IMPLY
WE HAVE DUTY TO BELIEVE
RELIGION SAYS
COMMENT: When you serve religion you really serve men. You follow the perception they want to have of religion and the perception they want you to copy. They think they are so great despite their professed humility that they want you to believe like them. So it honours God to believe in miracles? Rubbish and you know it. Ultimately you simply feel that your religion is true and you only accept miracles that match what you want to believe. It is that causing your acceptance of miracles not any real reverence for God.
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 divinity or God. It is a subjective criterion and useless and so it is pride and arrogance that make people claim such faith. 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.
Take Catholics for example who see the Blessed Virgin. The Church says it happens because God wants to honour Mary and show that the Catholic faith is the one right religion. They should come out with it and say what they really mean. It is easy to think that it is the statements of the Church that are being backed up. But the Church says being right is no good unless your faith is supernatural. Even the right religion without this is simply human religion and the Devil has non-supernatural faith and is orthodox in it but it is no good to him for it is not supernaturally caused by God (James 2). Your being right has to be a supernatural miracle and gift from God. If so, the experience of supernatural faith is a miracle so any other miracles are useless and to assume they happen is to accuse God of showing off and being undignified. Also miracles then do not make converts at all. They excite human faith which is no good. They verify nothing for the miracle of supernatural faith is its own verification. The proper attitude to miracles is to recognise that they have nothing to do with showing any religion to be true.
What miracles are doing is not verifying the dogmas of the Church but highlighting personal supernatural faith in the religion. This can only be done by miracles happening to people who have this faith and they must happen to encourage it. Miracles have to happen only to holy people to do this. Those who report miracles then are glorifying themselves and puffing themselves up. If miracles happen but not always to holy people then something is wrong. They are not from God and fraud must be considered on theological grounds. It is the “virtue” of those who see the vision and those who “verify” the claims that is being glorified when a miracle is accepted and or promoted. The miracle cannot be accepted otherwise. This is something religion cannot admit and yet if people were rational and knew what they were talking about they would see it. Religion regards pride as the deadliest sin and Jesus said that if you pray or fast you must do so in secret when possible for it is such a danger and we fall into it so readily and easily.
The Church believes that only the one true religion does miracles. God gives it miraculous powers. So God gave Bernadette of Lourdes the power to see the Virgin Mary in 1858. Miracles cannot verify the Church being the true Church unless they are the work of the Church. The Church investigating the miracle makes no difference. Miracles then support the vice of religious pride. You might as well show off your praying and fasting as do a miracle. Yet Jesus said that when you pray do it in secret even though this will be helping people and they will not know prayer and the power of miracle did it. Christianity teaches that genuine prayer that gets in touch with God is a miracle for the Spirit of God does the praying for you (Romans 8) so it is not really you. Prayer is evil. It encourages the dangerous vice of believing that miracles are common.
Apparitions are accompanied by the inducement of a state of supposedly miraculous ecstasy in the seers. They feel really high and enjoy the experience so much. The experience is union with God that is a little taste of Heaven. By claiming ecstasy, the seers are claiming to have God in their souls and the ecstasy is described as a state of intense prayer. Jesus said that if you pray, try and keep it private if you can because of the risk of pride which can hide itself even in the guise of humility. To flaunt your humility is a form of pride and the Bible warns that the heart is very prone to self-deception. That means genuine seers would have their ecstasies in private. Bernadette of Lourdes and the visionaries of Medjugorje and Fatima made no effort to hide theirs. Whatever was causing the ecstasies, it was not God. And their humility must be questioned and especially when it is the likes of the Medjugorje visionaries who are known for their worldly ordinariness and opulence.
Duty does not presuppose understanding what you have to do. You can be punished for doing something you didn't know was wrong. You can be punished for something you heard was wrong even though you don't understand why it is wrong. The doctrine of God then presupposes that it is a duty to honour God and that you are breaking your duty if you don't believe. It would be a duty for believers to silence unbelievers and use the law to stop them publishing anything in defence of unbelief or anything critical of the predominant religion.
Belief in miracles promotes intolerance.