People don’t appreciate biblical miracles nearly enough. Living during Bible times must have been a whole lot of fun. Examples include: People lived to be 900 years old, water was frequently walked on and/or turned to wine, and people sometimes got swallowed by a large fish.
It. Was. Wild.
Here’s the thing, though. Many non-believers point to some of the more outlandish miracles in the Bible as reasons for why they don’t believe. This has always bothered me. As someone who does not take the Bible literally, or all that seriously, for that matter, I don’t lose any sleep over the miracles depicted.
Non-believers start their reasoning process like this:
God doesn’t exist, so miracles can’t happen, therefore the Bible is bullshit.
Which, yeah, I get it. There seem to be a lot of questionable things happening in the Bible. But miracles aren’t the hill we skeptical people need to die on. The Bible is full of stories that are jaw-droppingly horrible if they really happened.
The whole situation is kind of like an abusive father talking about how well his kids behave because he beats them with a belt every time they forget to say “Yes, sir.”
He doesn’t seem to realize most of us are appalled by his tactics, and the fact that his kids are polite is secondary. That’s how biblical miracles feel to me. We don’t need to argue whether or not his kids are polite. Let’s shine a light on the fact that he’s beating them. We don’t need to argue whether miracles happened. Let’s keep pointing out that the general plan is to send most of us to eternal punishment.
Avoiding Circular Logic
Also, it’s circular logic to start with the idea that God doesn’t exist, and therefore miracles can’t happen; therefore, the Bible isn’t true; therefore, God doesn’t exist. We don’t need to resort to this to get people to rethink which parts of the Bible they truly believe.
Skeptics also assume biblical miracles aren’t true because they don’t happen in nature. This sets up a false dichotomy where a biblical miracle didn’t REALLY happen because it doesn’t happen in nature. Of course, if it DID happen in nature, it wouldn’t be considered a miracle. So if there did happen to be a God who really did the miracles in the Bible, we would disqualify those miracles as natural events.
From the Christian perspective, I can see how this would be irritating. It’s not debating fairly. People who use these kinds of arguments aren’t actually searching for truth; they’re just trying to gain points for their team.
If God actually is as powerful as the Bible says then he is able to do any miracle depicted in the Bible.
It’s not fair to ‘prove’ an all-powerful God isn’t actually all-powerful because we don’t think he’s powerful enough to get all the miracles done. We can prove that the Bible is on shaky legs by pointing out places it breaks from secular history. An example of this is the whole dinosaur situation. But we can’t just argue that a supernatural God wouldn’t be able to do some neat supernatural stuff to make the Biblical miracles pencil out.
Divinely Inspired and also a Bit Rapey
Miracles seem to be a stumbling block for many unbelievers. I’m more or less okay with Biblical miracles. So, why am I a skeptic about the whole thing?
I don’t question the Bible because I can’t wrap my head around how a fellow can survive in a large fish for three days. Rather, I question the Bible because it’s filled with stories like Judges 19: 22-29. Which, if you haven’t read it, is worth a gander.
TL;DR: It tells the story of a man traveling with his concubine when a mob comes and wants to have sex with the man. The dude who he was staying with was like, “No way, that’s wicked. Here, have his concubine and my virgin daughter instead because they’re just women.”
Judges 19 verse 22-29 22 While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, “Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him.” 23 The owner of the house went outside and said to them, “No, my friends, don’t be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don’t do this outrageous thing. 24 Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But as for this man, don’t do such an outrageous thing.” 25 But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. 26 At daybreak, the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door, and lay there until daylight. 27 When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. 28 He said to her, “Get up; let’s go.” But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home. 29 When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel.
So, yeah. We don’t actually need to argue whether or not Jesus REALLY turned water into wine. Sure, he totally did. Christians can have that miracle. WTF is going on in the rest of the Bible?
I’m not really interested in zooming in on each story to see if it’s plausible, although that is a fun exercise. What I like doing is zooming out and taking in the whole story.
Believers will be quick to note that God doesn’t say this action was a-okay with him anywhere in the story. BUT, nowhere does God interject and be like, “BTW, you guys, I’m super unhappy with the townspeople AND that shitty old guy who offered his virgin daughter to be raped and ended up letting a concubine die because she was raped so hard.”
I feel like an all-knowing God would know that story probably wouldn’t age well. I’ve heard it argued that the Bible was pretty groundbreakingly progressive for the time. But, they still seemed to hold men in much higher esteem than women. Shouldn’t God have put the kibosh on that?
A few rapid-fire questions to ponder:
Why didn’t God require men and women to be treated equally?
Is this still how God feels about women?
For that matter, why didn’t he end slavery while he was writing our manual for how to live?
What was the purpose of throwing teachings in there about how women shouldn’t be permitted to teach?
If the Bible was just written by a bunch of dudes, then it makes sense that they wouldn’t know you shouldn’t let women be raped to protect a more important man.
But, if God actually is the all-knowing ghostwriter of the Bible, then you’d think he would have had the foresight to correct this little error in the way they thought back then.
Anyway, icky feelings like this story are a much larger issue for me than simply whether or not Jesus was able to walk on water.
It’s been a while since I’ve done an On God post. I feel bad doing them because they can come across as making fun of Christians, but that’s not my goal.
I’m in an ongoing search to figure out what I really think about the whole thing. I would love to get in line and take my Jesus pills like everyone else, but the story seems like nonsense. That being said, I’d really like to avoid hell.
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Interesting points, and I don’t disagree! As one of the many “grew up super-religious but am not anymore” types, I can say that my feelings about religion might have turned out very differently if I had seen more people asking these kinds of questions. They’re important and valid. Instead, the vast majority of my experience involved cherry-picking issues to take literally as “because God says so” (like women being submissive, for example, but then they often don’t take literally the stuff Paul said about women covering their heads…) without anyone ever questioning if something was lost in translation or interpretation. And, not surprisingly, the failure to ask those kinds of questions just leaves tons of us like, yeah, no.
Yeah, people often ask me why I’m rocking the boat by asking these types of questions and I think you hit the nail on the head. I’m asking these questions because lots of non-believers are also asking these questions and when they don’t get satisfactory answers they wind up leaving organized religion.