MIRACLES ARE HOAXES
THE MIRACLE CONSPIRACY
How the Catholic Church tricks People with its Miracle Tales
Index:
- The Rules of Benedict XIV
- Ecclesiastical Miracles
- Miracle Double Standard
- The Extra-Biblicals, Basis of Faith?
- Church Fakes The Evidence
- Conclusion
FOREWORD
One of the main reasons that the Roman Catholic Church is the largest Church
in the world is because it seems to have convincing miracles that seem to be
God putting his seal on it as the one true Church.
The truth of the matter is that the Church cannot be trusted. At the very least we can be sure that we should not trust the miracles and at the most we can hold that they are pious frauds. Miracles testify chiefly to being signs but when we look at them honestly we see that they cannot be, so miracles are not signs from Heaven.
THE RULES OF BENEDICT XIV
In his directive De Canonizatione, Prosper Lambertini who was crowned Benedict XIV spelled out the
rules for working out if a healing was really a miracle from Heaven. If he had not been such a careless thinker
and therefore a shallow person he wouldn’t have needed to go to the
trouble. How could a healing be from
Heaven when people take it as an encouragement to listen to and follow
religion? Religious faith is bad. The first Stalin of the 21st
Century, George Bush, the fictitious president of the
Anyway Lambertini’s rules, which are now the
official rules of the Church, were as follows.
1. The illness or injury has to be a serious one.
2. It has to be incurable and
the patient must not have been recovering at the time of the cure.
3. The patient should not be
getting medical treatment around the time of the cure.
4. The healing should be instant
and not gradual.
5. The healing must remove all
traces of the disorder.
6. The cure must not come at a
time when some natural cause could make the patient think he is cured or
which simulates a cure.
7. The cure must be
permanent. There must be no relapses.
The fact that the Church would not recognise gangrene vanishing
instantly as a miracle if it appears again next week shows that there is no
logic in the Church at all. Rather
than being concerned about showing that God has done something miraculous,
the Church is not going to consider any anomalies that don’t fit its view of
God and religion. It says that miracles
are evidence for God and then it filters and twists the evidence to make it
suit itself and then it suppresses and ignores any contrary miracles or
evidences.
The truth is that despite all these grand words, the Church does and
has recognised miracles of healing that fail to meet the rules. The very fact that it has recognised
apparitions that could have been explained as fraud or a temporary and
partial psychosis proves that the rules are only for constructing a contrived
professional facade. The rules make
sense and the fact that Bernadette of Lourdes saw a lady who did not make
sure that psychosis or imagination could be ruled out in Bernadette’s case
shows that the lady doing the cures does not like the rules!
ECCLESIASTICAL MIRACLES
The Church says she does not bind you to accept any miracle – even an
officially approved one – that was not taught or implied by the teaching of
the apostles or the Bible.
You have to believe in the biblical idea that Jesus rose from the dead
and you have to believe that the Virgin was conceived without original sin
which is falsely said to be implied by the Bible. Catholicism’s unbiblical doctrines that are
not even implied by the Bible are said to have been indirectly implied by it
for it says that the apostolic tradition should be believed and these
doctrines are a part of that tradition.
The Church holds that revelation that must be believed ceased when the
last apostle died (page 4, Twenty Questions About Medjugorje;
part 66,67, Catechism of the Catholic Church)
and stakes her infallibility and her being the true Church on it. She says that she cannot add to that body
of doctrine for in Christ God revealed himself completely (page 19, Medjugorje).
That is why she calls herself the apostolic Church. The apostles did not predict that Mary
would appear at
Hume said we must only believe in miracles when the people lying or
mistaken would imply a greater miracle than the event they reported. But he held that this never happened. He is certainly right that a miracle should
only be believed as a last resort. The
Catholic Church surprisingly has the same attitude for it is hostile to
visions and miracles that have not been recorded in the traditions of the
apostles and accepts them reluctantly.
The Church always opposes visions in the early days and this has
happened with
The Church is being inconsistent for allowing people to believe in
non-Bible miracles if they want and forbidding the Bible ones getting the
same treatment. If they are optional
then people may disbelieve and if people may disbelieve a miracle it should
not be authenticated.
If the Catholic Church really were the true Church the miracles would
not be happening.
