RE HOAXES
Religionists
Arbitrarily Choose the Miracles They Believe in
The Catholic Church teaches that miracles are evidence that it is true
and that God exists. It says that God
will never do a miracle outside the Catholic Church in another Church or sect
that can be taken as evidence that that other Church or sect is the right
religion.
“Catholics logically hold that
since God has authorized the Christian-Catholic religion, He could not work a
miracle under such circumstances that it could be reasonably be interpreted
as divine confirmation of another religion as a whole or of a doctrine contrary
to the teachings of Christ and His Church” (Miracles (Theology of) New
Catholic Encyclopaedia). The
Encyclopaedia maintains that there have been no miracles attesting to another
religion or heretical doctrine and says that the idea of miracles having
happened in them to support the points of agreement with the Roman Catholic
faith in a false religion is debatable.
The unfairness of this is evident for the Church says it believes in
miracles for all the witnesses can’t be liars and then it scorns the
testimony of witnesses outside the fold – how ecumenical: so we see that
miracles oppose ecumenism! It is
undeniable that if God does a miracle for a Hindu to give him evidence that
God is almighty then the Hindu will not take it just as evidence for that
doctrine but also for the entire Hindu religious package. Doctrines fit into a system so to give
evidence for one will lead to the system of dogma being regarded as
authenticated by implication. Suppose
a miracle happened in Hinduism to verify some point of agreement between that
religion and the Catholic Church which is the true religion. The witnesses are not going to interpret
the miracle as the Church would like.
For example, if a Hindu is cured of cancer miraculously by praying to
the Blessed Virgin Mary that will only confirm to the Hindu that Mary is one
of many gods.
In 1870, the First Vatican Council, which claimed to be infallible
decreed that anybody who says that miracles can never be proven or that they
cannot ever show the divine origin of the religion of Christ is to be
excommunicated for heresy (The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief, page
454). The text is in the New
Catholic Encyclopaedia and commands belief in miracles as evidences (Miracles
(Theology of)): “In order that the ‘service’ of our faith be ‘in accord with
reason’ [cf. Rom 12,1], God willed that to the internal helps of the Holy
Spirit there be joined external proofs of His revelation, i.e., divine deeds,
and principally miracles and prophecies.
Since these clearly show forth God’s omnipotence and infinite
knowledge, they are signs of revelation that are most certain and suited to
the intelligence of all men. Therefore
not only Moses and the Prophets but also pre-eminently Christ the Lord
Himself wrought many obvious miracles and made numerous manifest prophecies”
(Denz 3009). The idea that “miracles
can never be known with certitude nor serve as valid proof of the divine
origin of the Christian religion” (Denz 3034) was censured. The Anti-Modernist Oath of 1910 said that
miracles were evidence for Catholicism.
It had to be taken by all priests and teachers for priests under the
regime set up by Pope St Pius X.
The suggestion that God will never do a miracle outside the true faith
that people will take as an indication of his approval for the errors of a
false religion is totally insane because most human beings are not
rational. The fact that there are
millions of religions contradicting each other suffices to prove that. And it is even more proven if there is a
God for they are ignoring the promptings of his grace which helps them
discern the truth so they still manage to listen to lies.
And the religionists lie in saying that no miracle can be proved
outside their own religion which they maintain is the true one. They know that there are alleged miracles
that they haven’t disproved. Nobody
can be expected to conduct an in-depth study into every miracle claim that
has ever been made. So when they are
saying that miracles happen only in relation to their religion they are
guessing which proves they are guessing when they call miracles
evidence. They are only pretending to
be sure. Jesus said you can tell a
false man of God and a false miracle by the fruits (Matthew 7:15-23). Miracles have bad fruits and cause bigotry
and arrogance and division and obstinacy when they demand to be unjustly
treated as evidence. Jesus exposed
himself as a fraud when he stated that the Devil had miracle powers meaning
that it was possible that the Devil was supplying him with his preternatural
capabilities. Jesus himself admitted
that the miracle of multiplying the loaves and fishes had bad fruits for
instead of making the people holy it caused them to run after him for free
food (John 6:26).
