The Stupidnatural and Miracles

The supernatural and miracles. What do I make of them? I wanted to believe in things unseen and I spent a huge poking at it. My online 'Moth' persona orgininated from my fascination with the Mothman Prophesy ghost stories from modern American mythology. During my latter years in church I tried to write a book about Angels from my particular churches' point of view. I really believed in them but didn't know how they worked into the unreality I lived in, so I wrote a really embarrasing, longwinded and stupid 'book' on the subject (Something that will always remain deeply hidden in the corner of an old hard-drive). I did a really pretty PowerPoint to go with the book and presented it to my church. In retrospective, I feel like complete nong.

Anyway, in truth, there are unseen powers that run along the meridians of this planet. Aren't magnets fascinating? I wonder what the ancients thought of magnets? You can actually make a 'rock' float above another rock. I'm sure this was labelled as supernatural until we educated ourselves and found they were perfectly 'natural'. Some even theorise in other unseen energy sources that run through the course of our planet... crystals, min mins, water divining (just some random words that I think are related to what I'm trying to describe). In summary, 'supernatural' is just a term we give to something we don't yet understand or are unable to classify based on information we have already aquired.

The wondrous gifts of the Spirit: The first thing ex-Penties have to confront is that the amazing ability to verbalise 15 minutes of random noise from their mouths is not miraculous. Like, hit yourselves in the head with a hockey stick until this sinks in. I truly convinced myself I was doing something only 'magic' people could do. I made this real in my head, and I had the misfortune of hanging around a hundred other people who also let themselves believe in this remarkable over-rated ability to make nonsensical 'sounds'. Together we built a huge noisy straw man brainless scarecrow thing and worshipped it.

This is a process called 'confabulation' - and it's not the same as lying. It's when people combine fact and fiction to produce fantasy. Christians want to feel really special and 'super-powered' so they attribute fanciful meanings to basic things... for instance, consider the other gifts of the spirit (wisdom, knowledge, tongues, interpretation etc) They're not like real super powers (x-ray vision, flying, walking on water - Jesus should have fought crime with his super-powers); they are just things that anybody can do.

The gifts of the spirit and given 'special' interpretations and some pentecostals go to such extremes where they use such gifts in the same way that clairvoyants and seers do in travelling circus shows.... "someone in this corner has a bad back", or "the Lord told me this and the Lord told me that" - bah. Other churches go with the whole Toronto Blessing thing and try to convince us that shaking uncontrollably on the floor is also another amazing god given superpower. It's not... it, like tongues, is just another thing that gullible and naive people do to make themselves feel more important than they are.

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