Saturday 23 October 2004

Pic of the day: And the heavens opened, and the Word of God came to me ... sort of.

Revelations from clouds

It is somewhat disconcerting to get revelations in Bible passages that aren't there. And it doesn't really help that my life has been inconvenienced by the same nonexistent Bible passage for many years...

The passage in question is Leviticus 19,26b: "Do not practice divination or sorcery." Or in the King James Bible "Neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times." But for some reason the same passage in Norwegian (both in Book Language and New Norwegian) prohibits "foretelling from clouds". The expression is also found later in the Old Testament.

If the Norwegian translation had been correct, God would have basically outlawed weather forecasting. And I did in fact, when I was young, make a holy promise to not listen to the weather forecasts on radio. (And I have stuck with it to the best of my ability, as one must do. Although the Bible actually strongly discourages making holy promises.) Anyway, this was really because forecasts were mostly lying, so I would probably have made that decision regardless of Leviticus. Who knows? Anyway it should take almost 30 more years before I got a new revelation on the topic of foretelling from clouds. It did not happen until this weekend.

***

The revelation is simple, as true revelations tend to be. It is also useful in real life, as true revelations tend to be. Basically it goes like this: Don't believe that random things that happen in your life are signs from God or Fate or the Universe.

It is a tendency among us religious people to see the hand of God in the small things that happen to us. Some psychiatrists claim that this is similar to a medical condition in the forebrain which makes people unable to distinguish between important and unimportant things. I'm sad to say however that such a problem is hardly confined to the religious minority among us. It seems to me that most people make a lot of fuss about unimportant things. But enough about that.

Certainly we can use things that happen to us as reminders, especially unlikely events that somehow seems to be connected to something else that's going on in our lives. Sometimes we are going happily about our own things, and then something happens to make us stop and think. I don't see a problem with that.

But I see a problem when I make my decisions about what to do or not to do, based on everyday things that just happen to anyone. For instance, as I have mentioned recently, I write about the upcoming NaNoWriMo writing project and then I get sick. So I begin to wonder if this is a sign from God that I should not talk about NaNoWriMo, or even that I should not participate in it. This despite the fact that normal people do get sick from time to time, and my journal shows that it happens to me with alarming regularity. To associate sickness with food is kinda reasonable, and in my case probably just as reasonable is to associate it with stress. But to use it as some kind of spiritual guidance is rank superstition. As a Christian I should make my decisions based on the Word of God, or a conscience enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Rational thought is not entirely excluded either. But there is no reason for me to consult with clouds or bacteria.

Not a bad revelation from a Bible passage that isn't even there!