Recently I wrote about the how I perceive miracles as natural events (here). There are no miracles like the ones in the bible, which leads skeptics to the conclusion that supernatural miracles can be discounted all together.
When people say something is a miracle, there is a general understanding that it’s something natural. There are no instant healings. There are no water-into-wine happenings. There are no examples of raising people from the dead like the biblical stories.
There are events that seem extraordinary, but they aren’t outside of the natural order of possibility.
My perspective is that there were never any biblical miracles. Biblical miracles were literary devices to make stories better. Samson didn’t have superhuman strength. Jonah didn’t spend three days in the belly of a whale. The Red Sea didn’t part. The first-born male of every Egyptian wasn’t murdered. Frogs didn’t rain from heaven. Elijah didn’t light his soaking-wet altar via a fire reigning down from heaven.
When someone says something is a miracle, they are referring to a person who had cancer, but was given a new lease on life through modern science.
Or they say, “Coincidently I was provided for in some way. Wow, what a miracle.” But there are absolutely no examples of supernatural intervention in today’s day-to-day life.
Or you have idiots like Bill O’Reilly saying things like, “Tide goes in. Tide goes out. Never a miscommunication.”
Well, Bill, you’re an asshole. Try to tell Japanese people, “There’s never a miscommunication.” The tide ripped through the Pacific with a vengeance yesterday. And it did it in an explicable fashion. A simple understanding of science showed that. Whether you think that the earthquake was god or satan, the quake is explicable in natural terms.
Sometimes things aren’t directly explicable, but that doesn’t indicate supernatural miracle. For every instance of something good or seemingly miraculous, there are more examples of the bad. God may have saved your loved one, but he ripped my loved one from me. So thanks for making me feel like shit.
Half the time a believer is bragging about a “miracle,” they are hurting someone else’s feelings. It might be time to stop using the term “miracle.”
Friendly Atheist recently posted this cartoon (below) from resident pastor friend of Le Café David Hayward and I think it should be reposted here. Read Hemant’s original post here.
Yesterday, many people wrote that they would pray for the victims of the earthquake, which I see as a pompous way to say you aren’t going to do anything at all except draw attention to yourself.
Instead, do something about it. Make something happen.
Be someone else’s miracle.
How’s that sound?
Le Café Wittypoots 