THE MENACE OF MIRACLES

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THE MENACE OF MIRACLES

In brief,

1 Belief in the supernatural makes it possible for a person to be misled by some charlatan. Is belief worth the risk? No. Even believers in miracles dismiss most reports as unreliable. The Catholic Church for example accepts only a handful out of thousands of apparitions as authentic and even then it can withdraw that acceptance and change its mind.

2 Supernatural claims cry out for investigation. This can be very expensive. For example, if I saw a miracle I would say nothing as the money is better spent on the hospitals for example. True scepticism is inquiry - in other words, a supernatural claim has been made lets check it out.

3 Supernatural beliefs make you biased and immune to logic. For example, if you believe God turned bread into real flesh and the CCTV shows trickery you can say the Devil did something to the CCTV.

Supernatural beliefs always come down to accepting testimony rather than hard evidence.

You relay need to see and test supernatural claims yourself - anybody doing it for you is no good because

4 If supernatural claims are fraudulent or based on error, then we are leading people into error by promoting them.

5 Believers in the supernatural often turn very vicious if their belief is contradicted. They slander the investigators who find out the truth. Muslims for example can persecute ex-Muslims.

6 People want to believe in the supernatural for it is comforting to think there are powers that can overcome evil and suffering. This is actually appalling because instead of looking for beliefs to comfort ourselves with we should go out and comfort people. "To comfort rather than be comforted."

We have to presume that if something supernatural is happening that what is really happening is down to unknown laws of nature or some super-science. That means we end up violating Occam's Razor.

Nobody dies because they didn't believe in the supernatural. We hear of people being sacrificed in black magic rites or contracting AIDS because a supernatural God says condoms are a sin or dying because they trusted alternative medicine and the list is endless.

7 The supernatural is about powers greater than us. This is a dangerous idea for it suggests the supernatural comes first. Evangelical Christians for example want the world to end in nuclear war so that Jesus will come back.

Supernatural believers are fond of conspiracy theories . The big bad doctors don't approve such a

So if there is a conspiracy who should we believe? The side that says belief in the supernatural cannot be justified.

8 Once you believe in the supernatural, you have no right to say that such and such a supernatural idea is true and another is false. For example, the medium reports messages from your dead loved one.

We have to assume that miracles don't happen until we see evidence that they do

We have enough to be afraid of without introducing the supernatural. It is something extra to be

Miracles are events like Jesus rising from the dead and the Virgin Mary appearing at Fatima and allegedly predicting the future accurately. A miracle is what is not naturally possible. It is a supernatural occurrence. It is paranormal.

We know that miracles are bad news if they do happen. We know that they are even worse if they are hoaxes or if mistakes have been made and they are not real.

We should not let people use them scare us into belief in religion or listen if they say that their religion is true for miracles have happened that point to it being true.

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. Read my book Prayer is Evil from the side frame.

The Church says that if you refuse to believe testimony to miracles you can’t justify listening to anything people say. But we all pick and choose what testimony we believe and the Church knows that and even allows that so it is just trying to manipulate us. To reject a good testimony to miracle, is not doing this as much as denying a good testimony to a more ordinary event is. If you believe in miracle then how do you know that the miracle really happened? Testimony? But what if the miracle was the alteration of their memories?

The Church says that miracles are to be defined as events that the laws of nature cannot do meaning that God or a being he has empowered could do them. The arrogance and deception of this definition is plain for the Church claims to know that nature cannot have the freak laws to create seeming miracles and to know that God is the only explanation when he is really just one of many. The Church would need to be scientifically omniscient to achieve all that knowledge. Yet what other definition can the Church choose for the Church says miracles are signs from God that point us to the things he has revealed in religion? To say miracles are a suspension of the laws of nature is still saying they are against nature because natural law is not supposed to be changeable. Besides if you unfairly dismiss a pupil from your school against the rules, you cannot say you are suspending the rule not breaking it. Same difference. To settle for saying that miracles are just inexplicable occurrences means you cannot know if they are supernatural or from God or not for inexplicable does not necessarily mean supernatural. Lightning was inexplicable to cavemen but now we know that it is not supernatural.

