When you argue with Christians, especially with Catholics, their last resort argument in defense of their religious bullshit is "miracles". Strange that God, Jesus, Mary and their army of saints make miracles only to a tiny fraction of people beseeching them for health, fame and fortune, many of whom are not card-carrying faithful. The dispensing of miracles seems either too arbitrary or with insufficient critical mass to drive belief.
I, for one, would return to the "faith" if a miracle is performed where a missing limb is grown back. That to me would be the ultimate proof of a miracle. Of course, the real ultimate proof miracle would be to raise someone from the dead. Jesus did it, supposedly, with Lazarus and then with himself. So my question to the herds of faithful spending hard-earned money to travel to miraculous sites to be ripped off with custom-tailored prayers or paid intercessions with the divine: Why can't the virgin, Jesus, and any of the millions of saints that the Church beatified and sanctified over the millennia bring grandpa from the dead? Why are miracles always unexplainable, cryptic, unfalsifiable... constantly churning out doubts as to their veracity?
Why can't we run a double-blind test in which neither the tested faithful nor the church officials know who is praying sincerely or who isn't. This would reduce bias and generate clearly reliable and reproducible outcomes. But, the Church hides behind "God's mysterious ways", a nice way to describe the greatest invention made by an ignorant mankind, namely the absurd existence of a sage old man up in the clouds who capriciously toys with our stupidity, traps us, tests us, and plays games with us.
I often wonder why did God have to send his Jewish son to die because of us. First why Jewish? Is God himself Jewish? Why couldn't God's son have been a native Ameridian or a Pacific Islander or a pygmy from Congo or a Chinese? Don't you find it odd that God started his three favorite monotheistic cults with barbaric nomads of the Arabian desert who, thousands of years on, continue to kill one another over who is God's true and favorite cult? The Hebrew prophets were Arabian desert Jews. The Christian cult was founded by a rebel Jew from Palestine. And the Muslim cult was entrepreneured by a camel trader from Mecca who may have been a Jew himself or at the very least grew up in the Hebrew culture of his time (which is why he retained all Jewish practices and customs in his new and improved Judaism known as Islam: circumcision, no pork, loud recitation of holy texts, etc. ).
Don't you think it odd that the omnipotent, all-knowing God decided to choose all his messengers from a tiny geographic line between Jerusalem and Mecca stretching some 800 miles (1400 km)? He had all the earth and all of human cultures to choose from. Oops, forgive me: He had the entire universe with its zillions and zillions of galaxies, each comprising zillions of stars and planets.... Why did he choose planet earth's Arabian deserts and its stinking tribes to produce prophets of doom (Hebrew garbage), then make an out-of-wedlock son for himself (Christian garbage), and finally gift us yet a third monotheistic cult, that of Islam (Muslim garbage)? Did God have a bias for these Arabian desert nomads? If so, why? What did he find in these people that was missing in other peoples on earth? With the benefit of retrospection, God may have found their innate violence so appealing for his gamesmanship of setting traps for humans, watch them fall in them, then punish them UNLESS they promise to be loyal to him. Come to think of it, this is Donald Trump's standard operating procedure!
Don't you think it odd that God, whose love we are told is boundless, decided to send a born-out-of-wedlock bastard Jewish son, to be tortured and killed to redeem our hypothetical sins (including the absurd Original Sin of just being born)? If God loves us so much, why doesn't he simply forgive us without torturing and killing his son? You see, the imagination of illiterate ignorant people from the Bronze and Stone Ages could not get past the tradition (across most cultures around the world) of human sacrifice: Abraham was asked by a devious God to kill his son to prove his love - my girlfriend once asked me to fly with her on her tiny boxy Cessna the day she got her license TO PROVE THAT I LOVED HER. I suspended my reason and took the unnerving flight of a simple takeoff and landing with a rookie pilot. Same bullshit. Then God sends his bastard son to die TO PROVE THAT HE LOVES US. I don't like these disgusting mind games that God plays with humans. Exasperated, the camel trader from Mecca said enough is enough: All you have to do to go to heaven is swear allegiance, pray, fast, pay the tithe, and do the pilgrimage. No thinking. No miracles. No mysteries. Sort of a Monotheism for dummies! Just some dumb traditions. Islam was, in a way the first reform movement that presaged the Protestant reformation: A reaction to a decadent pagan Catholic (Roman) - Orthodox (Greek, Byzantine) Church laced with gold, wealth, power, statues, saints...and a return to the basics of the generic Semitic Hebraic culture that prevailed back then.
On this day of Easter, I ask people to keep the traditions but please lose the faith. Oftentimes, the faithful conflate faith with tradition. They think that having faith means ONLY to keep the traditions (culinary, processions, prayers, masses, chanting, dancing, lighting candles....). But faith is, by definition, the suspension of reason: You are asked to believe some bullshit without any proof. Which is why people instinctively don't take faith too seriously but fall back on traditions as a substitute for faith. Our cerebral cortex demands explanations for everything in our environment, but when we have no reasonable evidence and explanations, we make stuff up, collectively known as RELIGION. And to counter our need for evidence, we are asked to have faith, i.e. suspend your reason and believe whatever bullshit some "prophets" come up with.
Example: 500 years ago, when the Black Plague struck human populations worldwide, people did not know of bacteria, protozoa and viruses. Failing to understand the calamity striking them, they imagined God to be mad at them and punishing them. Nowadays, thanks to explorers and discoverers, we know that the bacterium Yersinian pestis causes the plague, and thanks to other researchers we have antibiotics to kill the bacterium. Should the plague strike again, people would no longer blame God. They would blame garbage and lack of hygiene and rush to get an antibiotics shot. Everything humans think and believe is couched in this paradigm: When we don't know, it is God. When we know, it ceases to be God. Which means that as time goes by, God will inevitably continue to shrink the more we discover our environment.
In fact, there is a straight line between our original ignorance, say some tens of thousands of years ago, and our current state of affairs. Long ago, human cultures believed there were gods everywhere and in everything: rocks, trees, animals, clouds, stars... As many as tens of thousands of gods. Then that number began slowly shrinking down to a few thousands and hundreds (Semites, Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians etc.). Then again, that number continued to shrink until Egyptians began believing in one god, an idea the Semitic Hebrews borrowed and marketed. So, logically, if we were to extrapolate that trajectory, that tendency of divine reduction with time, into the future, I guess we'll one day reach zero god. None will exist. And we are well on our way to that realization.
To the faithful, don't be upset. You'll always have your traditions.
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