St Vincent Ferrer was the most famous miracle worker of all time and
allegedly the most powerful miracle worker ever. He was in fact a member of the
excommunicated rival Roman Catholic Church led by anti-pope Clement VII. The man the Church believes was the true
pope Urban VI excommunicated his rivals supporters as schismatics, excluded
from the true Church and the Catholic Church still has the nerve to say that
miracles only happen in the true Church and show us who the true saints
are! Vincent’s miracles were intended
to draw people into the false Church.
The Catholic Church accepts many unacceptable miracles as being from
God which refutes her suggestion that miracles in a Church mean the Church is
the true Church. For example, when a
miracle of healing worked by a saint to be is accepted the Church has to wait
for another one to happen and be authenticated before it will proceed with
the canonisation. What this is, is an
admission that miracles are not signs for one miracle should be as good as two. What this also is, is this: “God, we will
make your friend a saint if you do another miracle and only then.” That is clearly tempting the Lord which
both the Law of Moses and Jesus said was a sin. Jesus told Satan he would do no miracle
before him to impress him for it was written that the Lord God must not be
tested. The vast majority of miracles
accepted by the Church are signs from Heaven that God wants the dead people
they are attributed to, to be declared saints. When the first miracle encourages the sin
of trying to tempt God and the second comes to show that it is right to tempt
God it is obvious that the Catholic Church has no right to endorse miracles
as evidence for the divine origin of the Church and all its official
doctrines.
The Church says that God can answer prayers made by non-Roman
Catholics. Answered prayer is taken as
evidence for God though it is weak evidence for nobody can be very sure that
chance was not responsible. When God
answers the prayers of those outside the pale why wouldn’t he do miracles out
there too? The Roman Catholic Church
must see this. She is wilfully
lying. Surely she sees that when her
doctrine about miracles causes so much evil and deceit that the miracles must
be from her Devil if genuine? She is
capable of any lies at all. Though
there is no evidence that some Catholic miracles have been hoaxes we should
believe that the Church has covered up the real facts which are that no real
miracle has taken place. The Catholic
Church tells so many lies so we ought not to pay any attention to her at
all. She is in the same category as
the prophets who give a word from God that he never spoke (Deuteronomy
18). God commands that such prophets
and revelators be ignored.
The modern doctrine that all love starts with self-love is a modern
doctrine (a better formulation for it is the advice that you cannot respect
others unless you respect yourself first).
It is wholly incompatible with the Bible teaching that we must love
the Lord with all our hearts and that this is the basic commandment and the
commandment to love yourself is the second (Mark 12:28-34). Even Christian psychologists while giving
an insincere assent to Bible teaching, support the new idea. This new doctrine has certainly caused an
apostate condition within the Catholic Church. It means that the Church practices egoism
though it is well disguised. God is
used for spiritual thrills and not for his own good. The shift in spirituality is so serious
that it means that the modern Catholic Church is not Catholic at all but an
imitation. Yet the miracles are still
happening. What use are they for
teaching? Who is doing them? The saints of the Middle Ages all did
miracles as a call to the people not to love themselves first but to love God
first. Now better miracles are
happening and all they show is that religion cannot be true or believable for
the gospel alters with the times. It’s
all politics.
When the Church has optional miracle beliefs then these beliefs are
outside the pale for if the gospel cannot be added to then whatever they
support it is not the Catholic faith despite happening within it.
Despite claiming that miracles are signs to show what doctrines are
true, religionists just pick the miracles they want to believe and discard
those they don’t.
A religion that has some verified miracles and rejects ones that are
just as credible would fake miracles and so we could not believe in any of
its miracles.
The Church says that it rejects silly miracles such as bricks floating
in mid-air – another proof of its double-standards in relation to
miracles. But when you think about it
miracles of healing are just as strange.
When miracles are just signs it does not matter what form they
take. Apparitions are an example of a
miracle that is just for sign purposes only.
Catholics will assert that they believe that Mary appeared to Bernadette in Lourdes and that this was a sign from God that their religion is true ignoring other miracle claims such as that of spontaneous human combustion and ghosts and UFOs which have no Catholic or indeed religious connotations and which are better substantiated by the sheer volume of claimants.