The more supernatural beliefs society had the more destruction resulted. People panicked and stampeded when they saw an eclipse happening. They burned witches and blamed them for cursing their crops. They believed the Black Death was a miracle. Jesus and the Bible advocated belief in miracles and gave no safeguards to restrain the dangers of such beliefs. They wanted and are to blame for the evil. Jesus approved of the Jewish law which gave a black magic rite revealed by God for discovering an adulteress and which caused her grave harm if she were guilty.

Today belief in miracles cause trouble for people who feel they have no hope left. They are about to die and they have to be dragged on a dangerous and agonising trip to a miracle site of the Catholic Church. People at Medjugorje stare into the sun and damage their eyes forever thinking God will show them a vision and protect their eyes. Belief in miracles has led to Protestant evangelists and Pentecostalists deceiving the gullible and getting their money off them. Belief in miracles has led to people being more attracted to visions and healings than anything else. When did you see a shrine created at the spot where a raging alcoholic converted and became sober and an outstanding blessing to society? Signs and wonders demean his "miracle". They are not about helping people though they like to appear as if they are. The help is only a bait that religion exploits to get power and money and prestige.

Belief in miracles, when you see how fake miracles such as those of the US televangelists, Hindu "holy" men and Medjugorje and so on are the most popular, has mostly bad fruits. Religion, in its duplicity, ignores this in order to pretend that some miracle sites such as Lourdes are good. They say we are throwing out the baby with the bath water. We are not. There is not enough good coming from belief in miracles to make the propagation of that belief acceptable. If we refuse to believe in any miracles, we will not be led astray and fooled. It is better to wrongly think that miracles never happen, than to think they do happen. Not believing in miracles does no harm.

When Jesus said he did miracles and when the Church says miracles happened and points to events to back this up, what is happening is they are saying, "Ha ha you can't explain these events. Don't try to come up with a natural explanation." In other words, when something is decided to have been a miracle the question is closed. Miracles are pro-censorship. They are pro-bias. They are pro-bigotry. They are pro-arrogance. They are the oil religion uses to lubricate the machinery that it deploys to get power.

A Catholic bigot and I had a dispute on the authenticity of the Padre Pio miracles. I gave evidence for my scepticism. He retorted, "If you can' t come up with a natural explanation then leave it alone". Religion teaches that miracles are signs from God who alone has the right to order us what to believe. If so then miracles certainly imply that his attitude was right. Miracles do indeed themselves shout, "If you can' t come up with a natural explanation then leave it alone". This says a lot of things.

One is that it is up to the critic to disprove the supernaturality of the miracle. It is not up to the critic to do that. A miracle claim is so strange that it is up to those who say it happened to show that it did indeed happen supernaturally. Religion is insulting and being unfair to the critics.

Two, it says that the miracle should not be criticised if no natural explanation can be thought of. But even if no natural explanation can be thought of that doesn't mean there is no natural explanation. It does not mean we should regard the miracle with reverence and shun all critical thoughts.

Three, people can be wrong about whatever they want and this is fine but it is not fine in relation to miracles. One must be right about them. This is clearly religion seeking the power of getting people to think what it likes. What a lovely motive it has for proposing miracles for belief! How impressive!

