Skip to main content

Nothing Comes From Nothing


In the 1980s I worked for a company which manufactured business forms, including form letters for mass mailings. One of our customers was a faith healer by the name of Peter Popoff, who claimed to receive messages directly from God himself.
Peter’s shtick was to set up highly publicized public healing services in large cities. At these performances he would call out members of the audience by name, ailment, and sometimes even home address. The person so called would come on the stage, and Peter would miraculously heal whatever ailed him or her. Audience members were asked to throw their medicines on the stage, and did so by the thousands. I shudder to think how some must have suffered as a result.
Anyway, in addition to his performances, Peter would mail out letters by the tens of thousands, sometimes containing a napkin or some other small token. The recipient was supposed to carry the enclosure for a short time, then mail it back with a prayer request and, of course, a check.
For a while we printed 10,000 letters per week for Peter. His budget was $500K per month, and although we received only a small percentage of that, we did rather well. And we didn’t even need to have a salesperson call on him.
The whole thing came to a screeching halt one night on the Tonight Show, when the Amazing Randi, a professional magician and paranormal debunker, presented recordings containing many hours of Peter getting his transmissions from God at 39.17Mhz. And on these recordings God turned out to be Peter’s wife, Elizabeth. It seemed that after gleaning information from conversations and prayer request cards filled out by the incoming audience members, she would pass it on to Peter, who, in spite of being a healer, found it necessary to wear a “hearing aid.”
Many more of Peter’s shenanigans along with details of how his direct line was cut off can be found at http://www.bible.ca/tongues-popoff-39-17Mhz.htm. For all his business was worth after that, Peter might as well have been a pregnant prostitute.
An apocryphal story is told about a man who was visited by a police officer, who told him that the river was rising, and that he should evacuate his house. The man declined, stating that, “God will take care of me.” Eventually the water came up to his front door, at which point a man came by in a motorboat and offered to take him to safety. Again he declined, saying, “God will take care of me.” Soon he had to climb unto the roof of his house. Then a helicopter came by, and the pilot offered to take him to safety. Again he declined, saying, “God will take care of me.”
Finally he drowned, and when he appeared before the heavenly throne, he asked, “Why didn’t you take care of me?” And  God said, “I sent a policemen, a motorboat and a helicopter for you, and you declined. What more could I do?”
The point is, if a miracle is going to happen, it is probably going to be through the actions of other people. God does not perform miracles by suspending His laws of physics.
Of course, unexpected and unexplainable physical events do happen, but not all of them turn out to be “good.” Nothing appears from nowhere; for every event there is always a line of events that we can trace backwards in time, although we did not understand or pay attention to them at the time.
When we judge an unexpected event to be “good,” we call it a miracle, and when we judge it to be “bad,” we call it fate, or God’s unfathomable plan. Whether it’s a physical event or a human event, we tend to remember the good ones, and just to accept the bad ones. And that’s probably a good thing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There Are Only Seven Jokes - Introduction

      The statement “There are only seven jokes – all the rest are variations,” has been around for a long time, but no one ever seems to know what the original seven are. I think I have found the solution to the mystery.       The answer is to be found in an article published in the New York Times on May 2, 1909. Entitled “New Jokes? There Are No New Jokes, There Is Only One Joke,” it goes on to say that all jokes are a distortion, and lists seven categories of distortion. Supposedly every joke will fit into one of the categories. I believe that repetition changed the seven categories into the seven jokes.       Each of my next seven blogs will be devoted to exploring one of the categories. In addition, I shall attempt to give an example or two of jokes which I think fit the category.       You must realize that this article appeared over one hundred years ago, so most of the jokes appearing therein are so out-of-date that modern readers wouldn’t even understand them. For example,

By Today’s Standards Many of my Teachers Would be in Jail

I started school in a two-room building: grades 1 to 4 in one room; grades 5 to 8 in the other. One teacher in each room taught all four grades. I don’t remember first grade very well – the teacher left at the end of the year. I am pretty sure it was not my fault. Now keep in mind that reading the Bible every morning was the standard for all grades at that time. But my teacher in grades two to four went a little above and beyond the normal practice. As a member of a “plain” sect, she considered it her duty to lead the little heathens to Christianity. She offered a free Bible to all students who managed to memorize 20 verses. I memorized my verses – “Jesus saves” was my favorite because it was the shortest – and got my Bible with my twenty underlined in red. That would be illegal today (not the underlining), and rightly so. Teachers may not teach religion, although contrary to what many folks seem to think, students may bring their Bibles to school, read them, and pray their
The National Anthem I have a somewhat minor pet peeve. I say minor because in the grand scheme of things neither I nor society will do anything substantive about it, so my best bet is probably to suck it up and move on. Perhaps after writing about it I can lay it to rest. It came up recently while I was working out at our Wellness Center. A program on television was playing America The Beautiful , and I remarked to a lady I have known for 40 years that I thought that should be the National Anthem instead of The Star Spangled Banner. She replied, rather huffily, I thought, “Some people think God Bless America should be the national anthem.” At that point I decided, wisely, I think, to back off before an argument sprang up. Now I realize that The Star Spangled Banner is a very nice, patriotic song, but an anthem it is not. According to Wikipedia, “ An anthem is a  musical composition  of celebration, usually used as a symbol for a distinct group, particularly the  nationa