Religionists often pick out some of their own miracles for belief and
are agnostic about the rest. The
Catholic Church does not accept every miracle it examines even if it is as
good as the ones it has accepted. It
is always rather hostile to all miracles at first. Even
All the Church manuals say that any apparition that does not agree with
official and orthodox Catholic doctrine, is not from God. The Roman Catholic
Church only investigates miracles that suit its doctrines. If I saw the Virgin Mary today and she did
500 unmistakeable miracles of healing through me to back up my testimony that
I saw her, the Church would not investigate but would throw out the miracles
if she told me the pope was not the head of the Church on earth. If she found a way to persuade me that I
misunderstood the Virgin or to persuade others that I did she might
investigate then and hijack the miracles as evidence for herself and say they
are really from God. To say that
evidence backs you up when you are manipulating that evidence is clearly one
thing: fraud. The Catholic Church and
all its clergy is guilty of gross fraud.
That is the fruit that miracles produce, all this deception and
exploitation. That is what the Church
collects money to build shrines and publish holy books for: lies. This is very serious.
The greatest minds in history disagree over exactly what right and
wrong are. Even today people have to
agree to disagree. Ordinary people are
bad at working out right and wrong and don’t have the time to think. When Jesus indicated that you can tell true
prophets by their holy and beneficial fruits he was telling you to arrogantly
act as if you know it all about right and wrong! This shows that he was condemned by his own
standard as a prophet from Satan because he was trying to create the bad
fruit of arrogance and bigotry. And he
gave this advice to people who knew less than what people today know. For example, his hearers believed it was
right to force a woman to marry you, to sell your daughter into slavery, and
to kill homosexuals. By modern standards,
Moses was a fake prophet for he said God gave him many laws and we find most
of these laws savage and harsh and barbaric.
There is no point in banning hate if you are going to allow evil like
that in the name of love. Moses was a
false prophet and so was Jesus for Jesus regarded him as a true prophet and a
forerunner.
The Christian faith says that faith is not natural. You need the light of the Holy Spirit to
help you see the faith is true so that you can believe in it. So Christians believe not because of
miracles or anything but because they think the Spirit has made them see
stuff as true. That totally eliminates
the need for miracles and shows that whatever is doing them is not God. Miracles that say they approve of the
Christian faith are attempting to trick for they are approving of a
subjective standard of truth which is not a standard at all but a
caricature. I mean the Seventh-Day
Adventist, the Mormon and the Catholic all have theologies that contradict
each other in several important matters and yet they all swear that the Holy
Spirit has been making them see that their faith is true. Worse they all have periods of doubt and
unbelief when they wonder if the Spirit is telling them something
different. When miracles leave it up
to your feelings and insights that you think are coming from God to decide if
the faith is true they are not signs for it can’t be a problem if you think
there is no Spirit communicating with you and you decide not to believe. When the miracle is just about you asking
yourself what you think or don’t think the Spirit is saying then it is only a
waste of time for the Church to authenticate or refute a miracle for it is
not important if a miracle has really happened or not. All that matters is that it looks like a
miracle happened. Miracles are
encouraging chaos and division by encouraging you to elevate your imagination
as a vehicle of divine revelation.
That can’t produce faith. It
can only produce self-deception and the deliberate blinding of yourself to
the truth. Miracles are not
signs. Claiming inspiration from the
Spirit is pride. It is occult as well
for you would need to be a psychic god to know it was the Spirit. This stuff about faith being supernatural
insight that is mostly God’s work is really a plot to stop you thinking for
yourself. If it is up to you, you can
think what you like but if God is inspiring you then you are a bad evil
person destined for Hell if you don’t go along with what he is inspiring and
believe. So it puts pressure on you to
obey the pope and the Church or Jesus and the Bible. It advocates and employs conditioning while
pretending that it is not conditioning that makes you believe but God.
The subjective basis of faith makes faith an idol. If your reason brings you to God that is
better than your emotions and imagination doing it for they can’t tell you
what you should or shouldn’t do.
Reason cares about what is real.
A God who limits or opposes reason hates himself and wants to be
abused.