Four, once you admit that a miracle has a supernatural explanation you shouldn't go any further than that. Religion does not want you to regard a miracle merely as supernatural but also as act of God done to show that it speaks his truth and guards his message. It is not content with getting you to accept a miracle as supernatural but it seeks to impose a certain kind of belief in the supernatural on you. It wouldn't want you to think that the resurrection of Jesus was supernatural without you thinking it showed he was a supernatural son of a supernatural God who rose to supernaturally save us. Yet even if the resurrection was supernatural that doesn't prove that the resurrection meant all those other things. There are millions of possibilities. If a man comes back from the dead, there are many natural possibilities about how this might have happened. For example, perhaps the man was not declared dead by a competent doctor. Perhaps he revived after being declared dead due to some medicine he had. But if you bring in the supernatural then you are left with billions of explanations as to how he came back. Perhaps a fairy tricked the machinery or the doctor. Perhaps an alien made the doctor imagine he was declaring him dead and so on. With the natural, there is a limit to what you can say by way of explanation. But not so with the supernatural. The supernatural doesn't explain anything . It is better not to use it to explain but to simply stick with saying it happened if it happened. It is more honest . Also, choose the least supernatural explanation for something. If it is more supernatural for a man to rise from the dead and less supernatural for this resurrection to be an illusion by a witch then believe the latter if it is the least supernatural. If you can choose the most supernatural explanation for a miracle, then why stop there with miracles? Why not say that if you find snail marks on your carpet though you feel no snails can get into the house that it was a miracle and not a snail at all? By the way, Jesus Christ was shown to be a fraud simply by the big number of miracles attributed to him. Religion just uses miracles not as a reason for holding to what it believes but as an excuse. It forces an explanation on the miracle to make it fit its outlook. Its trickery with logic.

Five, if religion is right that miracles are an invitation or a warning to the world to join the one true faith and live it and believe its teaching then those who disagree and oppose are bad and must be stopped. Even if they are sincere they are still bad and doing harm and are not sinners in disagreeing and opposing for they are sincere and well-meaning. Some religionists say, "Love the sinner and hate the sin". In the case of a sincere opponent of religion and miracle this will change to, "Love the person and hate the evil they do and cause". The whole point of hating sin is to hate the evil. It is not so much to hate the evil intention in the person because there is nothing anybody can do about that except the person themselves. It is more hating the evil the person produces. So the evil whether deliberate or not is to be hated. In fact, when you ostracise somebody you don't say, "I ostracise the sin not the sinner". You don't say, "I punish the sin but not the sinner". You can't do that any more than you hate the sin and love the sinner. Christians are fully aware of the hypocrisy - they don't believe anybody who tells them they hate their Christianity but love them. Miracles are a call to hate. They demand that you hate and then do the additional evil of lying about it that it is really love you do.

Miracles and bullying are clearly two sides of the one coin.

God is said to do miracles as signs that he exists and to point us to the true religion for without them no religion can say it has evidence for its claims and no religion can have any hope of coming across as credible. But the thing is you have to suppose that God exists before you can interpret them that way. If you believe in something different perhaps that the world was made by an apathetic intelligence and is run by deceiving spirits you will not take miracles as signs that there is a God but as signs that this apathetic intelligence exists. When you just assume there is a God there is no point in God doing signs because after the signs you are still just assuming. They are not signs when that is all the far they can take you. They are just silly freaks of nature or the paranormal for when they don’t stop you assuming there is no point in them taking place. If God does them to fix his blunders then he should resign for he has no competence. So miracles both imply that the paranormal cannot be trusted at all and that God cannot exist for an incompetent God is not a God at all.

There are many miracles that refute the view that miracles are meant to be signs. The “Floating Wonder” Reynard Beck astounded America in the nineteenth century with floating in mid-air. No expert was able to debunk him or catch him out hoaxing. He even vanished in such a manner that it appeared that he had floated up to the sky and died. He is one of millions of examples of a miracle report that is better verified than any Catholic or Christian miracle, which indicate that miracles are freaks of nature. He did better than the witnesses of Mary at Fatima and the witnesses of Jesus risen from the dead. Why? For all one had to do to see his miracle was go to see him and so one was not dependent on witnesses one didn’t even know personally. You need to refute all the miracles like Reynard Beck that say miracles are just freaks of nature before you can dare to use your miracles as evidence for your religion being true for the simple reason that they cannot be evidence until the evidence that miracles are not signs is dealt with. Until that is done – and nobody and no Church has done it - nobody can let miracles dictate to them what they should believe. But the trouble is the case against miracles being signs is stronger than the case for them being signs simply because there are more miracles that are freaks of nature than ones that seem to be signs. Miracles then that are supposed to be signs do nothing but increase human arrogance and duplicity and all the evil things that go with them. That is all they are for.

