Chuck Parry, the spiritual leader of the Bethel Church in Redding, California, has claimed that he has brought two people back from comas via the video app Zoom.
This is less impressive than one might think. Thanks to the pandemic, we are all familiar with Zoom. I doubt that there’s anybody out there who hasn’t been a face in one of those little Zoom boxes since March, and we are all powerfully aware of the ability of Zoom to render participants comatose. Nothing like a sales meeting that was supposed to last 45 minutes but is dragging on past an hour thanks to that one salesperson who keeps asking stupid questions that everybody else already knows the answer to, to put you in a state of stupor so advanced that you can only be brought out of it by the boss saying your name.
I handle Zoom meetings like any intelligent adult would, by claiming that my camera doesn’t work so I don’t have to put on clothes or quit drinking, throwing my headphones to the floor so that the other participants’ voices became tinny, far-away and blissfully irrelevant, and opening a fresh browser window to something moderately entertaining, like TMZ, Facebook, or porn. The only hazard to this approach is forgetting to mute the sound on whatever web site you are actually on, and everybody else on your Zoom being able to hear the love cries of the Hot Big-Ass Stepmom.
That woman knows how to keep a coma at bay.
But back to the Bethel Church. Presumably, someone else logged in a comatose believer to Bethel Zoom, and during the course of whatever theological spouting was occurring on it, the unconscious church member responded by sitting upright and abruptly shouting “Hallelujah!”
Or even, “I think I filled up my bedpan!” Really, when you’re in a deathlike coma, you can say almost anything when you come out of it and people will be impressed.
There is some doubt among the cynical and sinful this miracle actually occurred, because the Bethel Church has some underpinnings of its faith that are really out there, and I mean out there like the left moon of Uranus. They were the congregation that tried to pray a dead two-year old back to life last year, only admitting failure after it became apparent that the child coming back to life would be basically an episode of the Walking Dead.
Instead of acknowledging what is obvious about God (there’s nothing He enjoys more than pointless tragedy) the Church buried the child with full religious honors.
Zoom, meanwhile, instead of being an app used only by distanced geeks, has taken over the world. Various conspiratorial fantasies have sprung up around the ‘rona. That it was deliberately created by the Chinese is something the CIA is investigating. That it was deliberately created by the CIA is something China is investigating.
But who is benefitting the most by the virus? Is it Zoom?
Nope, it’s Amazon. Forget I said anything.
This is less impressive than one might think. Thanks to the pandemic, we are all familiar with Zoom. I doubt that there’s anybody out there who hasn’t been a face in one of those little Zoom boxes since March, and we are all powerfully aware of the ability of Zoom to render participants comatose. Nothing like a sales meeting that was supposed to last 45 minutes but is dragging on past an hour thanks to that one salesperson who keeps asking stupid questions that everybody else already knows the answer to, to put you in a state of stupor so advanced that you can only be brought out of it by the boss saying your name.
I handle Zoom meetings like any intelligent adult would, by claiming that my camera doesn’t work so I don’t have to put on clothes or quit drinking, throwing my headphones to the floor so that the other participants’ voices became tinny, far-away and blissfully irrelevant, and opening a fresh browser window to something moderately entertaining, like TMZ, Facebook, or porn. The only hazard to this approach is forgetting to mute the sound on whatever web site you are actually on, and everybody else on your Zoom being able to hear the love cries of the Hot Big-Ass Stepmom.
That woman knows how to keep a coma at bay.
But back to the Bethel Church. Presumably, someone else logged in a comatose believer to Bethel Zoom, and during the course of whatever theological spouting was occurring on it, the unconscious church member responded by sitting upright and abruptly shouting “Hallelujah!”
Or even, “I think I filled up my bedpan!” Really, when you’re in a deathlike coma, you can say almost anything when you come out of it and people will be impressed.
There is some doubt among the cynical and sinful this miracle actually occurred, because the Bethel Church has some underpinnings of its faith that are really out there, and I mean out there like the left moon of Uranus. They were the congregation that tried to pray a dead two-year old back to life last year, only admitting failure after it became apparent that the child coming back to life would be basically an episode of the Walking Dead.
Instead of acknowledging what is obvious about God (there’s nothing He enjoys more than pointless tragedy) the Church buried the child with full religious honors.
Zoom, meanwhile, instead of being an app used only by distanced geeks, has taken over the world. Various conspiratorial fantasies have sprung up around the ‘rona. That it was deliberately created by the Chinese is something the CIA is investigating. That it was deliberately created by the CIA is something China is investigating.
But who is benefitting the most by the virus? Is it Zoom?
Nope, it’s Amazon. Forget I said anything.
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