God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (38 page)

It is odd that Simon, who had no idea who this demanding stranger was, now called him ‘Master’, but as I have written before, this is not my story. Anyway, Jesus and Simon let down some nets in search of fish and, to Simon’s amazement; they caught so much fish that their boat could not hold their bounty. Simon called for other nearby boats to join in this miraculous fish catch and then threw himself to his knees in praise of Jesus, to which the Messiah replied:

I’m not homophobic in the slightest, but if a strange man alone with me on a fishing charter, told me that together we would catch some other dudes, then my ‘Gay-dar’ alert system would be blinking red. And I’d at least ask for a drink.

Working through the Messianic checklist: Virgin birth – check; Baptism – check; Fan club administrators – check. Now Jesus would need to bring some wizardry to his shows or the small number of fans that were following him would soon grow tired of his incessant babbling about God and eternity and so forth. Let’s face it; it is hard to sell tickets if you don’t have an act!

Thus, Jesus began to heal those who were demonically possessed. Yes, the creator of the universe, God, believed it necessary that his only son would need to exorcise those with a demon inside their bodies. Understandably, Jesus was not yet versed on the germ theory of disease, a scientific discovery that would come many centuries later, but nevertheless surely the son of God would be given a little whisper in the ear from his heavenly father, “Psst, Jesus it’s me your Dad. The man whose forehead you have your palm on just has a common cold. I will reveal to you all the complexities of bacteria, germs and viruses a little down the track, but for now just know that this dude with the high temperature does not have a devil inside of him that needs to be released by you.”

This Biblical story, whilst seemingly benign on the surface, has led to the torturous deaths of possibly millions of suffering human beings throughout the centuries, all the way through to the Salem Witch Trials in the 18
^th
century in the US. This single narrative led to the belief that people could be intoxicated by Satan and thus we have countless souls burnt at the stake, drawn and quartered, hung, drowned, maimed, all because the claimed Son of God wasn’t intellectually advanced enough to denounce this bizarre practice or belief.

Luke claims that the very first miraculous act Jesus performed, before that of healing the sick, was an exorcism:

Mark tells more or less the same story, but John introduces us to a problematic theme that Jesus and early followers had to deal with, that being the healing of the sick on the Sabbath. An act forbidden by God, in his laws directly handed to Moses, but laws that Jesus often saw himself above, whilst simultaneously endorsing Mosaic law on a number of occasions, as we will review later. In this particular story, John writes that Jesus visited a swimming pool like complex, which in Aramaic was called a Bethesda. This particular pool was frequented daily by a vast number of people suffering all kinds of disabilities and illnesses. On this day, Jesus chose to visit and approached an invalid man who had not walked in thirty-eight years. Jesus laid his hand on him and said:

The man was cured and ran around like a teenage kid without his Ritalin. However, the Jewish elders in attendance were surprisingly underwhelmed by this miracle and instead of praising Jesus, they opted to denounce the former invalid for being healed on the Sabbath. The elders approached him and asked who it was that healed him and he replied that he did not know. Whilst this discussion was taking place, Jesus had slipped out through the back door.

The Gospels all have different stories of Jesus healing people suffering from leprosy to blindness, from paraplegia to male pattern baldness. Well, maybe I made the last ailment up, but he did heal many. Oddly though, Jesus with the powers of God, only chose to heal those that came in his direct path and thus it would have been far nobler for the Holy Ghost, Holy Father, or Holy Son to have cured blindness or leprosy in total, rather than just the odd believer here and there.

This miraculous claim to healing presents a conundrum for Christians; of all the tens of thousands, possibly millions of believers who have claimed to be healed by prayer thus ultimately through Jesus, never once has an amputee been afforded this benevolence. The question we must ask is why does the ‘big guy upstairs’ bear such a grudge against amputees? A question that one atheist website recently posted a US$100,000 reward for any proof to demonstrate that God has restored the limb of an amputee via prayer. Interestingly, in the more than twelve months this challenge has stood, not one religious believer has taken up the offer and considering there are more than 50,000 new amputees courtesy of returning US soldiers from Iraq or Afghanistan, an overwhelming majority of which are Christians, there should be no shortage of takers for an easy few extra bucks. At least that’s what one would think.

This question truly holds a microscope to the fundamental aspect of prayer and thus exposes it for critical observation. The result of applying this blowtorch is we are left with two clouds of uncertainty; ambiguity and coincidence.

A clever hypothetical scenario put forward by the website ‘Why Won’t God Help Amputees’ (
www.whywontgodhealamputees.com
)
illustrates this brilliantly. Let’s imagine that your doctor has diagnosed you with an aggressive form of bowel cancer. You opt to take the chemotherapy that your doctor is recommending and as this god awful remedy of radiation exposure begins, you are naturally terrified at the prospect that the number of your days on earth are dramatically falling. Assuming you are a Christian, you begin to pray to God or Jesus for some divine intervention and thus you pray morning and night, before, during and after surgery that your heavenly father will spare you an early visit to the grave.