The Church lies about miracles being signs from God that Christianity is the true faith. The Church says we cannot dismiss miracle reports as mistakes or lies or the meanderings of deranged minds for that would be like saying human testimony is worthless. And then the Church turns a blind eye to the fact that most miracle reports, for example, alien abductions and ghosts, indicate that miracles are just freak events that happen without a purpose for that denies its dogma that miracles are signs. Reliance on miracles as signs is a sign for only two things: arrogance and deceitfulness. With these nice attributes the Church cannot be trusted in verifying miracles.

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 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?

A miracle you see yourself has more importance than one that is just reported by others for it is more certain. For example, if you see a miracle that has been done to prove that Jesus never rose from the dead – it might be a hoax and it might not be but if you cannot refute it you have to believe it even more than you would have to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Thus it follows that the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus forbids you to believe in what you see meaning that the miracle of the resurrection was a dishonest miracle and by no means can be considered to be a reliable marker of the true gospel. It follows that if you have a friend who testifies to a miracle you know that friend better than the apostles so the friend comes first even if he or she contradicts them. So even when miracles seem to point in the one direction they point in every direction but that. They are useless as signs.

It is no answer to say that a miracle never refuted the resurrection. The stubborn dogmatic attitude is still there. Miracles mixed up with dogma cook up only bigoted vice. And loads of miracles have refuted the resurrection. We know that.

Religion stresses the miracles of the past when the ones of the present and the future should have more weight because they have been examined by more knowledgeable people and tested by our good scientific developments. To believe that a woman has been cured at Knock according to doctors is better than to believe that Jesus rose from the dead two thousand years ago. That is why the Catholic Church which claims the best verified extra-biblical miracles cannot make sense when it says we do not have to believe in these miracles but have to believe in the miracles spoken of in the Old and New Testaments. But the Church has to make belief in the extra-biblicals optional for it stakes its infallibility on the claim that what the apostles taught cannot be added to. It is certain however that modern miracles refute that claim though the miracles often deny it for a modern miracle is more convincing than anything just scribbled in some old papyrus two thousand years ago.

We are all egoists. We only do what we want to do under the circumstances. And wanting to do something necessarily implies you want to feel fulfilled by doing this thing. So what is the point of a God looking for worship from us and doing miracles for that purpose when all I love is myself? If miracles oppose egoism as religion claims then they are evil and want me to curse the way I am. Only I can decide what I should or shouldn’t do so God should mind his own business and not be making out that it is my duty to believe what he says.

Another disaster is that miracles cannot prove that God is a desirable belief. To be desirable the belief needs to be needed because if we can live without belief in God we should for happiness is more easily attained with simple tastes and the avoidance of unnecessary needs. (Even most people in the Church feel little need for God.) If I can fulfil myself by persuading myself that God exists and is with me then why can’t I fulfil myself without him? The Church creates needs and breeds them into people where there are no needs in order to get you around its little finger.

God should make us miraculously know we have free will before he does miracles. If we only think or feel we have free will and are wrong then there is no God. There is no need to believe in free will. I am most sure of my own existence – I am less sure of everything else. So I should be just as sure that I have free will before I can judge myself as a sinner. It is a libel against humanity to say we have free will and abuse it.

If we cannot prove free will we have no reason to believe in God. There cannot be a God.

Religion says miracles give us the warning that we are capable of sin and that God exists. If so, then the miracles give a false message for there is no God or free will and they are evil for doing so. They are supposed to be signs of the truth but when we don’t have free will we could be programmed to believe the truth and so they are not necessary though they deceptively behave as if they are. Anything they say should be ignored and anybody who reports them is a menace. Beliefs are forced on us. Beliefs are forced on us – examine yourself and you will find the proof of this. Even when we search for understanding it is the belief forced on us that we need it that motivates us. We cannot help believing that that our legs can walk and even the weaker beliefs are forced on us by the past. When I think, the conclusion hits me whether I want it or not. It just comes by itself. Religion says that faith is belief that is expressed by love. So it follows that God can force religious truth on us by magically making us see that it is true which would not destroy free will. He hasn’t so it follows that miracles are anything but manifestations of the power of God.

