I’m always half-assed serious, even when I’m not.
For context read JD’s post and comments on Miracles. I apologize for straggling like this but what can I say. I’ve had a few distractions the last couple of weeks. Believe me, I’d much rather sit around and contemplate the meaning of our existence.
An excerpt from JD’s post:
If I’m a disciple, handing out the food that day, I’m going to take note of a thing like [magically appearing fish and bread.] Maybe the actual disciples didn’t do work like that, and it was left to hangers-on, groupies, like, who didn’t or couldn’t record that sort of detail. Still, it’s kind of thin, and more than a little irritating.
In all my reckoning I’ve concluded that “miracles” are mankind’s attempt to explain that which is beyond our comprehension. Seems there are only a few roads to start down when contemplating the origin and realities of miracles:
- The miracles and such happened exactly as told and the stories describe what happened verbatim. You get to pick your translation of the stories, cafeteria style for all that it matters. For example, almost every early culture from far and wide has a great flood story and we can be reasonably sure there was a great flood that wiped out darn near everyone, but we don’t know whether God told Noah to do all that stuff he did; whether Noah did it all on his own; or whether or not it happened at all unless we simply choose to believe the biblical story of Noah is true. It’s all about faith.
- Something big happened, in all likelihood catastrophic, and the stories we are told in the ancient literature are attempts by the survivors to pass the unfathomable events from generation to generation over the period of eons–you get to define eons for yourself until someone can define it better.
- It’s all bullshit. No miracles have ever occurred. Politicians have been in power over great tribes since time immoral and the ancient stories are just the former-day bullshit flung about to keep people in line while the wars are fought over resources.
From what I can gather from looking around a bit to verify what I already thought I knew, if you know what I mean, the oldest known Egyptian hieroglyphics are dated around 3300-3500 BC, about fifty-five hundred years ago, give or take. No one even knew what the text meant until 1799. We may still not know the actual meaning of the text.
A couple of hundred years isn’t significant given the size of the number we’re talking about which is roughly two point five million, which is the number of years the “scholars” say humans have been around in some hominid form or another. All but about the last 10,000 years are filed under the broad Paleolithic era, or stone age, which lasted about 2.5 million years.
Think about the wheel. In the beginning of our written history, which is all the history we know about other than what we can piece together from archaeological evidence, there is already representations for kings and battles and God. And wheels. The current epoch — known as the Holocene — is too small to represent on a diagram. (See this geological time-scale wiki for some classroom quality visuals with drill down hyper links. Very nice work.) Archaeological evidence including pottery, flints, hearths, coins, burials and metalwork from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman eras have been found in the Mendip Hills cave complex of Britain.
Factual evidence such as these relics begs the question: What happened to homo sapien in the ten thousand years prior to the alleged beginning of agriculture ten thousand years ago? We don’t know. What about the ten thousand years before that? How did a developed civilization get to the point of finally drawing crude pictures about stuff that they have obviously already been using for quite a while? (Coincidently, the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago is both the beginning of homo sapiens domination of earth and the beginning of the Holocene extinction event, according to the scholars.)
People don’t just suddenly have technology and suddenly organize into a city. Are we supposed to believe that there were carts and ceremonies and cities and kings and wars before there was the written word? Just the efficient and safe disposal of waste made by a large group of people requires a sophisticated operation. It just doesn’t make sense that a society could accomplish such a necessary operation without the ability to efficiently communicate the requirements of the job.
If we could do archaeological digs into places underwater and within the Earth’s crust that are impossible to get to we might be shocked to find evidence of advanced technology that originated on this planet. Or originated from somewhere else even. Or we might by disappointed to find nothing at all, except maybe gold and diamonds.
We may find nothing because nothing is the only thing that can survive in it’s original solid state under the immense pressure created by the weight of hundreds of feet of water or miles and miles of earth. There is a possibility that mankind has reached the evolutionary stage of “advanced civilization” many times over the last couple hundred thousand years and have been periodically wiped out by a catastrophic event leaving only a few people to struggle for survival. The more people who survive, the further along the ensuing civilization starts out. Remember, a couple hundred thousand years is but an eye blink in the cosmic perspective.
Imagine if a few volcanoes like Krakatoa, Vesuvius, and St Helens start erupting repeatedly and non-stop for a century or two, causing dark skies, massive earthquakes and tsunamis on a regular basis, wiping out everything everywhere except for the most remote areas. Maybe every few million years the catastrophic event is so earth shattering that nothing survives except for some scattered DNA and a slough of simple organisms. The hook-up happens and something climbs out of the slime to start it all over again.
Getting back to our three paths of inquiry outlined above, let’s consider option 1 since it the option that is most unbelievable without faith and is also the option that leads to some serious forward-thinking. Let’s assume God was at work and He and His angels performed miracles of health care, instant creation of mass in the form of food one basket-full at a time, parted the Red Sea, and resurrected the dead. If we concede that it all happened as told, that leaves us with two options.
We can take it on faith that an all-powerful being can think stuff and make it happen, or we can try to find ways that such unexplainable feats could be accomplished. We search to discover through what type of technology can these things be done. We want to explain what we don’t understand. The stories inspire us to seek the truth which leads to knowledge. You could say that the miracle stories are God working in our everyday life by inspiring us to be more like Him.
If God sent angels, and by questioning the assertion I am not saying He didn’t, how did they get here? If they flew, how did they fly and from where did they take off? What are the angels doing when they are not here and where are they doing it at? In a spaceship or on another planet? Another Galaxy? Another dimension? Maybe they live in our minds or are encoded in our DNA? Or perhaps God and His angels dwell at the mitachondrial level in our cells, like the midi-chlorians that enable The Force and give the Jedi Knights their power?
Suppose that miracles are accomplished strictly through the power of God but it only works if a person opens his or her mind to it. In order to receive the power and to work the power a person must have faith in the works. Once you start down this path, nothing is impossible… if you believe.
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After a few days over the hills and through the woods, we’ve all just arrived back safe and sound from Grandma’s house we went. The usual turkey and trimmings were had by all and it was great to see the in-laws doing fine and well. I hope you and yours had a Happy Thanksgiving too.
In a mere instant my German Shepherd dog mauled and almost killed my in-laws two little rat terriers. Good Lord Almighty! The screaming! The Terror! I had to run up to the house from about 200 yards down the hill so I could beat the hell out of the dog. The tragic, unfortunate event was well over by the time I got up there (I’m no spring chicken, either) but I threw the dog a beating anyway. She was still excited enough to get the gist of it. My dog is the most hard-headed dog I’ve ever had that didn’t get run over by a car yet. I don’t know if throwing the dog a beating did the dog any good, but despite skinning every knuckle on my left hand, spraining my right thumb and big toe, and disjointing my lower back it sure made me feel good.