You need to have the Spirit inspiring you to see that the fruits of
religion are good or really good. So
the fruits are no good when the resultant faith is subjective and therefore
bigoted. They depend on an evil
principle that defiles them and makes them fly catchers rather than really
good fruits. To use the fruits
argument is to deceive yourself and others and to boast that you know more
than you can.
The fruits of miracles would seem to be one way to avoid just
arbitrarily picking some miracles as worthy of belief and not others. You could reject miracles with bad fruits
as not being from God and accept the ones with good fruits. Since the Catholic faith claims to come from
one source, God, that means miracles will encourage you to accept the entire
faith. But what Catholics do is
continue to scratch the surface of the faith.
They do not make sure they like this faith in its entirety. Very few Catholics know the faith properly
and have the right perceptions of its doctrines. The nastier doctrines either don’t sink in
and are sometimes treated as taboo in the Church to pull the wool over the
eyes of members for being too out of fashion or vicious would drive them away
– for example, I’d say only one in a thousand Catholics knows that the Church
considers oral sex in marriage to be a sin.
This is just as bad as the lukewarm attitude that Jesus said he would
spew the Christians who had it right out of his mouth for. Their enthusiasm then would be the fruit of
irresponsibility and ignorance mixed with a little honesty and would be
keeping them away from the full truth of God and not bringing them towards
it. So miracles then in this context
have bad fruits that look good. They
must be the Devil’s work or illusions or lies or all three. It also means that the priesthood is
thieving off people by taking their money for they don’t fully know what they
are paying for and are encouraged to think they do. It was because teachers in religion,
including parents and clergy, have such a hard job and have to teach so much
that James the apostle said it was a bad idea for too many to become teachers
for their job was a danger to them for they would be called to a very strict
account before God (James 3:1,2).
The truth about the fruits is that it is not the fruits of any
individual miracle that count as much as the fruits of belief in the
possibility and reality of miracles itself.
To say the fruits of a miracle are important is to say the concept of
miracle is more important for you have to see that miracles are possible
before you can adjudge their fruits.
So any miracle, be it from God or Satan, is causing people to adopt
miracles as something that can happen.
The fruits of belief in miracle then has been the vast majority of
believers in miracle led astray by false miracles. Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Judaism,
Islam, Paganism and Satanism have all reported undeniable miracles. So a miracle of healing having good fruits
means nothing when the very concept of miracles has led to nothing but error,
superstition and crime.
The Church would answer this problem as follows: “People are going to
believe in miracles whether they happen or not so God might as well encourage
belief in miracles”. Obviously, that
is all they can say. But if people are
going to believe anyway and God does no miracles then surely it is not God’s
fault. To ascribe any miracles to God
is saying it is his fault and that he is bad news and causing trouble on
purpose.
No apparition or miracle is from God at all because the Church cannot
and does not check out the fruits thoroughly.
But it could check the fruits out better but it does not. This makes it a bad fruit to believe in any
apparition!! It must be a sin to seek
apparitions for everybody looks for fruit in the visionary so the visionary
is asking to be put up on a pedestal as an example of humility and
prayerfulness which Jesus strictly forbade which makes one wonder if the
apostles made the resurrection appearances of Jesus up. Jesus had stated that if you are going to
pray do it in private and close the door so nobody knows. Anybody who can have their life examined by
the Church and maybe proclaimed a saint is obviously a sinner for breaking
this commandment. They are not a saint
at all. If they had been they would
have hidden their inner life from others to perfection and would have come
across just as a sinner no better than anybody else who was trying to make it
to God.
To say you have had an apparition is to say good fruits will appear in
your life. It is a boast. It is the sin of presumption. No wonder
The Devil might tell a person how to pull off the perfect miracle hoax
for why would he do miracles and waste his power for a religion that is so
dishonest that it treats evidence like putty?
It can do the hard work for him.
There have been hundreds of people who had the stigmata, miraculous
wounds like the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ. The Church believes that Jesus was nailed
in his hands and feet and had a slash in the side. Some stigmatists, however, may just have
some of the wounds. St Rita of Cascia
(1381-1457) had a wound on her forehead.
The Church has officially stated that the stigmata of St Francis of
The number of stigmatists is well over 400. There are many modern cases.
