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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Monday, March 11, 2002
22:08 - Oh, how can I be so skeptical?
http://www.cbn.com/living/amazingstories/groundzero/wtc-praimnath.asp

(top) link
First read this article, a True Tale of Survival recounted at The 700 Club by someone whose faith in God was what saved him from certain death, not just from the WTC towers' debris crushing him as he rushed from the building, but from the plane itself crashing through the window where he worked.

One spin on the article is by Sgt. Stryker, who takes exception (and quite rightly, I think) to the guy's selfishness in worldview that lets him think that all those good and miraculous things that happened on September 11th were because of the Power of Prayer, specifically his prayer, saving him from death while all those other people in the towers (all of whom, apparently, weren't praying enough) died.

That in itself's a pretty good read. But when I read the original interview on CBN.com, the only thing that went through my mind, and perhaps it's just me being callous and faithless and cynical, was "How likely can it possibly be that this is true?" And the second was "If it isn't, who's going to try to prove that?"
Gorman: He made it through the crash, but the wing of the plane was blocking his only means of escape.

Stanley: This plane was at an angle and the wing hung in my office door 20 feet away.

I cried, I prayed, and the entire ceiling came down. The furniture was mangled. The tables, the computers, the walls, the ceiling -- everything came down.

And I prayed, saying, "Lord, send somebody, anybody." And out of this smoke I saw the light. It was a flashlight somebody had.

I said, "Lord, just this one time more. If you give me the strength, I'll be able to do it."

I stood up, and I felt so powerful that I could have done anything. When Samson got up and shook off his enemies, that's how I felt. And I said, "This wall is no match for me."

I started clawing my way, climbing, climbing, punching, hitting until the man on the other side saw my hand and my head. And he said, "I can see your hand." I said, "As soon as you can see my head and hand, you just grab and yank me through."

Brian Clark, afterwards I got to know his name, he grabbed my hand and my head and he pulled with all his strength, and I squirmed my way through to this opening.

Gorman: Stanley and Brian miraculously made it down to the lobby, but the entire concourse was engulfed in flames.

Now... I'm not claiming to know the truth of the details of what happened on the 81st floor of Tower 2. I wasn't there. But I have seen the video of the crashes a number of times, and I do seem to remember something about a huge fireball that immediately erupted out the sides of the buildings where each plane hit. The violence with which the plane hit the building, pulverizing all parts of it almost instantly, and the force with which its fuel tanks exploded, would have resulted in the three or four floors above and below the plane being reduced to a gas plasma within seconds, if I have a reasonable grasp of the physics involved. The wing was hanging in the office door and blocking his way out? Er... unless he was miraculously protected from the heat and flame pouring from a torched 767 fuselage so that all he saw between him and the wing was mangled furniture and ceiling tiles and computers falling down, and not a white-hot wall of liquefied metal and building material and jet fuel, I must admit to being a tad skeptical. Damn me and my callousness and squalid pragmatism, but something about it just doesn't stroke my nerve endings with the soothing exhortations of Inspiring Obvious Truth.

It may very well be true, and in that case I'm completely without adequate words to describe how impressed I am. But now that the emotions of the moment have had six months to amortize out, I don't think it represents harshest sterile humanism for me to react with a perked eyebrow rather than a gaping mouth.

Especially if we're only just now hearing about it, and on The 700 Club rather than on any major news organs' human-interest stories.

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© Brian Tiemann