GOD

Of mice and men

by Mich

The question of Jesus, of course, begs the bigger question — the only question that really matters — is there a God?

More than half of the world’s population believes in God — that’s more than four billion people.

That’s a lot of people to embrace a myth, to be in the thrall of a delusion, to buy into a lie. Can that many people really be fooled? That’s the question within the question.

We have evolved into quite a clever race that creates architectural wonders and builds spaceships and invents technological marvels. Yet for all that we are like mice, blind mice, trapped in a maze.

Life is a matter of perspective, a point of view. If we elevate ourselves, change our POV, we might see a way out of the maze.

The question about God

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Vengeance is Mine, saith the blah blah blah

by Mich

Illustration Will Murai

God of vengeance, I understand. I understand that the illness is punishment for my sins. Sins aganst my father, my son, and most grievous of all, my wife.

So, vengeful God, I will accept my punishment like a man.

I have only one request — that you not bring down your final wrath in a hospital. Allow me to be stricken in my own home, with my books and my booze and my cat and the photos and memories of my wife.

Grant me that and I will gladly oblige you and join her in oblivion.

Romans 12:19 — Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”

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A layman’s guide to God

by Mich

This guy I know said to me that if he could find God he thinks he would find his wife.

He wasn’t referring to the God of Sunday School and the God of organized and disorganized religion — a divine being surrounded by bright light who lives in a magical place called Heaven.

By God he meant the mystery behind the universe.

The word God is a paltry three-letter inadequacy for the universe. The mathematical precision alone that keeps it all together, spinning and constantly moving at unbelievable speeds is miraculous. One centimeter off and KARRROOM!

This led me to thinking that God needs a more spectacular name. Take the word supernatural. That’s an impressive word. But God and the supernatural are not synonymous, because God also includes the natural world — the earth and the oceans and mountains and cities and houses and people and animals, everything we see around us with our available senses, the senses that currently are the only ones available to us.

But in the supernatural word, other senses must come into play, senses we aren’t yet aware of. There may be living people who have some supernatural sense, or think they do. But I think only in death does the supernatural world, that otherworldly dimension possibly become available to us and we become part of it, part of the universe, part of the miracle.

Unbelievers will say this sounds like the same pie-in-the-sky nonsense as the God in Heaven surrounded by divine light. Certainly, it requires the same faith or suspension of disbelief.

Faith carries a heavy burden for a five-letter word. The word for God should at least have five letters. Miracle has seven.

Seven. Now we’re getting somewhere. In Biblical studies, seven is the number of “completeness and perfection.”

The Bible itself was originally divided into seven parts: the law, the prophets, the writings or psalms, the gospels and acts, the general epistles, the epistles of Paul, and the book of Revelation. The total number of originally inspired books was forty-nine — seven times seven.

That works for me. God is the Miracle. The Miracle of the universe. If we become part of that when we die, we find the undead.

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