A 2 year old girl picks up a screwdriver, runs around, falls, and…
She's fine now, fortunately — it somehow missed her brain. The father calls this event a "Christmas miracle."
That God fella. He's such a card, poking little girls in the head with screwdrivers.
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Schizophrenia, again.
What about the little girls who got poked in the head and died? Where was God then? Policy wanking with Pat Robertson?
Perhaps it's one of those wacky carpenter-tool-handling cults.
Seriously, she was lucky as all get out. A miracle? Why do people claim "miracle" for the lone survivior of a disaster or recovering victim?
No, no - you're missing the point. Now, she's brain-damaged enough to convert to Young Earth Creationism. It's God's Will at work!
The lord moves in mysterious ways.
Cue creepy Thermin music.
God could have saved her and her family a lot of pain and stress by simply knocking the tip of the screwdriver a centimeter or two to the left.
Kid gets a black eye and a scolding for running with the screwdriver. Parent gets a scolding from opposite parent for leaving child alone with access to screwdriver. Everyone breaths a sigh of relief. Hell, they probably would even THANK god for twisting the screwdriver a bit.
Instead he has to get her all stabbed and mess up the whole families holiday.
Maybe he is the god of neurosurgeons.
At least it wasn't sonic?
I use "Christmas Miracle" all the time as a joke, about the most mundane things. My christian friends tell me "you can't use miracle for something that could happen on it's own, that's just a coincidence" to which I respond by just staring at them, waiting for them to finally realize the irony of what they just said. They never do...
I think we're being a bit rough on the father. He didn't necessarily invoke god, he may have used "miracle" in the secular sense i.e incredibly lucky. A couple of weeks ago in a snowstorm, I slid my new car down a 20 foot bank into a ditch with no injuries to my daughters and no damage to the car except for a ding in the front panel. I call that a miracle with no thought of any supernatural involvement.
You can't really fault a father for making the "it was a miracle" statement after a scare like that.
The real shame is that he couldn't muster (or the reporter didn't report) the same level of awe and gratitude for the medical staff that extracted the screwdriver and cared for her. Missing the eye and brain was fortunate, but treating her wasn't a simple matter of yanking the thing out and slapping on a band-aid. Without them, what would her father have done? Prayed it out?
So, let's not thank the doctors, nurses, and medical researchers that devote their lives to healing. Instead, let's give Sky Daddy props for shoving a screwdriver in her head but missing vital organs. God is great, no?
-OEJ
I just noticed that this took place in a church. Could god not be bothered to childproof his house before the kids came over?
So they have a fund to pay for her treatment? Will they sue the church, that had a dangerous implement in a "supervised" play area? Friggin' negligent, that.
Queue the concern troll wondering about all us bad atheists using this near miss tragedy as some spring board for our anti-god views.
Where is FtK when you need ..er... expect her.
Churches just aren't safe places for anyone. Really. They should have signs on the doors saying "Enter at your own risk."
Sorry... But, I think that was funnier when it was still inside my head.
The priests at the Mayo Clinic did it again!
I can imagine this guy's wife:
"You know what would be the true miracle? You keeping your tools properly stored".
"was playing with some other children in a supervised area during a church service in Cannon Falls, Minn., Dec. 19 when she found the screwdriver"
Riiiiggght
Clearly they lacked the faith to cure her by anointing with oil and laying on hands. They resorted to secular medicine and now have a hefty medical bill. Since they can't sue God for leaving His Tool about, they have established a fund.
Maybe it was a miracle that it was a standard head and not the superfatal Phillips? ;)
It could have killed thousands if it had been the Torx variety.
Perhaps it had already killed thousands, and her miracle soft baby skull halted the spree.
Yeah, that frustrates me more than almost anything else, when people use this type of tragedy to solidify and promote their faith in God. My wife had to have two artificial valves put in and a hole patched when she was an infant, and my in-laws always bring her "miracles" up any time religion (or our atheism) comes up. We just say that we appreciate the work that the DOCTORS did, and she was lucky that she was close to a good hospital (Childrens in Pittsburgh).
