Zombies and God

It’s not really hard to see how these two go hand in hand.  Once the dead start rising from the grave, some people will turn to God to save them, some will blame God for what has happened, and others will use it as proof that God doesn’t exist.  But what if God were the reason for zombies in the first place?

I’m not trying to be blasphemous or question any one’s beliefs.  This is not an attack on any religion.  It’s a simple question.  There’s a passage in the Bible, Isaiah 26, verses 19-21: “But your dead will live; their bodies will rise.  You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy.  Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead.  Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until his wrath has passed by.  See, the Lord is coming out of his dwelling to punish the people of the earth for their sins.  The earth will disclose the blood shed upon her; she will conceal her slain no longer.”  To me, that sounds like zombies. 

So what if God uses the undead to punish the sinners of Earth?  How do you combat that threat?  Is there anything you can do?  I found the concept so fascinating, I wrote a novella about it.  Finding Eden deals with the idea that God sends a plague of living dead to punish the people of the world.

I don’t even remember how I came across the Bible passage.  It doesn’t exactly stand out from all the other passages in the Bible, unless you’re a zombie freak like myself.  Zombies are a plague on humanity that wipes out the vast majority of the population.  Stories abound about how the survivors live in the “new” world and overcome the seemingly impossible hurdle that is zombies.  They are stories about survival and overcoming hardship.  They are stories about finding humanity.

In reality, it doesn’t matter where the zombies come from; they are just the catalyst that forces the humans in the story to react.  There is an us versus them concept to the zombie story, and it forces the humans to ask themselves what makes them human.  How are they any different than the mindless corpses walking on the planet?  If you think about it this way, it makes a lot of sense to have God send the plague onto the Earth.  After all, He granted us free will and the ability to make our own decisions in life, but do we always make the right ones?

To find out how the characters in my story reacted to the undead threat, check out Finding Eden, available here.