A few months after the chemo, your doctor is delighted to tell you that you have survived the tumor and all signs of the life threatening disease have now vanished. Naturally, you give thanks to God for heeding your prayers and your conviction and faith in Jesus is stronger than ever before. Praise the Lord!

But how do we objectively rationalize the above scenario? What saved you from seemingly imminent doom? Well, there are several possibilities. Was it the surgery, radiation therapy, your ’s natural defence, or was it God’s interference? On the surface the answer to this question seems ambiguous. God may have miraculously cured your disease, as many Christians would believe. But if God is fiction then it had to be the chemotherapy, surgery and/or your natural immune system that cured you.

There is only one way to remove coincidence of prayer from this scenario and that is to eliminate ambiguity. In a non-ambiguous situation, there is no potential for coincidence. Because there is no ambiguity, we can actually
know
whether God is answering the prayer or not. The examination of amputees allows us to completely remove all ambiguity, and by so doing, creating an unambiguous situation where we can see with our own eyes that prayer never ever works. Therefore, we can be sure that whenever a believer has proclaimed instances of miraculous healing through prayer we can be certain that the possibility of coincidence was present.

What we find is that whenever we create an unambiguous situation like this and look at the results of prayer, prayer never works. God never answers prayers if there is no possibility of coincidence.

Interestingly, John’s first account of the miraculous powers of Jesus are not of healing the sick, but of performing a magic trick that would ensure the Holy One to be the first man invited to any Sigma Chi Frat party.

John tells of a wedding that Jesus attended in Galilee accompanying his mother, Mary and his disciples. The wedding hosts are drunk dry by their wine-swilling guests and it is left to Mary to point this out to all in attendance, which suggests to me that she too was a little bit of a boozer. With her glass empty she turns to her son Jesus and gives him a little nudge so as her Holy son could do something about it, which more than suggests she had no ethical issues in utilizing her son’s super-hero powers for less than noble purposes. Jesus turns angrily to his mother and says:

I thought this would have constituted a stoning under the terms of the commandments for disrespecting one’s parents. Mary is now upset that her son has been so abrupt towards her and she verbally lashes out on a nearby slave and demands that he do whatever her son commands. Jesus then ordered this servant to fill six stone jars with water, each holding approximately thirty gallons. He then demanded that a cup of this water be brought to the master of the wedding banquet so that he can taste its contents. Drawing the cup to his lips, the master is astonished that the cup is filled with wine and says to Jesus:

Having several Jewish friends myself this party trick seems such a Jewish thing to do, that being to do anything to avoid having to pay for a round of drinks. And really I guess this miracle wasn’t so miraculous when you consider that I once turned an entire personal bank loan into vodka in one summer whilst in my early 20s.

John closes this narrative with a footnote that reads that this was indeed the first miraculous sign Jesus performed in front of his two disciples and thus they were now true believers. Comical, isn’t it? I am sure I too could find more than two disciples if I could convert tap water into Moet.

A story unique to John is one in which it shows meek and mild Jesus to actually have somewhat of a fiery temper, a personality trait that has been well hidden by modern day evangelists of this mythical character. The narrative includes Jesus making a visit to Jerusalem for the Jewish Passover holiday, and no Passover would be complete without a visit to the Temple. In the grounds of the temple, Jesus discovered all kinds of commerce taking place such as money changing, livestock sales and ornament markets. Jesus became furious that the temple resembled that of a neighborhood swap-meet and to vent his rage he grabbed a nearby whip and started lashing the sellers, overthrowing money-changing tables and chasing all and sundry out of the court with his bull-whip in hand, whilst shouting:

As he stood there exhausted, his face reddened from yelling and whipping, some Jewish elders approached the hot-tempered Jesus and asked him:

In reply, Jesus demanded that they destroy the temple and if they did so he would raise it in three days. The Jews mocked him and informed him that it took forty-six years to build and it would therefore be impossible for one man to rebuild from scratch in just seventy-two hours. This is the end of the dialogue between Jesus and the two Jewish elders, but John writes that this was Jesus’ cryptic way in forecasting his resurrection on the third day after his future death.

In my own personal debates, with Christians, more often than not they will retreat to defending the Bible in such manner, “Oh yes, sure the Old Testament has some bad things in it, but all that changes when Jesus comes along with his teachings of peace and love,” or words to that effect. Well, here is the problem for that evasive tack, as John quotes Jesus’ endorsement of not just Mosaic Law but
all
Old Testament laws commanded by God:

Well, there we have it, yet another smoking gun! What Jesus in effect has said is this: any genuine moral crusader or civil rights activist who stands up and denounces God’s decree for stoning a child to death because she disrespected her parents, has no place in heaven. Helen H. Gardner said it right when she commented on Jesus’ endorsement of the Old Testament: