Granted, I haven't seen them all, but ...

[apocalypsos]

... that's the first time I've ever watched an episode of I Survived when they asked the person who lived through a horrific ordeal why they survived at the end and rather than saying something profound like, "Because God wanted me to live," or, "Because I was meant to do something big with my life and I hadn't done it yet," she simply said, "Because I saw a television special that told me how to escape from a car trunk and it was raining, so that put out the flames I had all over me."

I kind of appreciated that.

Comments

[allthelivesofme.livejournal.com]

That's very nice (and very unexpected)! I was watching some thing on a tornado that hit a daycare center and some of the kids were a little banged up but none died, and of course one of the workers gave the whole "God was looking out for us!" thing and I was like, "No, you and the other adults acted quickly and got the kids to the safest possible places, and also you got lucky. But don't mind me, just go ahead and tell people whose children *have* died in F3 tornadoes that God must not have cared as much about them." *eyeroll*

Um, yeah. Sore spot issue there. LOL

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

I know, right? A lot of the people on these shows are like, "I survived because I really wanted to live for my family and kids." And people who died in the same circumstances didn't?

[myniamh.livejournal.com]

Obviously they just weren't praying hard enough.

[trcunning.livejournal.com]

That's always sticks in my craw about cancer survivors and their families. "X survived because God was on her side."

My niece was 4 yrs old - what beef could God have with her?

[allthelivesofme.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I'm sorry. :-(

[sabra-n.livejournal.com]

...How do you escape from a car trunk?

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

They have those pulls in the newer models that you can yank on and it'll open the trunk. They put them in after there were several instances of kids dying after crawling into car trunks on hot days and getting stuck inside.

[sabra-n.livejournal.com]

This makes my paranoia ever so much better. :)

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

i love when the practical reality of something works. brilliant- this is one of the best effects of widespread dissemination of useful information.

[tripoli8.livejournal.com]

Yeah, seriously. I don't know if people mentally prepare scripts for what they'd ever say if they were interviewed after some near-death experience, but I feel like atheists don't get to use the same boilerplate as everybody else (not that this lady was necessarily an atheist).

I had the same reaction after Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson in January and everybody called it a miracle. Like, jeez, this captain put how many thousands of hours into training, plus all the ridiculously well-trained rescuers, plus the passengers who stayed calm and helped each other, plus a fair amount of really dumb luck, but to explain that we need God? Do we really not have another word for a really wonderful improbable thing? Yeesh.

[wenchamok.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to ask you...have you discovered the awesome crack that is "Surviving Disaster" on Spike TV?