The Arrogance of Miracles

The Arrogance of Miracles

March 2005

You are God. I don’t care which God. Pick a God. Any God. And you’re it. You created the entire universe and all that is in it. The billions of billions of galaxies, the individual stars in those galaxies, the clouds, gases, liquids and solids on all the planets orbiting those stars—all of it. You created all of it. You are eternal, all-powerful and all-knowing. No one and nothing can understand you. But right now you must take a moment to help Goober Dimwiddle sink a putt on the 18th hole of Taylor Junction’s one and only golf course. After all, he asked you real nice, and there’s ten bucks riding on this putt. So you guide the golf ball gently into the cup and Presto! A miracle has been born. Goober says thanks.

Miracles have always been fodder for the religion-peddlers, and like all fads, they come and go, injecting themselves into the public consciousness with varying degrees of intensity. Today they are all the rage again, rivaling perhaps the 15th century, when Europe literally ran amok with them. Cow has twins? It’s a miracle! Clouds look like a donkey? It’s a miracle! An angel visits a shepherd girl and tells her that the weather is going to change, on and off, for a long, long time? It’s a miracle! Bird droppings on the well bucket look like two minstrels juggling ears of corn while standing on their heads? It’s a miracle! Yeah, the 1400s were big on miracles.

Well, the miracles are back and they’re bigger than ever. After a decent interval during which the world mourned the quarter million people in Southeast Asia killed by a tsunami, the ones who survived are now crawling out of the woodwork to tell the stories of their own, personal miracles. God saved them, you see (the hell with the rest of those now-dead losers) and it’s time to party! God saved me! Aren’t I wonderful? Damn straights, you lucky dogs. The arrogance in such thinking is breathtaking. I cannot think of anything more egocentric, vain, self-centered, smug or pompous than to believe oneself to be worthy of God’s miracles while the rest of the world is not! Breathtaking.

And it seems that ABC is going to run another show about miracles, like we need more of those. But as I said, miracles are in. They are talked about all the time, but never thought about at all. Because if anyone gave them even a fleeting thought they would evaporate into the thin air from which they came. Why? Because miracles require the following two conditions:

(1) The existence of an all-powerful God and/or saints and/or angels and/or spirits of some kind who can perform miracles.

(2) A selection process by the miracle worker(s) that will include, for example, helping a football player make a touchdown, but will exclude helping a pitiable, tearful 6-year-old boy who is praying for the priest to stop raping him.

Most people have no problem with (1). Those same people avert their eyes from (2) because of the ouch! feeling it creates. People want to believe in miracles, but they don’t want to understand them. It’s a lot like religion itself. Accept it and stop asking questions already! Well, sorry, people, but I’m asking the questions. And here’s a good one: If a plane crashes and 99 people die while 1 survives, it is called a miracle. Should the families of the 99 think so?

Miracles are said to happen to people because of their deep, abiding faith or just their generally wonderful personalities. Holy, devoted, humble and all that. But implicit in that description, which I think most True Believers would agree with, is the unspoken assumption that all miracles are good. Where is the rule book that says all miracles are good? I think that killing 280,000 people with one huge wall of water is a hell of a miracle! Caught ‘em all napping, huh? I’m impressed! That example is not necessarily ruled out just because the dictionary says a miracle is supposed to be “An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God” because you can always point to the exact location of the plate subduction that caused the tsunami. How was that spot “chosen?” When describing miracles people constantly refer to location: “If I hadn’t dropped my keys and stopped to pick them up, that car would have hit me! It’s a miracle!” So it could easily be argued that the location of the event which caused the killer tsunami was chosen by God to kill all those people, and is therefore a miracle. But there are oodles of examples to choose from. No need to reach.

Let’s consider the Flood recorded in the book of Genesis in the Bible. This was clearly an act of God because it says so. “…and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.” (Gen 7:4) That’s God talking. He was really pissed off and decided to kill everything he had created. Making it rain for forty days and nights and killing every living thing on the planet (except on one boat) is no small feat. This is definitely a miracle, is it not? It certainly fits our dictionary definition: An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God. The Flood is a perfect example of a miracle. It caused untold death and destruction and suffering, but it’s still a miracle.

So all through history, any event that “appears inexplicable by the laws of nature” must be a miracle. The Titanic comes to mind, doesn’t it? There are so many “if-onlys” about that event that I think it qualifies. But even if it doesn’t, there are still hundreds of awful events that defy natural description and should properly be called miracles. Everyone who believes that the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle cannot be explained by the laws of nature therefore believes that those disappearances constitute miracles. Every baby that ever died suddenly in the crib, with no apparent cause, was the recipient of a miracle. And so on. Miracle-believers cannot refute that. They may want to, but they can’t. They have defined themselves into that corner and there is no way out.