I'm sick of humanity being blamed when bad things happen (9-11 is a result of gays and liberals) and God getting credit when good things happen. Or in this case, bad things happen but they aren't worst case scenario.
Dear God, thank you for lodging this screwdriver in my child's head. I thank your grace for not turning her into a vegetable or killing her with your master plan.
"That God fella. He's such a card, poking little girls in the head with screwdrivers."
PZ....you really crack me up sometimes.
With orange juice and vodka.
Always, it's, "Praise the Lord; it's a Miracle!" and not, "Thank goodness for the years of med school those talented doctors went through to learn the skills they needed to help my child survive!"
/facepalm
What a tool. Aside from the logical absurdity of saying that a girl who gets stabbed in the skull with a screwdriver - but doesn't die or become brain damaged - is a "miracle," the hubris involved in believing that God cars for his little girl but not the 40,000 North Korean political prisoners/slaves - it's just mind boggling.
God doesn't care about the hundreds of Congolese child soldiers forced to kill their own family members, but God sure cares about his little girl.
This goes beyond myopia and self-absorption into something truly pathological. It's like these clowns don't realize there's a whole big world out there filled with misery and suffering totally beyond their capacity to understand...or care. Christ almighty.
I guess the Big Daddy has only a limited number of miracles to go around (or perhaps he was having a smoke at the time); the little girl who went out on Christmas day on her new bike, did not fare as well:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22400869/
And this was in Texas too, so God must be really in a pissy mood..
Well, considering it was in Texas, maybe that's God sending a message that he's not pleased about the recent attempts there to push creationism in the school system.
Hey, two can play the "It's a message from God" game!
Today I did not run around with a screw driver in my hand, fall, and impale my skull with it ... It's a miracle!!
Well, the KJV babble does say, (Matt. 19:14):
"Suffer little children..."
/quote mine
This took place at a church. Not only should gawd do better, but maybe now he can help out the family with its medical bills. But no, the family has set up a fund asking people, not gawd, for contributions.
So here you have gawd, who is guilty of criminal negligence, who not only escapes charges, but doesn't accept civil liability either.
--and instead gets credit for minimizing the damage!
Can I get away with that kind of thing, please?
Can we ad this to the list of consciousness raising that needs to be done. Lots of comments here about the need to thank (and the actual lack of such thanks) the medical staff that actually did the fixing up of this child rather than invisible grand poohbah that made things such that she didn't get scrambled eggs for brains when the screwdriver entered her skull. I do this all the time -- George Carlin knows language is a powerful thing and European languages are filled with references to xtian mythology -- so 'thank god' can be corrected to 'thank ' Do it with your own language; edit out the superstitious references, it's harder than you think.
"Don't run with scissors," that's all I remember. That and, from Mr. McCormick (on the occasion of somebody tossing a screwdriver to somebody else, in 7th-grade shop class) "Didya ever see a screwdriver in someone's eye? Not a pleasant sight."
So now it's "Don't run with screwdrivers," too.
Huh.
Wouldn't it be a "miracle" if she hadn't been stabbed at all... better yet, if she hadn't had access to the screwdriver in the first place?
I guess that would be the "miracle" of attentive parenting.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya, "The Princess Bride"
Huh. So, I guess God loved the one family more than the other? Or he couldn't do two things at once? "Sorry about the car hitting your kid, I was busy making sure that a screwdriver missed a frontal lobe."
This seemed like another of those situations where "a millimeter to the left and she wouldn't be here" stories which I usually react to by simply observing that "it wasn't a millimeter to the left and that's why she is still here, ipso facto."
But then her mother goes and ruins the warm, holiday spirit that suffuses my bones just now.