MIRACLE DOUBLE STANDARD
The Church says that you may deny or doubt her optional miracles as
long as you have a logical reason to (xvii, Raised from the Dead) but
must never attack the Bible ones for revelation ceased with the apostles
(page 142, Catholicism and Fundamentalism). To oppose the optionals
without one would be to slander the commission that concludes that they
happened by calling it stupid or dishonest.
It is our duty to believe what the evidence presents. But she commands us to believe in the
resurrection even though she says that we should reject it if the evidence is
not good enough but if we want to stay Catholic we have to believe in the
resurrection. She arbitrarily commands
us to believe this and tells us that we can believe that if we wish. The Church is sneakily making a difference
where there is none. Both the optional
and compulsory miracles can’t be different if evidence for them is all that
counts. So, Mary appearing at
Theologians might say that Catholics are obliged to believe the Bible
miracles and the others are optional because the former can be proved better
to be real and from God. This is
untrue. We have only one or a few
reports and just one testament for most of the Bible ones. But at
Reason says that if miracle say a cure at
We read in the Bible (1 Kings 17) that
during a famine the prophet Elijah stayed with a widow and her son. They shared the last of their food with him
a little meal and some oil. In return
for this the jar with the meal miraculously never ran out and neither did the
oil. Amateur magicians can do better
today. A starving widow and son were
in no position to be good at making sure that they weren’t being
tricked. No investigation was
undertaken. The Jews just took it for
granted that the miracle was true. No
God would do such a ridiculous miracle.
But the point of the whole story is that investigation cannot be
lawful. The Bible itself encourages
gullibility in the face of reported miracles. Catholics are sinning by investigating
miracles.
We can’t interview the apostles or do forensic tests on the empty tomb
of Jesus. We have only one testimony
that Moses divided the waters of the
Despite Catholic doctrine, apparitions and miracles which support the
threats of divine chastisement and plagues and wars that will come if the
message is not heeded, must necessarily be accepted
as equal to scripture. They would
actually be superior to scripture because they are more relevant to today and
because scripture would have to be seen through the eyes of the apparition
and its attitudes. Scripture cannot
speak on its own for it has to be interpreted in accordance with the visions
so the visions have the real say. Even
if apparitions are inferior to scripture there is a sense in which they are
superior for once they are accepted they colour the way the scriptures are
interpreted. But the main point I want
to make is simply this: to predict earthquakes and other disasters as coming
chastisements of God is extremely serious business. You need exceptionally good evidence before
you can say that. The utterances of
the apparitions would need the right to be considered scripture before they
could tell us such things. When an
apparition says things like that it is claiming underhandedly to be issuing
inspired scripture. The Catholic must
deny the divine source of the nasty threats in apparitions which is the same
as saying that no apparition can be trusted for most of them make terrifying
prophecies and which would mean that since some deceiving supernatural power
exists no apparition however orthodox can be trusted in or the Catholic must
deny the sufficiency of the revelations given once and for all through Jesus
Christ which means that the faith is left wide open to new innovations and
revelations that could swamp and smother the gospel and lead to millions of
sects.
The Catholic Church puts testimonies before physical miracles that we
can test for ourselves like communion wafers turning into visible human
flesh, holy people living without food and drink, saints not decaying and
stigmata and vanishing tumours that were there yesterday and gone today. For example, the Church approves the
It is wiser to believe a miracle that can be tested scientifically. If God does some of these they should all
be like that and when they are not we can be positive that they have nothing
to do with him. So, if both the
testable and the testimonial miracles happen then miracles have no message
except that science is nonsense.
Miracles are evil and when they happen in the Catholic Church they
evilly back up the double-standard regarding miracles that the Church has set
up.
When a miracle or apparition insinuates that Catholic doctrine is wrong
the Church rejects it immediately and does not even bother investigating
scientifically or otherwise. When that
is done the Church has no right to claim that only miracles that indicate the
veracity of the Church’s doctrine happen.
When that is done the Church has no right to say it is honest, open
and objective when it comes to miracle reports. The lies suggest that miracle reports are
used by the Church in order to unduly exercise an influence on people.
Catholics have to three options if they want to make sense of the
ecclesiastical miracles. 1, deny the
miracles that are not biblical; 2, make them superior to the Bible; 3,
declare them proven but deny they are from God. The first fits Catholic doctrine for it
denies that miracles happen today which is what some
Catholics especially progressive ones believe. The second denies that Catholicism is the
true Church and makes visionaries have more authority than the pope. But if Catholicism is a false Church then
how could visions that back it up be from an honest God? The third means that the evidence for Jesus
is weaker than the evidence against him.
