Not a miracle
I just want to point out one thing, regarding something said by a family member (Anna Kasto [sp?]) of one of the dead miners (Otto Withers). I heard her say this on the 2006-01-04 edition of NBC Nightly News:
We’re Christian people, ourself. We have got some of us is right down to sayin’, that we don’t even know if there is a Lord anymore. We had a miracle, and it was taken away from us.
Not so. The miracle she’s talking about is the survival of 12 of the 13 miners, instead of just one. She basically says that this miracle was somehow withdrawn, but in fact, it never occurred. Human misreporting is not the same as the divine repossession of a miracle.
The quote starts at 8 minutes and 8 seconds in the Nightly News podcast for that night.
UPDATE 2006-01-06: I just corrected the date above. I did not hear her say this one year before it happened. (Yes, I’m still used to writing “2005”.)