The miracles of the Roman Catholic Church, some of which have never been refuted, supposedly bear witness to that Church’s version of the gospel of Jesus. This gospel says that the main commandment is to love God with all our strength and power. Even loving yourself and your neighbour isn't as important. If you don't have the strength to love somebody enough to save their life you have to give the love to God instead. We know we cannot love God as much as the so-called gospel demands. So accordingly, everything we do is a sin. No matter what good we do we are glad that we are not asked to suffer for all eternity to save somebody else at God's command. So we love freedom from pain more than God or other people. We cannot protest that it is not our fault that we cannot love God enough for he must help us for he cannot command the impossible. These miracles then have taken place to make us more sinful by believing in God not less and cannot be relied upon as the testimony of God.

If religion is right that miracles are signs of God's love then the following mystery occurs. Why is Johnnie boy cured of paralysis and why is toddler Tanya who is dying of lung cancer overlooked? Obviously religion has to say that God puts himself and his own will first. So they will have to say miracles back up the doctrine that God should be put first by me even if it means me enduring extreme torment forever to help others.

Miracles that are supposed to be signs imply that sincere and open-minded love coupled with research into ethics is not good enough and that is a disgraceful insinuation. Miracles support the awful bigotry of religion which puts dogma before ethics and people for such miracles are trying to get us to believe that having the correct beliefs about God and Jesus is most important when it is not important at all if harm is avoided. Miracles are malignant.

The God of the Catholics is a God who made all things out of nothing meaning he has infinite power because there is an infinite distance between something and nothing. So he is his power to create if he is infinite meaning he is the creation. So even if the miracles say, as most do, that God is not the creation they are lying because he is and no miracle should be relied upon. If we are God then the craziness of God doing miracles to get himself to believe in God is evident and all miracles are silly. If creation out of nothing has really happened then that is a miracle so any other miracle is from the Devil because God would not do things just for a display.

All miracles, assuming they happen at all, are malevolent. They would not be happening unless we were wrong to reduce right and wrong to the essentials so they imply that we should be enslaved. A good God would not let them happen meaning they have to be hoaxes or the Devil’s work to destroy his reputation. They even imply that believing in the essentials and God and not in Jesus or anything more is evil! Religion says that God guides all people who are open to that guidance so he could keep us on the right path without popes and dogmas and Bibles and Churches.

Miracles are evil for they claim to defend religious belief and religion is full of seemingly contradictory and nonsensical doctrines that are called mysteries beyond reason. But you should not believe in a paradox except as a last resort. You could get a revelation from God commanding that babies be killed and say it is a mystery. Don’t be smug and say that will never happen. You are making it possible and religious motivated killing does happen. To make it possible is as malicious as doing it. You are certainly saying that God should not send down rain on the starving millions in Africa which proves you are a fanatic just because of that one belief.

Apparitions accepted by the Church have told provable lies. They are evidence that the force behind miracles is not to be trusted. Plus the Church selects only the miracles that fit its doctrine as authentically divine which means that the Church is filtering and manipulating the evidence. You couldn’t get worse dishonesty than that. The result is that if God tries to speak to the Church and contradict it the Church will not give him a hearing. No God would waste his time doing miracles in the Catholic Church and the miracles of that Church make it clear that their source is not God. The Church admits that miraculous visions can happen and not be verified by the Church for it says the Devil often sends visions, masquerading as Jesus or Mary. So when God lets miracles that are beyond verification happen he is allowing silly miracles.

To say that the verified miracles of another religion are from Satan is to admit that Satan does miracles that make people live what seem to be better lives and happier. He sees and hears things we don’t so his miracles will do undetectable evil or evil that cannot be directly traced back to the miracle so you cannot tell the difference between a miracle from God or him. The miracle of exorcising demons is a definite hoax because no sane Devil would let a person show the signs of possession in an obvious way.

The thought that when miracles happen among Catholics that the wonders verify the Catholic faith because of the Catholic association is pure absurdity. Carrying the Catholic label does not make one a Catholic. As the popes teach, Catholic faith comes from God and to doubt or disbelieve any part of it is to reject the whole thing because it is questioning the authority that tells us what is to be believed. A person who believes that 1 is not equal to 1 cannot seriously believe that 1 + 1 = 2. Most Catholics despite all the praying and all they do are not true Catholics. Intending to be a Catholic is not enough but if you believe the Virgin Mary was a sinner you are not a Catholic whether you know it is Catholic teaching or not. The pope proclaimed an excommunication (expulsion from the Christian community) and a curse anathema against anybody who said she was in the nineteenth century.

