At our family's getaway house in central New York state, summer lightning strikes have more than once caused the phone to ring.

You impress easily. Be happy you do not have sparks jumping out of your electrical outlets.

we take lightning as a message from the Almighty to quit playing and come back into the clubhouse.

Gee, Why don't you put videos of The Kingdom on and mind groove with that Danish auteur you lauded so expressively a mere fortnight ago. Or was it more recent? When lightning strikes it won't hit twice they say, that should comfort you in the dark night when you wonder if you advocated sex torture. Don't your ilk always end up promoting what you'd never be able to endure, but pawning it off on other people never loses its appeal.

Only God can hit it.

What in the holy living fuck are you talking about? Did you lose your way on the way to the "Garrison Kiellor is a torture enabler" hate thread or what?

The question I pose to physicists and other thinkers: Which is the essential fact, the lightning bolt or the electron?

...I was a kid. A ball of lightning came through her living room window and rolled across her kitchen floor.

That was her story and seeing her sob made a believer out of me.

I've been in canoes when my graphite fishing rods started to hum. We scooted to shore.

As an "atheistic people" myself, I can tell you I am sick, sick, SICK of lines like that one. No, we aren't all just waiting for a Sign from God so we can believe. We aren't credulous jackasses in disguise as atheists. We don't believe in god. There IS no god. And no amount of lightening is going to strike "something approaching religious terror" into our hearts.

Sheesh.

That was, by far, the most insane letters entry I have seen in man an outing. What ARE you on about, friend? Seriously... this sort of inanity needs explanation for me to keep my faith in humanity's capacity to rationalize!

It's all poetic, romantic. It's Frankenstein.

Yet for all his talk about facing life as it is, and avoiding "fairy tales," he admits that the lightning incident has informed his writing career ever since.

Maybe this makes more sense in the movie, but it comes across here as a non-sequitur.

Why would avoiding fairy tales mean that a dramatic incident wouldn't affect one's life? I could easily see being struck by lightning might make a person even less inclined to believe fairy tales.

Isn't that just a fancy word for 'shit we make up'?

At least call a spade a spade

I always felt sad about this man who was struck 7 times (8 really):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan

I can't imagine lightening making any Atheist question their lack in belief in a deity, much less most of them. Pretty supid and inflammatory statement. What are we supposed to be, back in the iron age worried that Zeus might strike us down?

atheists, lighten up! I'm an atheist, but whenever I witness something really awe-inspiring (a BIG lightening bolt, or an incredible harvest moon rising over a hill) I get an almost religious jolt of just haw fantastic the universe is!

A short while back. O'Hehir gave a glowing review to a film by a Danish director that mixed sex with torture. In this review, he rhapsodizes on about lightning. I think it is intensely inconsistent to wax poetic and talk about God, on the one hand, then demean sexuality on the other hand. Where else do human beings most often encounter the metaphysical in nature but in sex? Unless of course, we are only evolved apes, hence the expression "apelings," i.e. little apes. If that is all we are, metaphysics doesn't exist and torture is just another type of animal behavior.

Some of you will probably read half of the previous sentence and accuse me of advocating that which I oppose. That seems to be the way of this medium. to skim read and castigate, with little reflection.

I think usually in the U.S. they can revive your heart after this kind of injury, but he was in a remote area in a foreign country with bad roads, so he couldn't make it to the hospital.

People never believe me when I tell them that's how he died, but oh well. My young mind could only make sense of it by telling myself that God needed him for some higher purpose, or that he was too good for this earth.

I used to fear lighting, thinking God was coming to take me too, but now I think if that's the way I die maybe it's my dad bringing me wherever he is, and that's cool with me. We deal with death and grief in all kinds of ways throughout our lives...