"All I kept thinking was I don't care about scars, I don't care about loss of movement, I don't care about loss of vision, I don't care about her speech. I just want her alive," she said.
In the interest of not spoiling this year's lovely Christmas afterglow, I not going to describe the images this conjures up. But isn't that statement something to start you thinking?
Maybe he is the god of neurosurgeons.
well, that would explain Egnor, anyway.
Today I did not run around with a screw driver in my hand, fall, and impale my skull with it ... It's a miracle!!
no... no...
I will not take that bait.
;)
*reminisces to old Saturday Night Live skit with Billy Crystal instead*
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/84/84ewillie.phtml
they must have been atheists...
Oh Yeah! I hate it when that happens!
#35 - Im not so generous, not only will I share what image that brings to my mind, but Ill link to a youtube of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBYk4F164Hk
These people do know the word "lucky" can be used as well, don't they? If the "My Lord!" (not ever "Our Lord!") and "It's a miracle!" were being used metaphorically, this wouldn't be posted here, after all.
Can, or has, a study be done to see if there is some brain abnormality that prevents Xians (and similar religious fanatics) from being able to distinguish metaphorical from literal speech? And would this cognitive disability also explain the common inability among them to develop a sense of humor?
The real miracle is that, not only did the father live, but he also saved a lot of money on his car insurance by switching to Godco.
Perhaps this will become the 21st Century equivalent of hardshell Baptist snake-handling. Line up all your two year olds, screwdrivers at port arms, and send them scurrying across the room to prove their faith(screw that wussified christening and baptizing crap, make 'em earn it).
And it could take place right after the sack race at the church picnic.
I'm struggling for a word here.
What about the case when someone is terrifically unlucky? The brake line goes on the newly marrieds' car, they skid through the only missing bit of roadside barrier for miles, just as the express train happens to be rolling through the bit of railway track their crumpled car is on, and this causes the falling electricity pylon to set fire to the wagons full of gas...
Anti-miracle doesn't seem *pointed* enough, and so "god" escapes blame, again.
How does a tiger escape a supposedly escape-proof enclosure?
Another Christmas miracle.
Yesterday I cut out a cabinet for a dishwasher. Laying around, I had a circular saw, a jig saw, a reciprocating saw, an air compressor, a 2 year old, a finish nailer, a brad nailer, several hammers, a 4 year old, razor knives, screwdrivers, pliers, and a drill.
The only thing that happened is I cut out a cabinet and installed a dishwasher. It's a Festivus miracle!
Not according to the X-ray. Or what have I missed?
The true miracle is the antibiotics that are going to keep her from dying of an infection.
--and quite painfully, at that.
Child recovers from deep head injury -- father's brain damaged.
And if these people lived in one of the many countries that have universal health care, they wouldn't have to be asking for contributions to pay for the girl's astronomical medical bills. But I guess the US lack of a health care system is part of God's great plan or something.
The true miracle is the antibiotics that are going to keep her from dying of an infection.
Unless she's unfortunate enough to get a MDR infection. Of course, those don't exist, since they're products of untrue evolution, so she ought to be all right, right?
Two big Christmas stories down here in Australia are a father of five who was bashed to death on the beach with a cricket bat, and a 26-year-old nurse walking to her birthday party who died when a car lost control and hopped the curb.
Christmas miracles!
My christian friends tell me "you can't use miracle for something that could happen on it's own, that's just a coincidence" to which I respond by just staring at them, waiting for them to finally realize the irony of what they just said. They never do...
There isn't any irony there. The things your friends consider to be miracles are things that never happened -- they're lies.
I think we're being a bit rough on the father. He didn't necessarily invoke god, he may have used "miracle" in the secular sense i.e incredibly lucky.
You don't have to believe in God to be stupid. Since when is "Christmas miracle" secular?
Just spent the holiday with my immediate family, which is nine kids under ten, and enough adults to insure that we were too busy arguing to notice anything our little brats did. Yet they were unharmed in this extremely dangerous setting. A miracle? No. A minimum of attention, and a bit of good luck.