We even see the phenomenon of Catholics following apparitions threatening hellfire and everlasting damnation and they still follow them despite seeing the unCatholic element in such apparitions though it is the ultimate sin to go against the faith or belief. To do that makes everything else fall apart. Religion brings out the bizarre element in human nature, it produces many eccentrics and crazy people. You cannot tell a true Catholic when you see one. The power of self-deception must never be underestimated.

Many Catholics are in a state of serious sin or mortal sin or sin that deserves Hell. The Church says such sin chooses the eternal torment and separation from God in Hell so if you die you will get what you choose. The Church says the Church exists on earth, in Heaven and in Purgatory but not in Hell though there are baptised people in Hell. This is the doctrine of the communion of saints in the Apostles Creed. So it follows that whoever is estranged from God by sin is not a Catholic.

Nearly all Catholics must have doubts so it is impossible to consider them true Catholics.

There are countless Catholics with excommunications for voting for abortion and so on that haven’t made an effort to get them lifted. You can be automatically excommunicated. If you learn that Catholic doctrine is that Jesus is God and you think that it is rubbish then such excommunication takes place. It is that easy.

Considering that it is only a guess that a group of Catholics are really that, a miracle among them attracts them emotionally to Catholic practice but not to Catholic faith. They usually deceive themselves that because they feel the faith is true they believe in it which is stupid. Feeling is not believing. The miracles do not then support Catholicism. Is it going to far to say that they bless doubt and disbelief and religious feeling and oppose proper faith?

To believe in the miracles as signs of the faith one would need to hold that those who witness them are true believers. You would start by examining the holiness of the witnesses and their orthodoxy and check them out for no excommunications. That would be done before you would even examine the miracle. If miracles prove Catholicism, then clearly there is no point in examining any further if the witnesses have doubtful orthodoxy or contrived and delusional devotion to the Church. If they are not true Catholics then the miracle is necessarily false. The miracle is encouraging their religious feelings but not their genuine devotion. It is not encouraging Catholicism.

Having seen the link between miracles and the witnesses being orthodox and holy, to say a miracle happened is to boast and be arrogant. It is to boast of one’s righteousness as did the Pharisee Jesus condemned in the Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee. This would point to miracles being tricks of Satan. And it would be more than just smug self-righteousness to say they happened and are evidence for religion being true. It would be pure vindictive when the content of that religion is the doctrine that people who die in serious sin even if they are only seven years old can go to Hell to suffer forever. The Church teaches that children are to be given confession and communion around the age of seven or eight for then they have the use of reason and can reject God by mortal sin or sin that takes you to Hell forever should you die. Strange that children can make the ultra-mammoth decision, the most serious decision of all namely where to spend eternity, and cannot marry or consent to sex. It is no wonder with absurd and vicious doctrines like this that paedophile priests do not think they took advantage of the children they had sex with.

When miracles are so needless and therefore ridiculous and ridiculous in their own right they make us less sure that a person found guilty of murder really did it for a demon or something could have pretended to be him and did it and that is bad for the surer you are of something so serious the better. The less miracles people believe in the better and why we must try to find alternative explanations remembering that if there is any doubt that a supernatural event has happened we must not believe in it for if we start preferring supernatural explanations when we can do without them we will have to believe anything at all to be consistent. Human testimony alone can verify a miracle. If ten people see a miracle and one liar says they are frauds then we can’t believe in the miracle even if he is a liar for we don’t know if he is and God wasted his time.

Christians believed in what their 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. So miracles are not about helping God get converts but to get the Church more power.

