are involved. Believing otherwise is usually deemed superstition, and rightfully so, unless you happen to believe in the same ghost as the Guvnah, in which case it's called religion. Someone swinging a dead cat over their head to make it rain is crazy; somebody singing songs to a 2,000 year old dead Jewish carpenter is spiritual. Got that? Glad I could help straighten that out for you.

Perdue draws an interesting conclusion from his notion that rain and the lack thereof is the result of divine intercession:

Perdue said after the event that Georgians have not done "all we could do in conservation" and that the drought was an attempt by God to "get our attention."

"Hopefully we will be better conservators of the blessings God's given us as he gives us more [rain]," the governor said.

See, he can't tell when God is going to make it rain, but he knows what Jehovah is angry about this time. It couldn't be that Jehovah is angry about the poor conservation practices of a century ago when lumber companies were busy stripping Georgia of its pine forests, and it isn't that swine farms have been dumping animal wastes into rivers for decades. It's not that Jehovah is angry at Georgia for electing Perdue governor, for that matter. Sonny knows different, even though he hasn't a clue when said deity is going to end the punishment. Thinking like this bring to mind for me an image of a little hamster on a squeaky wheel going round and round in Perdue's head.

It also brings up a basic problem I have with the concept of prayer; it's a good way for people to feel like they're doing something about a problem without actually doing anything at all. The religious will object to this, but I don't see a bit of difference between prayer and wishful thinking. One may as well be daydreaming about one's fairy godmother waving her wand. It accomplishes every bit as much. For those who object, this latest bit of religious hand-waving is a case in point. Where's the rain? Now, in all fairness, rain does appear to be on the way; it was predicted before the latest prayer vigil ever took place. It isn't going to be much, though.

"We're not going to break any drought," said meteorologist Robert Beasley. "But it's better than nothing."

Meanwhile, is there some coherent plan for the future coming out of all this praying and singing and gesturing? Nope. Not a word about finding new ways of getting water to the people who need it.

A few protesters, concerned with this rather egregious violation of church-state separation, tried to drive their point home at the event, but they weren't allowed to get too close:

Twenty-two protesters were forced to stay more than a block away, out of earshot and out of sight of the prayer service, on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. They were members of the Atlanta Freethought Society. Signs include "Hail Priest-King Perdue" or "Pray on the Church Steps, not the Capitol Steps."

Why were they kept away? The Atlanta Freethought Society isn't exactly a violent group of people, and they have a very good point. For the governor to lead a prayer service at the capitol, and an all-Christian one at that, is clear endorsement of a particular religion by a government official in an official capacity. Of course, the right to peaceful but effective protest is like all rights these days. You only have it if your local government feels like giving it to you, and if you hold a view that isn't shared by that government it's off to the "free speech zone" with you. This is what America is turning into, and certainly a bunch of people who question the existence of Jehovah and the efficacy of ritualistic supplication aren't going to be allowed anywhere near a pray-in held at the building for which their taxes pay. Didn't we have a revolution in this country over "taxation without representation" once? Maybe that was the "old" history, before the revisionists started turning the revolutionaries into religious figures.

It was a head-scratching experience for some observers, as state Rep. Melvin Everson noted.

"I know we're on the Capitol steps," he told the crowd. "And it's quite all right."

"This isn't the first day he's been on his knees in prayer for rain," Cagle said of Perdue. "This is not a ceremony. It's an action of calling the entire state to pray."

The event was billed as an interfaith ceremony, but only Protestant ministers spoke.

— source

So, let's face it; this prayer thing has been tried a couple of times now and it isn't alleviating the drought. It's time to turn to Tlaloc. Let the child sacrifices begin!

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And Thunder Is the Bowling of Angels

Back in June of this year, the Southeastern USA was in a terrible drought. Taking a boldly useless approach to the problem, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue held a pray-in on June 11 in order to petition the sky-god he fantasizes about to make rain fall on his state.