Every minute was a potential disaster, but with a tiny bit of thought we were able to prevent the ten-thousand most common mistakes. The ten-thousand and first, however, is always beyond us.
Let's give a break to those who have tragedy forced upon them, they need our support, and we may be one of them in the near future.
That said, if anyone were ever to try and comfort me by explaining that it is "god's will", I would tear them a new asshole so large that the city of Boston would immediatly hire me as a consultant on the "Big Dig".
It's a little disturbing, but I kind of look forward to a time when folks might offer me the "god's ways" explaination, just so I can deconstruct it without being out of line (my father's funeral seems to be the best candidate; tell me why my son didn't get to have more time with his grandad, is it Jesus' fault? Well fuck Jesus and the ass and/or mare he rode in on)
I'm going to miss my dad, and I'm sure that my son will miss his grandpa, but we are going to miss him because he smoked his lungs out. He loves us, but he is leaving early. It is a purely worldly consequense of his habits.
If I believed in god, I would be so full of hate (he allowed my father to become addicted to nicotine, he never gave my father the strength to quit, he did not alleviate my father's pain after my father quit smoking, and he accepted the unusually persistant deterioration of my father's lungs.)
I have forgotten what my point was supposed to be.
Take it or leave it.
Oh, I just remembered.
Fuck You God.
You are a tiny piece of shit, and I wish to bleach you out of my life, and the lives of my children.
Fuck You god.
#7: I LOLed. This whole thing is quite horrible, but "at least it wasn't sonic".
The girl is two years old, so she is still technically an atheist. Someone who thinks of themselves as one of gawd's minions must have put the screwdriver there to teach the older kids a lesson in the danger of not believing and to keep them in line.
Christians have the unique ability to have it both ways.
On the one hand, it's a "Christmas Miracle" if the child survives.
On the other hand, if the child did not survive, you hear "I guess God had to call her home to heaven, as he needed her up there."
Either way, a warped belief system is supported. There is no way to fight such an all-purpose God - either way they can chalk it up to their God.
That's the kind of ridiculousness that is impossible to reason with. But then again, blind faith usually is.
You have to admire this kid who watches Discovery Channel rather than the usual submental trash on TV.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20071228/avalanche-survivor/
"PARK CITY, Utah -- An 11-year-old boy said a TV show about surviving an avalanche helped him when he was buried by one at a ski resort.
"Create air pockets," Max Zilvitis told himself, recalling a show on the Discovery Channel.
That's about all he remembers from an avalanche that buried him for about 30 minutes Sunday and killed a 30-year-old Colorado man at The Canyons."
easy one, humans only use 10% of their brain. The screwdriver pierced some portion of the spare 90%.
Next!
at any given moment.
Over longer periods, like hours, we do use all of it.
Even though we wouldn't really need to, as it appears. There's a bilingual girl in Germany whose IIRC right brain hemisphere is simply missing and who lives almost without symptoms. Well, we have two kidneys and can do fine with one most of the time...
I just ran (again) across this essay by Daniel Dennett; I wish I had remembered it when this thread was fresh, because it is so appropriate.
Amusingly, there was a sort of similar story I heard on the news the other night.
Two window cleaners on a skyscraper were cleaning windows, right at the top, and then their cradle collapsed.
It was another miracle!
You see, one of them died, but the other survived! He'd just come out of his 18 day coma, his broken limbs and ribs were on the mend, and they're waiting to find out on the brain damage.
But, you know, yay for God, He really stepped in there!
Not according to the X-ray. Or what have I missed?
at any given moment.
Over longer periods, like hours, we do use all of it.
Even though we wouldn't really need to, as it appears. There's a bilingual girl in Germany whose IIRC right brain hemisphere is simply missing and who lives almost without symptoms. Well, we have two kidneys and can do fine with one most of the time...