If you listen to CNN for more than a few minutes, especially if Wolf Blitzer is the anchor, you're guaranteed to hear "Breaking news!"
Of course, usually it isn't genuine breaking news that hasn't been reported before, but rather fairly fresh news that I'd heard before, though not a whole lot.
When was the last time, though, that you recall hearing breaking news about God?
I'll provide the answer: never. Not once in my lifetime, all 70 years of it, has there been a credible story about some new divine revelation from the Big Guy/Gal upstairs in heaven.
For some reason -- and I'm pretty sure I know what this is -- all of the breaking news about God stopped being broadcast many hundreds of years ago, if not thousands.
Today I was walking down three flights of stairs after a meeting of the Salem City Club. A woman slightly ahead of me on the top landing stepped to the side and said, "Go on by. I'm as slow as Moses."
Showing that I'm pretty much clueless about the Bible, I said to the woman and her husband as I walked past them, "What makes Moses so slow?" They gave me a quick Old Testament lesson about how it took Moses forty years to get his people to the promised land, if I recall what they said semi-correctly.
That got me to thinking about the Ten Commandments and other godly subjects.
Why have messages from God dried up now that the Old and New Testaments have been written, along with the Koran and other holy books such as the Adi Granth Sahib, Bhagavad Gita, and so on?
It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that with the rise of science, there's been an almost total decline in miracles. Now that miraculous events can be critically questioned and examined through the microscope of logic, reason, and demonstrable evidence, they've dried up.
Which leads me to conclude that either God is afraid to have his communications tested for veracity, or God doesn't exist. I'm going with the latter theory, being the most believable.
So the next time you pick up a newspaper, listen to the radio, or turn on a TV, ponder the fact that there's no new news about God. Which is pretty damn strange, given that religious believers consider that God is the ultimate reality, the power behind creation, the source of all that is good.
A lengthy silence can be construed either as the absence of an entity capable of making noise, or as a willful desire to not communicate one's presence.
The first possibility points to atheism being true. The second possibility points to some form of deism where God chooses to absent himself/herself/itself from the world. Both are far removed from what most religious people believe.
Yeah, I know. This truth is painful. But it must be told. There's no news about God because either God doesn't exist, or God doesn't care about us. So get on with your life and pay attention to all the other news about things that are real.
"Slow as Moses." That's a new one, I hadn't been aware of that usage.
I checked out a bit, and sure enough, that seems to be an accepted usage, if somewhat obscure. As you point out, Moses took all of 40 years to get his "flock" to the Promised Land. But that apart, apparently Moses was literally slow in speech -- apparently when God ordered him to go make his case in front of the Pharaoh, Moses expressed doubts about his own capabilities, and mentioned his speech impediment.
... Of course, when it comes to "slowness", one would think that it was Abraham who was even slower! After all, he started with his "begatting" when in his eighties (an age when others are grandparents, if not actually great-grandparents), and did his circumcision thing when he was, like, a hundred or something. How's that for slow? So let's start saying "slow like Ahraham" instead!
On the other hand, in another sense, Ahraham was "fast" enough. After all, he pimped his wife out twice, first to the Pharaoh, and later on to that other king with the unpronounceable name, and did very well indeed out of both transactions. That's as "fast" as can be! So perhaps "slow as Ahraham" doesn't really work after all!
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | January 26, 2019 at 06:20 AM