The Doctrine that Faith is a Miracle
The Christian faith teaches that the only kind of faith God wants from us is the
faith he gives to us. He causes our belief and faith by internally working his
magic on us. This is so that faith may be the basis of our life and love
so it has to be a gift from God. It makes faith an aspect of your
relationship with God which is so intimate because God is deeply involved in
your faith and in your having it.
The Church says all are born with spiritual blindness. God has to take this away
supernaturally for us to see. That is why they say that the faith they have is
supernatural. They say that natural faith in Christianity is useless for only
supernatural faith can help you get to Heaven. So faith is a miracle. The
miracle then is not in seeing a miracle such a person rising from the dead but
in believing that God did it.
God programs us to be amazed and impressed by miracles. He makes the nerves and
responses. So why can't he make us amazed at the miracle of the existence of the
universe and ourselves? Then he wouldn't need to change the way nature
ordinarily works. It is mad to go to all that trouble. Miracles never convert
anybody. Ever. It is our reaction to them that does that and God can tweak that
instead of tweaking nature. Miracles always have the element of showing off and
are beneath the dignity of God.
The Church teaches the existence of supernatural faith which is a miracle. Every
other kind of faith is natural.
Religion says that natural faith even in God is about yourself and from yourself
and that God has to give you the gift of supernatural faith which is about him.
Only the faith he gives is the faith that pleases him and gets a reward. But
nobody can tell who has this gift. Put a Mormon and a Muslim and a Jew and a
Shinto in the same room and all will claim that their faith is not natural but
supernatural so that to respect their faith is to respect the divinity or God.
It is a subjective criterion and useless and so it is pride and arrogance that
make people claim such faith.
Religion says it is a community of faith set up by God. Thus religion has to
claim that this gift of magical and supernaturally caused faith is necessary
because it doesn’t want to admit to being a mere human creation. The idea of God
performing miracles for the benefit of man-made religion would be total
absurdity and would suggest that it is not God that is doing them at all. It
would be like God doing miracles to promote the local youth club! To get people
to believe in the subjective criterion for a true religion or spirituality,
means that the Catholic believer has to slam the Mormon and Muslim etc believer
as a liar and they him or her. It is the, “How dare you claim that you have an
experience of the divine that justifies and verifies your faith when mine is
different. My experience is the real one!” kind of thing. Unless that is done
the criterion is meaningless and useless and laughable. Unless that is done, the
criterion hasn’t even the semblance of integrity. Miracles clearly pay homage to
this bigotry. They are no good without the idea that religious experience is the
ultimate decider if somebody belongs to God and the true faith. But that idea is
nonsense and is easily disproved philosophically and has been laughed at for
centuries.
The Bible is full of miracles and even claims to be a miracle - the word of God.
The Bible is for Catholics and Protestants the indispensable source of
revelation from God. Any belief that people have that is not authorised in some
infallible source such as the Bible is believed by natural faith.
If it is a gift to believe in Bible miracles like the Church says then when you
cannot believe in them without God’s help which the Church teaches then these
bizarre consequences pop up:
1 Though we believe in the non-biblical miracles by natural faith we cannot
believe in the Bible ones except by supernatural faith which is a gift from God
that guides our will and mind to embrace the truths given by God.
This is weird. It must be God's fault then if we are lost and blinded. The
teaching about God inspiring and giving faith implies that God blinds us to cure
us which shows he is neither very sane or decent or sensible. Who would trust
anything he says? Plus your belief in both types of miracles will feel the same.
Supernatural faith and natural faith to our experience are no different. To say
one is natural faith and the other is supernatural faith is just arbitrary and
dishonest. You need self-deception to manage to think you believe
supernaturally.
2 To suggest that human beings cannot sincerely come to God in faith and through
faith unless he helps them denies the validity of self-esteem. Self-esteem is
the root of all good so miracles are evil if they suggest otherwise which
according to all believers they do.
3 If the Bible miracles are not signs unless God opens your eyes to make you see
the truth about them and their message then this is saying they are not signs
except for those who respond to God and accept his gift of faith. It is saying
that the assumption you make that the faith is true comes before the miracle.
You guess the faith is true and you guess that the miracle confirms it. This is
not faith but guessing. The miracle then is not a piece of evidence but a guess.
The doctrine that faith precedes acceptance of anything as a miracle is saying
that nature prevents you from seeing they are miracles and from seeing the
message they give and the truth they give. Thus to believe in miracles you
cannot have genuine faith in nature or its regularity. The sun might turn into
ice cream in the morning.
That is very subjective and what is to stop you feeling that faith that the
devil has done them is a gift? Or that the signs or wonders are just done to
keep us interested in the supernatural? There are millions of possibilities.
4 Jesus said that you can see that God did something by looking at the good
fruits or good results of the deed.