Surprisingly enough, it didn't work. The drought continues and the situation worsens. Some bold and decisive action is needed! Governor Perdue has once again stepped up to the plate! Next week, he'll be hosting a prayer service on Tuesday to get true-believers together to pray for rain, because it worked so well the last time!

Georgia Turns to Prayer to Ease Drought

ATLANTA (AP) — What to do when the rain won't come? If you're Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, you pray.

The governor will host a prayer service next week to ask for relief from the drought gripping the Southeast.

"The only solution is rain, and the only place we get that is from a higher power," Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley said on Wednesday.

Perdue's office has sent out invitations to leaders from several faiths for the service, set for Tuesday...

Perdue, a Baptist, has enjoyed strong support from Georgia's Christian conservatives...

Albert Einstein once said that insanity was repeating the same actions time and again but expecting a different outcome. By this definition, I am of the firm opinion that Perdue is a raving loon. Assuming that he really believes in his favorite mythology, he would be praying for rain on his own all the time. So would the many other Georgians who share in these beliefs. They've already tried this en masse at least once, and now Perdue is going to pull in a bunch of other believers in similar mythologies in the apparent belief that somehow the sky-king in whom he believes is more likely to accede to the supplications of 20 people than he is to the begging of just one. Is there some reason to believe this to be the case? Or is it that the people he's gathering have been proclaimed "leaders of several faiths" and so have more pull with Big Daddy Rainmaker than some lowly farmer outside of Climax, GA?

No matter. The whole thing is both nutty and futile. When one believes that rain comes from a deity, I'm sure one feels a lessened desire to insure that one's beliefs are in line with the rest of reality.

None of this is to say that all Georgians are religiously-motivated nutters who pray to invisible spirits to clean up their messes, like the governor. The Atlanta Freethought Society is taking a much more sober and dim view of Perdue's nonsense:

Group to Protest Ga. Rain Prayer

A secular group said Friday it would protest Gov. Sonny Perdue's planned prayer service intended to ask for relief from the Southeastern drought, saying the rally violates the principle of separation of church and state...

"The problem is not that they are praying for rain, it's they are doing it in our name," said Ed Buckner of the Atlanta Freethought Society, which seeks to educate the public about the separation of church and state. "We didn't elect that guy as a preacher. He has no right to make a religious statement on behalf of Georgians."

I agree generally with Buckner's sentiment here, but I think the basal problem is deeper than this one action. Ultimately, the fault lies with an electorate that keeps turning over the keys to power to people like Perdue, people who call in a team of witch-doctors and mumbling incantations to giants in the firmament and thinking that those giants are going to reply by changing our world to conform to their whims. People who hear celestial voices needed medication, not re-election.

Clearly, the rain-god Hiro is punishing Georgians for not eating the hearts of the enemies they should be slaying in battle. Unless Perdue wakes up and realizes the might of Hiro, he and all Georgians will find themselves in Rarohenga after they die.

Why would this be any less valid than praying to an ancient Near Eastern deity to make it rain in Georgia?

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Real Men Love Tlaloc

Came across this little gem this morning:

Perdue, farmers pray for rain
Governor issues state proclamation declaring June 11 a Day of Prayer for Agriculture

Gov. Sonny Perdue and Georgia farm officials joined in prayer Monday morning with hopes that rain would soon fall upon the parched state.

Perdue was in Macon at the Georgia Farm Bureau to issue a state proclamation declaring June 11 a Day of Prayer for Agriculture before a gathering of about 250 people that featured three prayers.

"We don't need the government's help, we need God's help," Perdue said...

Vincent "Zippy" Duvall, president of the Georgia Farm Bureau, said the organization began trying in late May to establish the day of prayer.

"There is only one word that describes what we're here to do today, one word, and that's obedience," Duvall said, greeting the crowd...

Tommy Irvin, Georgia's agriculture commissioner, who estimated the drought and Easter freeze have cost farmers and cattle owners hundreds of millions of dollars, said, "We must not forget that all good things come from above."

