Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be by Joe R. Lansdale
As an example of a miracle, an otherwise sensible man once told me how he knew that God was in his camp—because there was a terrible storm that killed a bunch of people, and a tree had fallen near his car, but it had missed, and therefore God was on his side. If it had fallen on the car, I suspect he would have decided that that was God’s will.
A lot of these survival friends of God remind me of those who claim to have been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. Aliens come down, snag some guy while he’s throwing the meat to a stump-broke cow, and fly him off among the stars quicker than you can say, “Rock them udders, bitch.”
“Uwhap,” says one of the aliens, “get the salad spoons. We got us another cracker and a cow.”
These alien abduction experiences are not always described as positively as surviving a tornado (which can really happen), but there is still about them this air of survivors being special. Of being highly prized, selected for anal probes and sperm donations, chosen and perhaps used to create a superior race of beings, half alien and half peckerwood. Big-eyed grays with their caps turned backward who can drive a pickup as well as a UFO.
As I have said before, I digress.
So God kills everybody in the trailer park but one, and this survivor praises God for sparing him, even though he sure as hell drove death’s bulldozer over the rest of those folks. This is what we must call human conceit. If I survived a twister, the first thing I’d think is that I was lucky and the others weren’t, and that it could have gone either way. But not the true believer.
God is indeed the adult Santa Claus, and for some to even consider letting go of that last little fantasy is as impossible as shitting a pile of gold coins. Now there is a miracle even I would like to see, though I would insist on nose plugs and the coins being steam-cleaned afterwards.
I remember my own personal devastation on learning that Santa Claus did not in fact live at the North Pole, drive flying reindeer, wear a red suit, and deliver presents. It was painful. I was told then that Santa lived in our hearts and that if you believed in him, Christmas was in your heart every day of the year.
Fuck that. I wanted a magical guy in a red suit who could bring me presents. This is the same sort of bullshit you hear when you challenge miracles. Every day is a miracle. A baby being born is a miracle. A bird singing in a tree is a miracle. True believers struggle to keep God alive in their hearts because many, I suspect, actually question the whole thing but can’t quite let themselves go there.
All I can say is, painful as it was, I got over Santa, same as the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. I do want to point out that I was always suspicious of the rabbit. That was a hop too far for me. And finally, so was God.
Many factors led me to being a nonbeliever, but there were two that were critical. One was that you had to reject science and common sense to justify the giant Pie In The Sky. The other was that God is willing to allow the horrors of the world to continue—that as a deity he is as judgmental as a Tea Party Republican and has less kindness than people I’ve known.
Yeah, I know. Jesus was all about forgiving, but most hardcore Christians embrace the Old Testament because it is full of hate and revenge and you get to read about stuff like mass murder, incest, rape, and war—not to mention some nasty poems written by King David about fucking.
Truth is, the gun-toting, tough-talking, warmongering Christians I know do not consider Jesus their hero so much as John Wayne. They don’t want to turn the other cheek, they want to kill something. If it can’t be a human, there’s always a deer.
These are frequently the same people who insist that black people are naturally inferior because, once upon a time, one of Noah’s son’s saw him naked, spotted his balls, and a curse was put on him. Ham’s dark-skinned descendants were henceforth destined to be slaves and basically have a hard time of it, since God is an asshole and thinks accommodating this judgment of Noah’s is a fair thing to do. Really, this is justifiable punishment? Why not add to this curse a limp and weak kidneys and the inability to match socks?
While we’re on Noah, lets go back a bit, to the ark, one of the silliest ideas since the pet rock. But like the pet rock, it caught on. Unlike the pet rock, it has not receded into the past.
First, you have to accept that Noah could actually build a boat that would hold all the animals of the earth, two by two. (And if God so hated pork, why were pigs spared? But never mind that …)
Noah’s ark is one big boat. The Titanic, or an aircraft carrier, couldn’t hold all the animals of the world, even if it only chose one of each species and left the platypus a life preserver and best wishes. And as Twain once pointed out, who gets to swallow and bring along the microbes? Now that’s a job no one wants. I can just imagine the looks on the faces of Noah’s kin as they waited for him to pick the one who was going to have to down all those microbes, not only the “good” ones but the microbes bearing all the fatal diseases.
Many Christians brag about how literally they take the Bible, but when confronted with this ark business, they make excuses. Well, God can do anything. He got them all on there. They were all made very small, like animal crackers, and one of the kangaroos had to squeeze up tight in the glove compartment next to the map and the emergency candle.
The stench of an ark full of shitting and farting animals, not to mention humans, had to have been tough. Rabbits must have been hopping all over the place. Of course, the fast multiplying rabbits could have been beneficial. “Hey,” says Noah to his wife. “Nail one of them little fuckers with a hammer and lets have lunch; otherwise, I’m afraid I might break down and eat some pork.”
Believe it or not, we will come back to miracles.