Fruits cannot tell you if say an apparition was heavenly or not. It is not the
apparition that works the fruits but your perception of its meaning. And you may
imagine that perception to be a supernatural gift from God. To say that miracles
are signs from Heaven is to say that miracles bear the fruits of faith and
charity and other benefits. You now know that this is a shameless lie that
nobody has an excuse for falling for, because we should see that when different
people with different faiths all think their faith is supernatural that this is
purely their imagination.
If God brings good out of lies and evil, does that make them good? The notion
that good fruits from a miracle mean it is from God contradicts the alleged
truth that God uses evil as a tool to bring about good. And nothing ever has
only good results in the big picture.
Miracles in a Christian context that say that Jesus shed his blood to save
sinners by bearing their punishment are undermined by the fact that they result
in big money. The miracles give a message verbally and then they deny it by
their materialistic and degraded results. So which message then should you
listen to? For example, take the commercialisation of Knock and Lourdes. Is that
compatible with the gospel of a man who wanted people above all to live simply
and who said that all our money belonged to God and not us? Would God want
people spending money on pilgrimages to holy places with his money that he would
give to the poor if he were in our shoes? A God who was generous enough to give
his life for us on the cross would have none of this pilgrimage stuff. The money
spent on pilgrimages in the twentieth century alone would be more than enough to
wipe out poverty in Africa.
5 The miracles deny free will if they back up the concept of supernatural faith.
They imply that we cannot take God's word for it and honour him unless he helps
us. Yet they must back free will up if they want us to believe in the God of
Christianity who says that faith is a gift from him to be freely accepted.
Miracle believers contradict themselves.
The Bible miracles claim to be binding on us making it our duty to believe.
Religion gives us duties we don't really have or that we cannot be proven to
have. Only bullies invent duties. No human thinking is sacrosanct and you can
think you have supernatural faith and not have it at all.
To deny free will or to say that God made us defective is to say that God is
evil. Free will is the nearest to a possible way to blame man and not God for
evil – it doesn’t work but it is the believer’s only option. To see miracles as
signs is to accuse God of being evil and them as beacons to slavery to this evil
being.
6 To say you came to faith because of a miracle is to say that if faith is a
virtue – which it must be if it is a gift from God – is to boast before
unbelievers, “I am better than you and holier for I have come to the virtue of
faith and received a gift from God you don't have.” This completely contradicts
the parable of Jesus about the Pharisee and the Publican in which the Pharisee
was rejected by God for telling God how good he was – another reason why I say
there was a tradition in early Christianity that denied that Jesus did miracles.
The Bible says it is great that Christians have nothing to boast about
(Ephesians 2:8, 10). So miracles encourage the insulting and offending of
unbelievers. They encourage division. That is terrible. We know how over time
even a little looking down at a group can escalate into violence and hatred over
time – just like what happened in Northern Ireland. Whatever is doing the
miracles, if they are true miracles, is not a friend to people but a false
friend.
7 Theologians would tell you the following: A miracle is something supernatural
that cannot be naturally explained or for which a natural explanation is
implausible. It facilitates God as a personal reality for us who gives us the
truth and the true religion. Grace is God's forging a supernatural relationship
with us.
If so, then it is the sense that a miracle is a grace from God that matters. The
supernaturality of it is secondary. It is the grace that follows a miracle that
is to get prime consideration when examining the authenticity of a miracle. To
authenticate a miracle purely because it is supernatural shows no concern for
how the miracle helps change people. People get grace as a result of the
miracle. This alone should lead to a miracle being accepted as genuine and as
originated by God.
Believers run after miracles for the awe effect and out of curiosity. A man who
miraculously changes from evil incarnate overnight to a hero of virtue does not
get the same following as somebody who says he sees the Virgin Mary.
Disgraceful!
8 Belief in miracles always involves arrogance and lying that failing to work
out how an event happened means it is a miracle if somebody says it is.
The miracle believer does not understand how something seemingly or allegedly
miraculous happened. "I don't understand therefore it is a miracle" is claiming
that not understanding it means it is supernatural. That is more than just
irrationality. It is arrogance - arrogance always boils down to saying that a
belief is justifiable when it is not or claiming to know what you in fact do not
know. Real faith does not involve arrogance. It cares profoundly about being
realistic and rational. Real faith is based on the notion that reason and
feelings cannot tell us everything but that we need to have faith for own their
own they are not enough. But it is open-minded. The believer in God will be
happy to drop that belief should she find that faith in something else makes
more sense and helps her live a better life. Faith in a miracle strictly
speaking is impossible. Arrogance pretending to be faith is the nearest you can
get to faith in a miracle.
FINALLY
Miracles are promoted by devious people and fools. No decent God does miracles -
period. No God worthy of faith does them - period.