Friendly Atheist: What Caused the Oroville Dam Crisis? Some Christians Online Blame CA Liberals for Defying God.
Here in California our several years of drought have ended (at least in the northern part of the state) in so much rain that an enormous reservoir is threatened to overflow.
The reaction of some Christians is a typical self-serving superstition, the flip side of the claim by numerous evangelical leaders that the election of Donald Trump was due to divine intervention, e.g. Todd Starnes: ‘I Believe That We Experienced Divine Intervention Last November’. The way this mental fallacy works is that, whenever anything you approve of happens, you attribute it to God being on your side; whenever something bad happens to people you don’t like, it’s God taking his revenge. (And you ignore all the contrary cases, either way, like California’s abundant economy or tornadoes demolishing churches in southern states.)
Yes all humans are susceptible to such self-serving patterns of thought. But some cases like this it’s hard not to conclude that Christians who say such things are just not too bright. The area threatened by the dam overflow is inland California, a region far more conservative (and Trump supporting) than the coastal cities… which are in no way threatened.
