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My dad wrote once something about a newspaper headline that read something like:

Miracle Baby Saved From Earthquake.

The gist was that this infant had been thought lost in the rubble of a hospital, one amongst thousands of deaths due to this natural disaster. But then, three days later, a dog managed to get beneath the collapsed nursery ward and barked the bark that meant ‘a human is here’, and the rescuers dug and carefully balanced precarious bricks, and pulled out a dusty but otherwise unharmed child.

God be praised, said the baby's mother. This is truly a miracle.

My dad went on to proper interrogate this.

As for me, in my blunderbussing way, I have some questions.

Like:

Where was God when the earthquake was brewing? 

Couldn’t He have diverted it toward an uninhabited desert or somewhere else where there were no people? 

What was the benefit for anyone for this to happen? 

And, quite frankly, why did He let this happen in a country where the poorest people lived, like it always seems to?

I mean, are you omnipotent or not, mate?

Or are you just fucking with us?

Or as I put it:

God can’t, won’t, or isn’t.

Which fits better on a T-shirt.

The longer life goes on, and the more people we lose along the way, and the more confused I am about how people vote the way they do and how they are racist and weird and all of that, then I think I understand religion a bit more.

Without certainties, there is a black hole. Doubt breeds faith, because the ineffable and the aleatory are one and the same. Faith in a higher purpose shifts the responsibility onto a supernatural power, and one which we are not expected to understand.

If everything is part of God’s plan, then we conclude that the plan must be Good. We just need to have faith.

Moreover – and I love this bit – if you question God then he’ll fuck you up, like he did to Job for a bet with the Devil. He’s a proper prick, God. Seriously. A huckster. A self-centered murdering bully-boy arsehole. And the miracle melts away into chance and physics again.

Burning bushes aren’t miracles. Nor are babies hidden under concrete beams for two days, in their ventilator and still breathing through a mask.

His lad was alright, for a hippy, mostly, except:

Bringing Lazarus back from the dead to make a point when you could have saved him all the hassle is not a miracle, it’s a cunt’s trick. No wonder Lazarus never smiled again til he died again a few decades later. I'd have loved to be there when he caught Jesus up in Heaven again. Imagine that conversation.

Miracle My Arse.