Some say that only predicting the future accurately is a sign from God. But when the message would be a miracle how could it be a sign? The Devil could make prophecies and then rig them to come to pass so prophecy does not prove the existence of a being that knows the future. Religion responds that God would never let the Devil do a miracle that does not give some indication that it is not from God. In other words, when the miracle fits religious dogma and morals and has spiritual consequences it is from God. But in the first instance they are saying that a miracle is only true if it fits their dogma which is a denial that miracles are signs from Heaven for they will not consider any miracle that does not fit this mould. And they are admitting that they are going to be unduly biased in favour of their own side – which renders any of the evidences for miracles they give unreliable at best. In the second instance, you never know if the spiritual fruits are divine because every religion admits that the world is full of false teachers who look like butter wouldn’t melt and Jesus said that it was wrong to wear your virtue on your sleeve. Religion does not believe in the second excuse. The only thing that that miracles imply is that we should be dishonest thinkers and show-offs. They encourage all the bloodshed that religion has started through its defilement of goodness.

If the Turin Shroud and the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe are miraculous then they should be burned. If tests show that the children of Medjugorje are seeing something then they should not be disclosed to the public.

Extra-ordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Miracle believers deny this. Murders happen and yet we demand a huge pile of evidence before jailing killers for murders are out of the ordinary. Miracles are more uncommon than murders and the same quantity of evidence would be no good for verifying them. Believers demand extraordinary evidence for extraordinary miracles they don’t like such as Buddha’s enlightenment but they don’t for the miracles that suit their religious preferences! The evidence they present is only an excuse. They would believe without it. Miracles invariably induce bigotry and dishonesty and blindness. Not very godly are they?

It is thought that those who disbelieve miracle reports and say that extraordinary evidence is needed for extraordinary claims are really saying, “An extraordinary claim like a miracle is one that we are already convinced isn’t true or cannot be true”. Not all of us are really saying that. What we are saying is, “If religion cannot provide extraordinary evidence for miracles, we will not say the miracle is false. It could still have been a real miracle. What we believe is that without the evidence we are not entitled or obligated to believe the miracle happened. But extraordinary claims do need to be justified by extraordinary evidence.” We might have other reasons for holding that miracles are impossible but we cannot use the reasoning they attribute to us to declare them impossible.

It is thought that those who disbelieve miracle reports and say that extraordinary evidence is needed for extraordinary claims are also really saying, “Extraordinary evidence is evidence we know you cannot produce.” The correct attitude is that, “If you can produce extraordinary evidence then I will believe in the miracle it proves.” And, “You may have extraordinary evidence and that entitles you to believe but it doesn’t obligate me to believe unless I see it too.”

None of these corrections affect the correctness of saying that extraordinary claims must be backed up by extraordinary evidence.”

We all see that people die and stay dead. For those who disagree to say that Jesus didn’t stay dead, the burden of proof therefore is on them. It is up to them to prove the resurrection. (Because of the burden of proof they have to prove every miracle of Jesus and every other one they say happened individually.) They answer that the burden of proof is on those who deny the resurrection to disprove the resurrection! It is not. It can’t be on both sides. If one and one is usually two and somebody says there is an exception then the burden of proof is on that person. Not every miracle of Jesus can be proven believable or proven taken on its own so clearly Jesus violated the rule and didn’t understand it so we can consider his miracles to be superstitious legendary nonsense. If you assert that a miracle has happened then the burden of proof is on you no matter who else has proved it to themselves. To say, “I saw the Blessed Virgin in an apparition,” is just as serious as somebody saying, “My friend saw the Blessed Virgin in an apparition.” One is just as outrageous as the other. So the burden of proof is on the first to prove that he really sees the Virgin and separately on the second to prove that he or she is right to hold that the friend saw the Virgin. It is bigotry to believe in a miracle claim without proving it to yourself. It is not enough for the Church to prove it – you have to see the complete evidence and examine it for yourself. You stand alone in considering claims like that. If God wants us to believe in miracles then he must want us to go through all this! It is ridiculous to think that he does. A better belief is that miracles are mistakes or frauds and God had nothing to do with them. To say that a reported miracle by Jesus or anybody else may have happened or was possible is simply to say we should be gullible. Nobody teaches that one must verify miracles to oneself for it is such hard work and there are so many miracles reported.

