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In biblical times, you couldn’t go to the market without encountering some kind of miracle, according to the tales in the bible.

People getting healed, enemy armies getting blinded and slaughtered, talking donkeys, people rising from the dead. And there are many Christian stories from the past 2,000 years of miracles that were even more amazing.

But funny thing, as soon as cameras and film and video recorders and tape recorders were invented, miracles seem to have all but disappeared, except for the odd case of someone’s aunt being healed something which showed up as a dark patch on a scan which may have been cancer. Maybe miracles have gone the way of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and UFOS, which still cannot be captured definitively on film or video even though almost everyone has a camera with them on their cell phone at all times.

Although video and photography equipment has become cheaper, higher quality and more accessible, we still have to make due with rubbish blurry photos that could depict anything. That’s because there was nothing real to begin with.

Are miracles the same? Are they only real when no one can prove they happened? When the only way of recording them is through word of mouth?

Is the age of miracles over, like some conservative Christian churches teach? Funny, the bible doesn’t seem to suggest that there were any “ages” or that miracles would ever stop.

What’s the most likely answer? God doesn’t do miracles when anyone can prove them, because they must be taken on faith? God doesn’t do miracles anymore because the bible is all anyone needs to believe?

Or there never were any miracles to begin with?

Maybe miracle stories are just stories, made fantastic in the retelling. I’ve seen this happen many times. A number of years ago, our newspaper received frantic calls about a “chainsaw massacre” and we had to investigate. One person in the office even said she’d heard about it and offered some lurid details. Turned out some guy had been walking down the road with a chainsaw, and may have waved it threateningly at someone he didn’t like. No one was attacked or “massacred” with a chainsaw, but the story spread and turned into the plot of a B-movie splatter flick.

Maybe that’s how miracle stories work, too. All it takes is a small grain of truth to be twisted into a story about something that never happened.

So on Sunday the pastor ended his sermon with a bit of a monologue about the situation in Haiti, and made reference to the idiot Pat Robertson’s comments that the Haitians got what they deserved for supposedly making a pact with the devil. The pastor soft-peddled Robertson’s comments and suggested they were taken out of context by “the media.”

Then he really pissed me off. He said that many people are looking at the horror in Haiti and asking how a good and loving god could allow something like that to happen. He said we should turn it around on ourselves.

“How can a loving god not allow devastation on us?” he said, suggesting that North America is just as sinful as anywhere else in the world, and just as deserving of destruction.

“How can god not allow his judgment and wrath to be poured out upon us?” he said.

We live at a point of grace, he said, suggesting that as long as we tremble in fear at the foot of the cross, kept safe by hiding behind Jesus, God won’t squash us like the worthless bugs we really are.

Some kind of love. That’s an abusive relationship. God only hits us and hurts us and kills us because he loves us. That’s what abused spouses tell themselves.

This is not a god of love. Threatening to destroy us unless we kiss his ass is not love.

Then the worship team came and led the congregation in singing love songs to Jesus. I couldn’t stand it and walked out.

Church is a place where people are either too false or too honest about themselves.

It’s also a place where hard questions are not welcome, encouraged or answered.

It’s a place people go to either feel good or miserable about themselves, depending on the denomination of the church. People are expected to be motivated to improve their lives from either approach.