Recker's World
Reason 15
Real miracles were not taking place
During my days in churches, I was constantly hearing about miracles happening but yet never seeing them. These things were always unverifiable and tended to happen in far away places. Even though there was no way to prove them, it didn’t stop church leaders from passing them onto us and it didn’t stop us from believing them. After all, we wanted to believe those stories. We wanted to believe that Jesus was real and doing stuff around the world, even though he was doing Jack shit in New Zealand.
The benchmark for all miracles, in my mind, is the resurrection itself. That was a miracle that couldn’t be put down to chance. It couldn’t be natural either. It had to be because of the supernatural, no doubts about it. When I think about miracles now, if someone is going to claim a miracle, it should be nothing less than a resurrection.
When talking about resurrections I am most definitely not talking about Near Death Experiences. People like to claim those are evidence of the afterlife and of people returning from the dead; however even though there may be similarities, it’s the differences that stand out the most E.g. the fact that Christians see Jesus, while Muslims see Mohammed. Then you get more subtle differences too like what Heaven and Hell is like and who’s there and what goes on. There have also been NDEs where living people turn up in Heaven. Even FICTIONAL characters have turned up! They are clearly hallucinations, with commonalities there because of culture and/or what one expects to see. Neither have these people been dead long enough to be considered well and truly dead.
Of course, there are non-NDE stories out there too of resurrections that have allegedly taken place. Of course, they are unverifiable stories handed from one person to the next like a game of Chinese Whispers. Funny how they never occur where autopsies are done, or when coroner’s reports and death certificates are written up. Instead, we have stories coming from places like deepest darkest Africa where the most likely scenario is that some witch doctor mistakenly deemed a person dead and then a short while later they regained consciousness. Or even more likely it was a con job.
The inescapable fact for me now is that if these types of miracles really were happening, we’d be seeing them in the modern society on a regular basis. There would be no doubt about them and they would be easily verifiable. After all, when somebody dies in the western world and you have a body, then they will always go through a coroner. They will always have a death certificate and then, if not cremated, they will most likely be buried six feet under the ground, not lying uncovered in some tomb where they could continue to breath or be tended to. In the western world, you can be well and truly certain they are dead once the funeral is complete. There can be no mistake once that body is buried and rested for several days that they ain’t coming back from the dead unless by a bon-a-fide miracle, but we don’t see this and rightfully so. Once you’re dead and you’ve been dead for a couple of days you’re not coming back. That’s an absolute fact.
The bible tells us stories about Jesus and Lazarus rising from the dead. Of course, there was no medical expert there to declare them dead, no autopsy done, nor a coroner signing off their death certificate. They weren’t buried six feet under the ground. They were put into tombs by family members… pretty much rooms that could be sealed or unsealed so that people could go in and tend to the dead bodies with perfumes and what-not to keep their cadavers as fresh and nice smelling for as long as possible. If Lazarus and Jesus were supposedly resurrected, we have no way of knowing whether they really were dead or even if they were the original person who was laid to rest there.
Bodies don’t get up and walk away these days because modern day graveyards aren’t easy to remove bodies from without making it obvious, unlike tombs. You can’t just dig up a grave, take away a body and then have a lookalike turn up one day saying they’re that person. DNA tests would easily prove you a fraud, but needless to say there were no DNA tests in Jesus day.
If people could be resurrected it would be on the 6 o'clock news and on the front page of newspapers, after all stories like that would get huge ratings and that's what the media wants - huge ratings. Of course, we know that when people have been officially registered as dead and are buried six feet under the ground they ain’t coming back from the dead unless it’s on a horror movie.