http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12101074_1

You have no idea what you are talking about. Believing that all things work according to God’s will has nothing whatever to do with denial, plausible or otherwise. You don’t want to have a serious conversation about this, so I won’t pursue the topic any further.
Not only is how I feel about George W. Bush completely unknown to you, it is also totally irrelevant to this topic.

You just felt the urge to “pay me back” for the beginning of my response to you. Silly boy.

Nevertheless, I have no trouble discerning God’s will in this, and further, I would venture to say that the friends and families of the dead miners will be far easier to console having the knowledge of God’s will than they would wandering in spiritual darkness cursing Him.

See the Book of Job in this regard.
Any translation will do, but the New American Bible is my preference:
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/job/intro.htm

http://www.thetalentshow.org/

Far be it for me to defend the media, however, in this case, I don t think anything was their fault. They reported the information they were being given as they had no way of knowing the correct information unless they had a mole in the command center.

They got the story wrong. Badly.

That means either an official source gave them bad information or they reported a poorly sourced story. If it’s the former, the media should report that. If it’s the latter, then somebody didn’t do their job right.

In all likelihood, I think the word from the resuce teams in the mine must have come back to the command center that they found the 12 miners and somehow someone thought they heard that 12 survivors were found. It appears that the mine personnel who misinterpreted the reports from the rescue teams then phoned their family and friends in the church and word quickly got out of control.

While I can sympatize with the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position the company was in at that point (i.e., “Who do I tell not to celebrate?”) I think they should have erred on the side of providing truthful accounts of events (and rebuking unproven rumors) even if it would have caused more anguish to the families.

Coal miners are, of course paid for the danger of their work. GAP clerks, for example, are not.

Your apology is accepted.

Jay C, nonetheless the story was not, at that moment, the media’s error. It was the death of twelve men. Nothing could be more horrible, in my mind, (with the exception of losing a child) than saying goodbye to a loved one in the morning, and never seeing them alive again.

“Orwellian (well named) would have us believe that the  solution to this coal mining  problem is to pay more money for every other job in the area. The actual worth of that work is irrelevant, you see, as is the relationship between the demand for coal for wages paid.”

I extended your argument further than you did — free market dictates value of coal= free market dictates value of lives spent in procuring coal, and the whole thing justified because people enter into the free market on their own free will.

It’s a classical libertarian-type argument, but it is not the argument you made and I apologoze.

Now that’s rich coming from the man who only recently was explaining to us all so patiently that the miners deserved their fate because they chose to work in the mines.

What a terrible mess.