Jesus and Christianity, if you set the Old Testament aside, is supposedly about charity and forgiveness. But many Christians appear to resent the idea of charity for anyone other than a personal friend or relative. They have the view that if you are in bad situation, you must have done something wrong to bring it on. If you’re black, well, there’s that whole Noah’s balls thing.
Social programs that help anyone besides them or theirs, are generally perceived as undeserved. Goddamn Medicare, they say, as they take advantage of it. They have earned it, they say, not those others.
Goddamn socialist programs. As they cash their Social Security checks.
Goddamn entitlements, as veterans cash their checks.
Goddamn beggars, as they cash their unemployment checks.
And so forth. They curse them without realizing that they actually benefit from a lot of socialist ideas mixed in with their capitalism. Hey, I’m a capitalist, so how can my benefits be socialist?
Much of this view grows out of Christian concepts. Hey, I am on God’s side, but the rest of those bastards are freeloaders.
Those Others.
It’s always The Others who bring ruin on the Us. For the white populace it’s the blacks or the Latinos, now and again the Asians, or the Jews, and of course, the homosexuals, which many Christians have determined were responsible for 9/11. If they hadn’t been out there butt-fucking, and had been god-fearing instead, at home beating their wives and drinking beer, divorcing on a regular basis (which according to the Bible is also a sin) God wouldn’t have let that happen. He’d have stuck to disease and old age, wars, murders, and accidents to kill people.
These are the same charitable Christians who want to snuff out anyone that isn’t a Christian, which is in fact an Old Testament tradition. I always think of Joshua, commanded by God to wipe out the Amalekites, happily complying like a mean kid with a sun-heated magnifying glass sighting down on an anthill and its unsuspecting subjects.
God, the All-Benevolent Bully, has Joshua and his army kill the men, the women, the children (including babies), the elderly, and the animals. I mean, hell, what did the children and the donkeys ever do?
However, things got better with time.
You see, at some point, God, who was always a little bipolar and jealous and cranky, got on Zoloft or some su
Still, the New Testament as a guide to life is an improvement over the Old Testament. Jesus seems like a pretty good fellow, at least from the King James version of the Bible.
Can you really imagine the King James version of Jesus toting an AR-15, or hunting to kill something for fun so he can put its head on the wall and brag about it? Jesus is love. But does he wear camo, and is he a hunting buddy? Those are the important questions.
Maybe he does both. Consider this:
Even those who embrace a gentler form of Christianity ignore the fact that there were originally more than four books about Jesus, and some were less flattering than the gospels. Some showed how Jesus was in fact a killer, using his powers not for good but purely for mischief and vengeance. These books, called the Apocrypha, were deleted from the Bible and the later books were gradually revised to show a more spiritual and kinder version of God’s son.
The earlier Jesus, the Jesus represented in the Apocrypha, seems to be right out of the Old Testament, with a vengeance.
One book of the Apocrypha, the Gospel of Thomas, deals with Jesus’ youth. It’s interesting to read the segments where Jesus gets pissed off at other boys his age. I like the phrase he uses: “Thou shalt not finish thy course.” Then God kills the boy who has offended him. In another section Jesus himself kills a boy for throwing a rock at him, saying once again, “Thou shalt not finish thy course.”
In another scene, Jesus is playing on a roof with some boys when one of them, pushed by another boy, falls to his death. The boys scatter, leaving Jesus to take the blame. And why not? The little bastard is already a known killer and a cantankerous asshole.
Jesus, to prove his innocence, has the boy brought back to life (nothing medical here; this was an instantaneous miracle) so he can explain what happened.
The boy, now breathing and well alive, says, and I paraphrase here, “Naw, J.C. didn’t do it this time. We was fucking around up there, and Billy Bob pushed me and I slipped and smacked my noggin on a rock. That’s what killed me.”
This book was conveniently removed from the Bible, along with a number of troubling books that didn’t fit the evolution of biblical ideas. (That’s another human trait, changing things, attempting to improve them to fit one’s own ideas.)
I will admit, out of fairness, that there’s also something cool in those older books. In one incident, Jesus makes sparrows of mud and causes them to fly. That part is cool; the killing parts, not so much.
These books are still available and translated into English. Check them out. The Bible was changed constantly, and eventually we had the King James version, but it is merely one of several. Many scholars have been upset with how dramatically sections of the Bible have been altered over time. Even the monks of old were bothered by it, and wrote in the margins of biblical manuscripts brief instructions that amounted to, “Stop changing things!”
Good storytellers, however, will not be denied, so there were slight changes from one monk to the next, and in fact, some outright new inventions, one of which was the Old Testament Noah story. Or so the evidence suggests. “I been reading some Gilgamesh, and he’s got a flood in his story, and some animal stuff, so why don’t we add that?” says one monk to another. “Go for it,” says the other monk. “It’s a good story. Who gives a damn if it’s true?”