So we have established that a miracle is a two-edged sword. But the more pressing question is, how are the miracle-receivers chosen? If you accept that God is all-powerful and all-merciful, how do you explain the above (2)? What sort of God would intervene in something as unimportant as a sporting event (and we’re told he does that a lot) yet ignore the suffering millions who implore him for help daily? Especially when it comes to innocent children, how can God not work miracles for them if he’s perfectly willing to perform miracles at all? There are only two possible answers to that question: (1) God does not perform miracles on earth and never has. (2) God has a cruel streak. There is no third option.

Here is just one small example. In India and Pakistan impoverished families sell their young children who end up either in sweat shops or brothels. Their lives are horrible beyond imagination, and they almost always die young. Those forced into prostitution usually die of AIDS. Please tell me how a miracle-working God can look at that, do nothing, and then turn his attention to a Yankees’ pitcher in the middle of a double-header and whip a little magic on him. Think this through. Miracle-believers are saying this makes perfect sense—God has his own reasons, works in mysterious ways, and so on.

Aside from the fact that the “works in mysterious ways” explanation has been worked to death and does not explain anything, there is no avoiding the cruelty involved in refusing to intervene in a child’s gruesome death while choosing to intervene in a baseball game. It is cruelty on a monumental scale. If a human were to do something like that he would be tarred and feathered if not prosecuted. But God? Oh, he works in mysterious ways……..

Sorry, no. There is nothing mysterious about it. If God indeed works miracles here on earth, then he is a sadistic thug without an ounce of mercy in him.

“My Son Looks Like Jesus, Only Shorter”

A woman was actually overhead saying that. What makes it so preposterous is that no one, not one single person alive today or any time in the past 19 centuries, could possibly know what Jesus looked like. If there was an historical Jesus, no one left any record of what he looked like. The only clue is that the Bible says he was a Jew. That would mean he had been circumcised, and that is all we know about his “looks.” Over the centuries artists have offered various representations of what they think Jesus might have looked like, (this one is the one I grew up with) but those images have no more relevance than something that might be drawn in a kindergarten class. No one knows. So why are there so many claims about miraculous sightings of the “face” of Jesus on a pancake or in a cement mixer or on a snowball? How can you see a face if you don’t know what the face looks like? Did Jesus have an enormous forehead? A tiny chin? Wide lips, thin lips, thick lips? Long face, round face, prominent brow ridge, small brow ridge? Big nose, small nose, curved nose, straight nose? What? How can people not understand this glaring problem?

This “face-sighting” thing is one of the biggest occurrences in the field of miracles. Jesus and the Virgin Mary are the only two ever mentioned, but why? How come no one ever sees the face of St. Bartholomew or St. Paul or Matthew or Mark or Luke or John or Noah or Jonah in a bowl of porridge? No one knows what they looked like any more than anyone knows what Jesus or Mary looked like, so why don’t they pop up occasionally? Of course someone once claimed that the now famous cinnamon roll reflected the face of Mother Teresa, but at least we had a face to compare it to. And actually she did look a bit like a cinnamon roll. But Jesus or Mary? Nonsense.

“I’m Healed!”

The most famous miracle resort is unquestionably the town of Lourdes in southwest France. A prosperous tourist attraction, the shrine there marks the site where the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to Saint Bernadette (Bernadette Soubirous) in 1858. Bernadette was 14 years old at the time and the “vision” that appeared to her told her to tell the priests to build a chapel at a nearby grotto on the Gave de Pau River. They inexplicably followed the advice of this teenage girl and built the chapel. Since Bernadette’s asthma cleared up during this period it was only a matter of time before “miracle” cures were reported. And reported they were. In droves. Cures of all kinds were sworn to have taken place in that grubby little grotto. Those reports continue to this day. But there’s an irony in this story that few people are aware of. Bernadette Soubirous ultimately entered the convent of Saint Gildard where she died of tuberculosis at the age of 35, despite administration of water from the grotto at Lourdes. How many people know that? Well, it kind of spoils the story, so that inconvenient fact is routinely ignored.

Today people from all over the world go to Lourdes seeking cures for their ailments. You can buy every conceivable religious artifact known to the Catholic Church: candles, crucifixes, rosary beads, head scarves, prayer cards—you name it, they’ve got it. You can even buy or rent, yes rent, wheelchairs and crutches in town before heading for the grotto. Hmmm. What is wrong with this picture? People manage to travel halfway around the world without the aid of a wheelchair or crutches, but suddenly need them for those last grueling steps. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt the thriving tourist industry to have discarded wheelchairs and crutches strewn around the grotto.

What is not strewn around the grotto, however, is anything that would indicate a truly miraculous cure. There are no glass eyes, no artificial limbs, no pacemakers, and no dialysis machines. Yet the people keep coming, filled with hope. And hope is a powerful emotion. Enough hope can actually help stimulate your immune system and if you think you’re going to feel better you may actually feel better. For a while. But unless an artificial limb, or something like it, is actually cast aside at Lourdes, the “miracle cures” are pure nonsense.

However, when it comes to miracles, nonsense rules. Miracles are nonsense. They defy all logic, compassion, common sense, fairness and sweet reason itself. Time for a cinnamon roll.

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