MIRACLES AND TRUSTING GOD

FOREWORD
 
A miracle is what is not naturally possible. It is a supernatural occurrence. It is paranormal.
 
Religion uses miracles as evidence for the truth of its claims. Miracles are not evidence for religion being true or for the existence of God. Why? Because we don’t really know what they are evidence for.

Religion claims that it is true that a person who reports a miracle is more likely to be mistaken or lying than right and argues that it only validates miracles when lies and errors have been ruled out.  It does not admit however that the person lying despite all tests saying he or she is not may be the real miracle.  It does not admit that if a miracle is reported, what the miracle is and where it is is anybody's guess.  To trust witnesses then is made out to be mistrusting the God who appointed them.  That puts pressure on people and bias is a clear problem.  It is going to arise. In reality, trusting people is NOT trusting God but trusting them.  You need man's word posing as God's word when you don't want or don't have God's word.
 
The main cause of religious fervour in the world is peoples’ fascination with miracles. The sense of wonder they get from them is addictive. This book hopes to do something about that disorder. Miracles are events that seem to be against nature or the way natural law usually runs. In other words, they cannot be explained by nature. Examples are the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing to children, the unexplained cure of incurable illness, blood coming out of nowhere on Catholic communion wafers, the sun spinning at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 and most importantly Jesus Christ coming back to life after being dead nearly three days. It is thought that only God can do these things.
 
Miracles have been conclusively refuted as signs for centuries now and new disproofs are appearing by the day and yet the Church plods on and just ignores the progress made. It is no better as regards its obscurantism and ignorance than the Old Testament God who in the Law of Moses who demanded belief in miracles and dared to say that the testimony of two witnesses was sufficient to verify any claim! If the religious world accepted that, it would be dead easy to create rivals to Jesus Christ. All it takes is for some obscure person to die and then two people to start claiming he rose from the dead giving them new doctrines. The resurrection body acts like a spirit so it doesn’t matter too much if the physical body is still in its grave as long as they are not saying the whole body rose. This was never said in the case of Jesus Christ though there was a mystery reported about the body not being in the tomb.
 
The central message of miracle, according to the Church, is that prayer is needed and miracles are said to happen in response to prayer. Miracles would be meaningless and just curiosities unless they invited and claimed justification for prayer. But prayer is evil. Prayer has insulting implications. If miracle justifies prayer then there is nothing more to be said. Miracle is poison and whatever is responsible is evil. Whatever is evil is hardly a good source of information!
 
IN GOD THEY DO NOT TRUST

God is supposed to be the one who creates out of nothing. God can't expect us to believe a miracle comes from him when it shows no sign of being an act of creation out of nothing. If blood appears on your statue out of nowhere - it does not mean it really came from nowhere or nothing. The devil could be moving the blood from a hospital on to your statue.
 
No Catholic or Christian or whatever ever believed in God’s miracles just because of God or because of God who they say is all that matters. How interesting that the signs that God alone is to be loved show that he is not to be loved at all!
 
They believed in what the religion said were miracles so they were believing the religion more than God. There is a difference between trusting in God and in trusting in God because of the Church.
 
If A says that B can be trusted and you trust A you are really saying that A is the one that can be trusted for you believe in B because of A. You are looking at B the way A tells you to because A tells you to. It is not B you care about but the image of B that A wants you to have for it is just A you trust. You act as if you trust B. You will say that you trust B. But it is all because you trust A. by trusting B you are indirectly trusting A. A is the real focus here.
 
Trusting in God because of the Church is really trusting in the Church alone. When you believe in one of the cures accepted by the Church as miraculous at Lourdes you are really believing in the doctor who diagnosed an incurable disease. Be aware of how much deception, craftiness and cruelty exists in this profession. God would want us to believe him not other people for he comes first. God means the being who alone matters. Believing the doctor is listening to what he says God might have done and not God. It is making the doctor more important. If miracles are signs for the truth then God would have to make us see them for ourselves for it would be malign and wicked to force us to believe what men say about him instead of what he says. The miracle-workers of the Catholic Church and other miracle cults are devils in the sense that they try to put themselves between God and us so that we can’t get to the real God but only a mental idol.
 
When you trust another person or the Church you are not honouring them but yourself for you are honouring your judgment of them. It is yourself that you are putting your trust in. That is the simplest reason why it is madness to believe that a miracle is really a sign no matter how much it might look like one. What is the point of a God looking for your trust by doing a miracle when you can’t give it to him?
 
The miracles are not from a God of truth and decency and so they are not signs.
 
After reading all this it must look more certain than ever that religion could be doing magic tricks or controlling and sifting the data about visions and miracles it would like to declare authentic and from God so that the contrary evidence is phased out and twisted. Another point in favour of this view is that a God of miracles would do one for all the world to see when only what we see can bring us to true faith in him and not what others report. The Devil must be doing all the miracles if they are miracles and there are no aliens or whatever to do them.
 
Even if there is an all-good God, it does not follow that any miracle is a direct action of God. Even those who say that God does miracles, seem to think that there are paranormal forces that do things which have no religious significance. A scheming spirit could be doing miracles or using the paranormal to fool people that some miracle has taken place. When you are not sure, running after miracles is a sign of NOT trusting God. It shows you need miracle signs from him before you will love him better. And you want to assume the signs are from him when they might not be. This is about you not God.
 
