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With regards to supernatural entities, one thing that my experiences have taught me is to see men like Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammad much more as men. I think it’s commonplace to say “Jesus was a man” (with some qualification) or “Mohammad was a man”—but it gets lost since these are men who, especially in the case of Muslims, have followers who may kill you if you decide to treat them, even today, as just another man. So their humanness becomes obscured. I bear little relation to these men, not being a man of world-changing importance, but my experiences have given me a small taste as to the difficulties that can be encountered—especially with regards as to what God, the angel Gabriel, or the gods want you to do.

I tackled the ambiguity in my earlier article today about “messages from beyond”, and the same point can be illustrated with Joan of Arc—she made prophecies, some of which did not come true. Yet a failed prophecy does not necessarily mean “supernatural fraud”—a prophecy is more about the ability to see the actuality with clarity than a predication; and, further, the process by which you encounter the supernatural (puns, cryptography, contradictions, polysemy, and “irrational behaviour”) makes it difficult to interpret the messages and can obviously lead to duds.

Even Jesus cried out to his Father “why have you forsaken me?” on the cross—which suggests he wasn’t entirely sure where the whole process was going himself (and I speak as someone who takes the miracles literally). Further, all language contains ambiguity—so when he said nobody would know God except through him, did that refer to the people in the room with him or the world (if the world, Christians must suppress other religions; if the room, what a mess)? Hence with religious matters there will always be very human wrangles, even from Buddha and Jesus, and even more human wrangles from their followers. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.