Oracle
 

Oracle is a software program or computer language for managing data. It is not the first matrix called Oracle however. The one in Delphi was the most famous. She was thought to be a divine database and repository of truth. She was sought after by scores of lost souls looking for a compass or by combatants looking for confidence. While in a drug-induced trance she would make pronouncements that were taken by suppliants as the very word of the gods. We believe we are more sophisticated and hopefully, more spiritual than that.

In other times, shamans would pronounce supposed words of wisdom while studying sheep entrails, and whole armies would be set in array depending on the position of a kidney or how a piece of intestine would lay “just so.”

Add to this the many charlatans, snake oil salesmen, tea leaf readers, and cockamamie ideas that pass for tokens of faith, and one has to wonder, who opened the gates of the asylum? Recently, billions of people waited for a stream of white smoke to rise from a chimney to indicate that God had spoken once again. What is frightening is that so many are so sure that He did.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and all Jihadists give me the jitters. There are people who put their trust in medieval and modern prophets from the Saudi Arabia to the Salt Flats of Utah. There seems to be no shortage of suicide bombers or of people who are willing to “drink the cool aid,” or dress to be “beamed up” to the Hale-Bot comet. That someone believes killing an infidel (like me) will fast track them to heaven is not comforting either. What is it about religion that make people so , (well, okay, I’ll say it) so weird?

From the snake and rat gods of India, to the self immolation of saffron robed monks, to self mutilation in the Philippines, or to the multitudes who insist the Virgin Mary is hanging out under a highway overpass, something is nutty about all this. Someone said that there is a “God-shaped void” inside every man that only God can fill. I am afraid of the void is between people’s ears.

Does finding God make people crazy? “Paul,” said Agrippa, “much learning doth make thee mad.” Here is a litmus test if I ever saw one. If the faith you hold makes you the “angry” kind of mad, or the “mean” kind of mad, or “money-mad,” you’ve got the crazy kind. If on the other hand, you get the “kind” kind, the “patient” kind, or the “sacrificial” kind, then I think you are on to something. God is love, and the apostle John settled it for me, basically saying “If you do not love those you have seen, you don’t love the God you have not seen.” This however is just a preliminary test. There is one that is more sophisticated, spiritual, and definitive. When you can bless those who curse you, and pray for them who despitefully use you and say all manner of evil against you, and love you enemies, then something has really happened in you. When that happens, we are finely getting with the program. No you are not going crazy, you and are being transformed and “reprogrammed” by the Oracles of God.
 

                                                                                                                                         id