Suppose miracles are direct actions from God. Miracles must happen for a very serious reason for they are much the same as breaking the law of nature. When God has to go that far the need must be great. So to say miracles are signs is to imply that that people need miracles and need God and need conversion and so are serious sinners. Miracles then call on you to judge and condemn. Since to oppose the sin is to want to hurt and oppose the sinner too, miracles clearly incite to hatred. To be against the sin is to be against the sinner and since hatred is condemned because it makes you hurt people it follows that this is practically the same thing. Why is it okay to hurt a criminal to punish them for a crime and wrong to hate them even when the hate might not or will not be carried out? Oh the hypocrisy of the God-botherers! Free will denial means you condemn the flaws in somebody that caused evil but not the person but to say they are a sinner or a free agent who created sin means you condemn and hate the sinner. To say John’s work is a disgrace is to insinuate that John is a disgrace so if miracles speak of a loving God then God loves the sinner and hates the sin and is a total liar for it is impossible.
 
The main alleged message of the miracle is that God has the power and the desire to protect the upright. The Bible advises confidence in God no matter how bad things get. Nobody would be interested in miracles at all if it wasn’t pretended that miracles were a sign that God cares. However the corollary of this idea is the totally objectionable belief that anybody who doesn’t prosper and who suffers is cursed by God or being punished for sins.

THERE IS NO REASON TO TRUST MIRACLES OR GOD

Religion just assumes that God would not lie in his miracles. You know it is bad to trust anyone without knowing a bit about them first so miracles are bad. A stranger who asks for trust except in an emergency is up to something. Yet miracles are the only way God can talk and when they happen so rarely and are hard to verify it follows that we cannot trust God. He might be trustworthy but we don’t know that. When you see a miracle you should get evidence that God can be trusted before you trust it for you have no evidence that it can be trusted. Some people say you should assume when somebody tells you something that it is true even when there is no evidence that the person is being truthful. But that is what you are doing, assuming not trusting or believing – assuming is trusting yourself not the other person and not trusting yourself to be right about what is being assumed but to be doing the right thing. If you assume A and B follows from A and you say you believe B it follows that you do not believe B at all for when its foundation A is an assumption it must be one too. No God is going to do miracles to have us assume that he tells the truth. He’d want better than that when he goes to the bother of doing miracles. If miracles act as evidence and just get us to assume then they are failures and are not done to convert us at all. If miracles lead us to assume that religion is true then they hamper the faith that the Bible asks for and they do what the Devil wants – to destroy faith and loyalty to God. Who do you think then is doing them now?
 
Even if you can prove that some visionary is miraculously seeing something that does not prove that what the visionary says about what he or she sees is the truth. The visionary could be seeing the Devil or an alien and lying about it. After all, the visionary and the Church say that what he or she is seeing is a private revelation just for him or her though he or she can share it with others. To treat such miracles as signs is really to say that the witness’s word is being taken for it that the miracle is from God. So we will not look at God but at what people say about him. The result is that the only God we end up with is an idol as good as created by man. You are honouring the man who reveals God more than God for it is what he says about God that determines what you think about God and how you relate to God so you are relating to that man’s creation.

When others tell you how to perceive God then why not do the logical thing when you should be egoistic and make God in whatever image you like? You should for you come first in your life.
 
God or gods or aliens or whatever cannot be trusted for they force apparently sane people who are actually psychotic to lie. That is the same as lying themselves. They made the laws that compel the psychotic person.
 
CONCLUSION

To believe in miracles as signs is evil and a thoughtless insult against all who live on this planet and any God out there if there is one. Miracles or supernatural events are hopeless when it comes to searching for support for any dogma or system in them.   Miracles are rife at the start of a new faith be it faith in a religion or an apparition story.  Most prefer the miracle to be in the past so that now they can argue that it happened.  This is no surprise for if there is anything suspect, the past because it cannot be repeated, provides a good cover.  Miracle supporters are inherently dishonest.
 
Further Reading ~
A Christian Faith for Today, W Montgomery Watt, Routledge, London, 2002
Answers to Tough Questions, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Scripture Press, Bucks, 1980
Apparitions, Healings and Weeping Madonnas, Lisa J Schwebel, Paulist Press, New York, 2004
A Summary of Christian Doctrine, Louis Berkhof, The Banner of Truth Trust, London, 1971
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Veritas, Dublin, 1995
Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1988
Enchiridion Symbolorum Et Definitionum, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited by A Schonmetzer, Barcelona, 1963
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books, New York, 1993
Miracles, Rev Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1937
Miracles in Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1969
Lourdes, Antonio Bernardo, A. Doucet Publications, Lourdes, 1987
Medjugorje, David Baldwin, Catholic Truth Society, London, 2002
Miraculous Divine Healing, Connie W Adams, Guardian of Truth Publications, KY, undated
New Catholic Encyclopaedia, The Catholic University of America and the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc, Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
Raised From the Dead, Father Albert J Hebert SM, TAN, Illinois 1986
Science and the Paranormal, Edited by George O Abell and Barry Singer, Junction Books, London, 1981
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Headline, London, 1997
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline, London, 1996
The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2000
The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief Volume 1, Gordon Stein, Editor, Prometheus Books, New York, 1985
The Hidden Power, Brian Inglis, Jonathan Cape, London, 1986
The Sceptical Occultist, Terry White, Century, London, 1994
The Stigmata and Modern Science, Rev Charles Carty, TAN, Illinois, 1974
Twenty Questions About Medjugorje, Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D. Pangaeus Press, Dallas, 1999
Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer, Freeman, New York, 1997

THE WEB

The Problem of Competing Claims by Richard Carrier
www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/indef/4c.html