As for the New Testament, the oldest version of it in existence, the Sinai Bible, does not contain Jesus’ resurrection. This is the Gospel of Mark. Even the Catholic Church believes it is the earliest representative of the New Testament, and is the basis for other books, said to have been written later by Matthew and Luke. It appears obvious that Mark was not the only source for these later reconstructions. All manner of influences were soaked into those pages over time. They are story by committee, and if you’ve ever worked for Hollywood as a scriptwriter, you know how this kind of stuff can turn out.
The obvious lesson here is that the resurrection was added in at a later date. As far as the Bible being written by Mark, or the later versions by Matthew and Luke, it could just have easily be labeled “written by Heathcliff and Amos” for all the true historical value there is. In fact, there is no mention of the virgin birth by Mary in this version, which immediately kills the whole kafuffle about Jesus being from the Old Testament line of David. He seems to be mostly from the line of Imagination.
Another sideline on that bloodline of David business: Outside of the Bible, there has never been found one bit of evidence that there was a David, or a Solomon for that matter. Historically they are as elusive as Hercules or a Blue Power Ranger with real powers. It’s like the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, Moses, all of that story. Outside of the Bible, the evidence vanishes.
Not to put too fine a point on it … Oh, hell, let’s do put a fine point on it. Jesus himself is suspect. He is mentioned only once in Josephus, the authoritative first-century chronicler of Jewish history. And then it’s only as one of a slew of nuts running around claiming to be a prophet or messiah.
Jesus seems to have been given the mantle of divinity by those who followed him or claimed to have followed his disciples. Later versions of the New Testament added the resurrection and the virgin birth stuff. My view is that Jesus was born in the normal way, did good work, mostly charitable things, died, and didn’t come back.
Another thing overlooked is that we know how old the Bible is, at least down to a few decades. For the Old Testament we’re talking roughly four thousand years, and two thousand for the New Testament. This is why so many Christians argue that the world is not as old as scientists claim.
To accept that the world is in fact billions of years old, and that humans in one form or another have existed for something like seven million years, and in modern form something like two hundred thousand, makes their belief system hard to swallow, so they therefore declare that the geological and archeological timeline isn’t true and that the world is no older than your great-grandmother’s socks.
This brings about another question. All those folks before the Bible, what happened to their souls?
Are they outright forgiven?
If so, why so hard on the later folks?
If they’re not forgiven, what happens to them? Are they just diddled in Hell? Do they get folding chairs and a sack lunch in limbo?
If good folks go to Heaven, do they stay the age they were when they died? Does Uncle Jim get better looking? Will Aunt Jane lose weight, or gain some? Will we all be in good shape? Is there sex in Heaven? If not, why go? Will our dogs be there? If not, why go?
I suspect all cats go straight to Hell.
Do you have to hang out with your brother who died as a baby? Is he given a heavenly pass or is he in limbo, having done nothing other than be born and then die? What sin could a baby have committed? Are AIDS babies given a pass? They never knew they were supposed to believe in this religion business. Why would they be punished? Why would God allow them to have had AIDS? Who is he punishing and why? If he’s punishing the mother for having a child out of wedlock, for example, why does the baby carry the weight of the punishment? And that baby brother, what exactly are you going to talk about? Does he still wear diapers, perhaps now made of clouds? Who has to change him and powder his ass?
How does that work?
“God moves in mysterious ways,” is the desperate answer.
Well, don’t he, though!
All of this
Told you I’d get back to it.
It’s all tied together. Blind belief in blind ideas, and true miracles go wanting. Faith is the answer normally given when Christians find themselves painted into a corner.
You have to accept it on faith, they say.
Faith?
The problem with faith is, which faith? Islam has faith and so do the Hindus. Even among Christians, each sect believes it knows the best way, and all the others are theological morons.
The Church of Christ believes it’s right. The Baptists think they have the inside track. The Methodists (also known as Baptists who can read) think the have the inside track. And then there are the Pentecostals, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Latter Day Saints, Catholics, Episcopalians, Calvinists, and so on. They all think they hold the proper cards. So which faith are we referring to?
Let’s take a simple miracle test. You won’t need a pencil.
Start with God, who can do anything.
Check? Powerful dude.
So, instead of just causing a miracle flat out, why does he use doctors to accomplish his miracles, and why do so many of these miracles require recovery time? Why do so many of them leave people maimed and scarred and missing pieces?
In the Bible miracles are instantaneous and absolute. Lazarus wasn’t given a body massage by Jesus, electric paddles, and an IV full of go-juice and some cautious instructions. He just got up from his deathbed and walked out into the light. He had been dead for four days, which is right there in the Stink Zone. But he came out alive, full and whole, not a walking dead man but a living human being. At least according to the Bible.
But I digress. Back to the test.
How many amputees do you know who have grown back limbs?