The booklet, The Stigmata and Modern Science by Rev Charles
Carty (TAN, Illinois, 1974) states that Francis, Teresa Neumann, Padre Pio
and St Mary Francis of the Five Wounds had stigmata for which there is no
rational explanation. The priests
would like us to think there is a miraculous explanation but to do that they
would have to refute the existence of poltergeists which is impossible for
them. It would be easier for an
invisible spook to inflict stigmata than spend time writing on the walls and
tossing tables around the room.
Dr Romanelli who examined Padre Pio testified that his wounds were
inexplicable (page 15).
The stigmata of Louise Lateau (1850-1883) was examined by a Catholic
doctor and one who was a freemason who said that medicine could do nothing to
explain it (page 15).
She could lose half a pint of blood a day from her wounds (page 67, The
Bleeding Mind). Her right hand was
once put into a jar that she couldn’t get it out of in order to prove that
she was not cheating and she still developed open wounds in it like nail
marks (ibid, page 39).
Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), a German nun, was observed and
examined by more than twenty doctors who agreed that something that medicine
was mystified by what was going on (ibid, page 31, 32).
These miracles are not signs when the Church has not officially
recognised them as such. It is
refusing to give them their proper status and implying that everybody else
should do the same. The miracles
happen to verify the Church and when the Church is not moved by the Spirit to
let them then they are false miracles and possibly hoaxes. They prove that the Church is dishonest in
relation to miracles for it arbitrarily presents some for belief and not
others.
I am not saying the stigmata is real.
If you read my book Stigmatic Sorcery you will see that it is not but
when Rome listens to doctors who say a cure is inexplicable and they use that
as an excuse for saying it was a miracle it should do the same with the
stigmata but yet it dismisses some very convincing cases as unworthy of an
official statement of authenticity.
There are many miracles that refute the view that miracles are meant to
be signs. The “Floating Wonder”
Reynard Beck astounded
There is more evidence for alien abduction than for any other kind of
miracle. Sane people report this
experience but few accounts agree. The
disagreement means only that something strange may have happened for that is
one thing that is agreed upon that it is an odd experience. The differences don’t necessarily mean they
are all lying because different people seeing different mountains doesn’t
mean the mountains don’t exist. The
evidence for alien abduction then indicates that miracles are not signs. They just happen and that is all. It is no use focusing on some miracles that
do seem to be signs at first glance because what the majority testify to is
what carries the weight and wins the argument.
Lots of different groups report miracles or supernatural events and
they have no problem finding the academics and scientists to authenticate
them. So why then should we believe,
say, in the Catholic Church just because a few eminent doctors say that
miracles have happened and ignore say the Christian Science movement which
reports miraculous mind cures verified by very intelligent and reliable
people?
Conclusion
Religion uses miracles to pretend that faith is interested in what is fair
and real and what can be evidenced.
Miracles produce only self-deceit and hypocrisy and even supercilious
bigotry.
Further
A Christian Faith
for Today, W Montgomery Watt, Routledge,
Answers to Tough
Questions, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Scripture Press, Bucks, 1980
Apparitions,
Healings and Weeping Madonnas, Lisa J Schwebel, Paulist Press,
A Summary of
Christian Doctrine, Louis Berkhof, The Banner of Truth Trust,
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Veritas,
Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press,
Enchiridion Symbolorum Et Definitionum, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger,
Edited by A Schonmetzer,
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books,
Miracles, Rev Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society,
Miracles in Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM Press Ltd,
Medjugorje, David Baldwin, Catholic Truth Society,
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,
Science and the
Paranormal, Edited by George O Abell and Barry Singer, Junction Books,
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Headline,
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline,
The Case for
Faith, Lee Strobel, Zondervan,
The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief Volume 1, Gordon Stein, Editor, Prometheus
Books,
The Hidden Power,
Brian Inglis,
The Sceptical
Occultist, Terry White, Century,
The Stigmata and Modern Science, Rev Charles Carty, TAN,
Twenty Questions About Medjugorje, Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D. Pangaeus
Press, Dallas, 1999
Why People Believe
Weird Things, Michael Shermer,
THE WEB
The Problem of Competing Claims by Richard Carrier
www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/indef/4c.html
Saturday, 26 January 2008