If we say it is unlikely for a man to rise from the dead the believers are forced to answer that we don’t know what is unlikely or not. This answer shows the immorality and wickedness of declaring miracles to have happened or possible. Why? If we say that the dead are dead we have no right to say that if we believe that people can come back from the dead for how do you in Sweden know that it isn’t possible or unlikely for all the dead in Australia to rise this moment? How can you say the dead are dead or that the dead don’t return? Because of the consequences of miracles, they deny the uniformity of life never mind nature, the burden of proof is on the believers. And the burden doesn’t get lighter with “small” miracles. Why? Because if we can’t say the dead are dead because of our respect for miracles then how can we say that people need to study if God miraculously inspires a schoolboy or schoolgirl regarding the correct answer to a small question in an examination paper?

The person who says they got a revelation from God that the world is to end next week and the person seeing the Blessed Virgin and getting a harmless message to repent from her, demand the same level of evidence. Why? Doesn’t the first person have a more important message than the second? Yes the content is more serious but that is not the point. The method by which both messages came is equal in that it is supernatural. The two messages equally need to be proved reliable and supernatural because they claim to be supernatural. The point is not the importance of the messages but the medium of the message – that is, how the message was given. The content messages can have no importance at all unless the supernatural nature of the message can be proven and the supernatural can be proven reliable. Think of it this way, we can’t listen to the world end message or the other one just because of what it says. The supernatural has to be proven to exist and be reliable before we can heed such a message. Therefore small miracles need to be treated as scientifically or sceptically as big ones.

If 1 plus 1 is 3 in a village in Spain that calls for as much attention and examination as 1 plus 1 being 3 in the whole of Europe would be. A miracle challenges the way things happen in the same way that that would challenge mathematics. For example, if 1 + 1 = 3 is true anywhere it is true everywhere. It’s a universal law. If somebody can instantly cure the incurable that means the diseases cured are no longer incurable and this becomes a universal law too.

Imagine that when two natural laws are brought together they result in a specific result that we will call result X. You could say that law 1 plus law 2 is equal to result X. If a miracle interferes with this then the two laws bring about a different result. It’s the same scenario as 1 and 1 = 2 being changed to 1 and 1 = 3. Believers say that this is wrong. Its law 1 plus law 2 plus miracle law 3 = a different result from X.

It’s a matter of worldwide concern when a miracle takes place – though the world wouldn’t be concerned it ought to be. The view that the bigger the miracle the greater the evidence is a mistake. True, you need almost unattainable evidence for a big miracle for its big but you are no better off with smaller ones. Why? The manifestation may differ but the nature of the event is the same, it defies what we know of nature. This evidence is so difficult and time-consuming to verify that clearly all believers in miracles are inferring that evidence isn’t so important and if so, then we should believe crackpots who claim revelations about the end of the world!

Take the miracle of the Virgin appearing to St Bernadette at Lourdes in 1858. The Church claimed to authenticate that Mary appeared to her. It did not. What it authenticated (leave aside the question about whether the authenticating is of any validity) was that Bernadette was having trances that couldn’t be explained by doctors and that a spring appeared and that healings took place. None of this proves that Bernadette really saw Mary. She might have lied or misunderstood. Or the vision might only have been pretending to be Mary. She may have went into a miraculous trance that affected her brain to make her imagine she saw the Virgin Mary. For the Church to say that it authenticated the apparitions of Mary at Lourdes is simply for it to lie. So here we have an extraordinary claim, that Mary appeared for which there is little evidence if you want to be generous. But the truth is there is NO evidence at all. So the miracles of Lourdes did nothing only support lies. We know that the stranger or more unlikely the claim, the evidence needs to be of a standard and strength to match the strangeness of the claim. The evidence needs to be in proportion to the level of unbelievableness of the claim. You don’t need the same evidence that Charlie met Annie at Loch Ness that you need to justify believing that Charlie saw the monster there. Lourdes and all the accepted Catholic apparitions deny this truth and so are evil and trying to drag us into superstition.

Conclusion

Miracles are a menace and those who promote them are up to mischief whether they know it or not.