Haygood gave the final prayer of the morning.
Georgia's food, cotton and related industries bring in an estimated $54 billion of the state's total economic output, according to the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences.

Perdue said God moved him to leave his career in veterinarian medicine for farming in the mid-1970s.

"I've known since 1977 that I've got to get on my knees and pray," Perdue said. "And that's what we are here to do today, to start a prayer revival around this state."

However, Perdue said Georgia will only be blessed under certain conditions.

He said Georgians should look at their lifestyles and the way they conduct everyday business.

"As smart as many of us think we can be sometimes and all that we think we can create and all the government programs we think we can have, I'm here to tell you as your governor that we're still dependent upon a graceful and almighty God," Perdue said. "Only God can make it rain."

Clearly, the governor could better serve his people if he covered as many bases as possible. He needs to make sure that as many rain-gods as possible are placated if he wants to maximize the chances that the drought ends. I suggest that in addition to praying to Jehovah, it's time to round up the kiddies and make a proper sacrifice to Tlaloc, the Toltec and Aztec rain-god.



Tlaloc was worshiped in Mesoamerica for at least 1,000 years, during which time he successfully insured that the rains fell upon the maize and squash fields of two of the greatest civilizations of the Western hemisphere. By contrast, Jehovah has been worshiped in Georgia for only about 300 years, during which time there have been repeated droughts. It's all well and good to get together and pray, but that's really the easy way out, and frankly the deity from whom aid is being requested doesn't really have a very good track record. If Georgia's leadership is going to start invoking supernatural entities, then, they should be certain that they're not simply wasting taxpayer dollars by performing the correct rituals.

Like most effective consultants, Tlaloc's price does run a bit high. His payment consists of the drowning of children. This is a bad drought, so it's going to take a large number of children. To be conservative about it, though, one child from each of the 156 Georgia counties affected by the drought should be given to the rain-god. Many more than that die every year in the state because of a lack of access to basic medical care and nutrition, and Governor Perdue hasn't called for a "day of prayer" to change that fact, so it's safe to assume here that it's not as high a priority for Georgia as is ending this drought. Thus, another 156 children dying for a more important cause shouldn't be of much concern. To make it as fair as possible, the Governor could simply draw social security numbers at random, and the children whose numbers are drawn would be brought to the state capital and drowned in a bathtub on the steps of the capital building.

If I recall my Aztec ritual dogma correctly, it's also necessary for the priests to pull strings of thorns through their tongues, cheeks and penises. That's between the Governor and god, of course. I don't know that we'd want to see that on TV.



A state day of prayer simply isn't enough. In fact, I'm quite certain that all those who participated have probably prayed to Jehovah before... and look where it's gotten them! It's time that Governor Perdue called for a state day of sacrifice. Doesn't Georgia deserve it?

Of course, he could just start advocating a scientific approach that included such things as more efficient use of the land and water available, the development of drought-resistant crops, and the construction of a better irrigation system with increased reliance on desalinization. That'd just be silly, though. Praying to supernatural beings is a much better use of his time. Wise men know that child sacrifice and begging help from invisible spirits is reliable; humans have done it for at least as long as they've had language. This science stuff? It hasn't even been around for as long as the New Testament. Who knows what it'll do?

The fool has said in his heart that there is no Tlaloc, of course... but who cares what fools say?

Remember, you can't spell "ooga booga" without GA.

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Life: Just Add Water

After weeks of near-silence, the woods are again filled with the calls of tree frogs tonight. I can distinctly make out green and pine woods frog calls. After a long absence of rain (we're still about 14.5" below normal for the year), we've had two days with at least a little bit, and a good soaking this afternoon. On a normal evening at this time of year, the volume of the frogs is so great here that one's ears hurt after a few minutes. Lately, there had been cricket calls, but otherwise dead quiet. Even tonight it's not nearly as loud as usual. Nonetheless, they're coming back. I wonder where they've been.

Life always finds a way.

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