It says miracles were his credentials and since the Devil always does
miracles that seem kindly there is no way of being sure which are his or
which are God’s. But Jesus’ would be
probably satanic in origin because if the ecclesiastical miracles cannot be
shown to be God’s work how could any miracles, even
Jesus’, be an exception? Jesus said
his miracles were his credentials so Jesus then would be guilty of using fake
evidence that he was sent by God and full of God’s power to do miracles.
The Catholic Church says that the Bible cannot be added to or that the
canon is closed until Jesus comes back to inaugurate the reign of God on the
earth and the last judgment. But it
should be adding the statements of its apparitions to the Bible if it wants
to believe in apparitions.
The Catholics say that the apparitions and miracles do not add to the
faith but uphold and verify the faith given to the apostles. They draw attention to it. But did the apostles say that Mary would
cure people at
These miracle apparitions deny that the Church has the right to decide
if they are from Heaven or not for they attempt to authenticate themselves
without the Church. The Lourdes Lady
said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”
The Fatima Lady said, “I am the Lady of the Rosary”. The Medjugorje
Lady said, “I am the Virgin Mary. I am
the Queen of Peace”. In other words:
“No matter who says otherwise, this is a real revelation from Heaven for I
say so.” Moreover, the apparition
never tells the children she appears to that the Church must decide. The apparitions are anti-Catholic because
they attack the authority of the Church without which there can be no faith
and no Church. It is interesting that
the early Church did not call in experts to decide if its visions of Jesus
were real! It is clear that both the
resurrection visions of Jesus and the later visions such as
To make the extra-biblical miracles optional is the same thing as
saying that they are not needed at all.
When God does unnecessary miracles that shows that God is showing off
or he is fixing his blunders. The believer
can admit neither. A God who does
either of these is not fit to be God.
The Catholic miracles philosophically imply that God does not exist! Incredible but true!
The Church today warns that most modern apparitions and miracles
promote a God who is harsh and frightening and who is threatening
punishments. It condemns such
apparitions. Curiously, you can be
excommunicated for denying that the Virgin Mary was conceived without sin but
you will not be excommunicated for supporting an apparition that teaches an
off-putting view of God! So
questioning a dogma about Mary is a bigger sin than insulting God! It is obvious that the Church is more
worried about its authority to make dogmas and order people to believe than
in God. Any apparition that supports a
Church like that is fit only for condemnation.
THE EXTRA-BIBLICALS, BASIS OF FAITH?
The miracles that the Catholic Church claims are inferior to the Bible
ones and which are not necessary to faith are often used by Catholics to
bolster up their faith and indeed to be the basis of the faith. This is very very
wrong for it is like ignoring the smoking gun in a man’s hand when somebody
is found shot dead to concentrate on weaker testimony. Yet most Catholics are like this. So the God who sends miracles to them must
approve. He is sanctioning their attitude. When the miracles are so irrational and
they are deceptive because they use weak evidence at the expense of strong
what use are they as signs?
Catholics who scoff at all extra-biblical miracles might say that the
Devil does the miracles and apparitions for the purpose of distracting people
from the case for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. After all the Bible
says it was the most important sign ever and the mark that proves that Jesus
has the power to save and is the foundation of all our confidence in him and
his salvation. The resurrection
miracle would imply that they are right for it was Jesus’ vindication of his
role as life-giver and saviour.
The alleged appearance of Jesus to more than 500 people which is
alluded to by
Some Catholics hold the unorthodox view that visions and voices from
Heaven even when they are accepted as genuinely from God by the Church are
only binding as towards belief on those who have had these experiences. But that means that St Bernadette was bound
to believe she saw Mary in the Grotto at
CHURCH FAKES THE EVIDENCE
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! Then they themselves are happy with less! 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?
Take the miracle of the Virgin
appearing to St Bernadette at
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
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!
It is truly outrageous how the
Catholic Church claims to establish that Mary appeared at Fatima in 1917 and
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 ordinariness and opulence. To honour an apparition is to honour the visionary more than the vision.
The Bible complains that people generally prefer fun and pleasure to God. Is it likely that God would confer ecstasy for the ecstasy could be preferred to him and be what the visionaries enjoy not the Virgin or him? Ecstasy isn’t mentioned in the Bible. True Christians say it is bestowed by Satan to create an addiction to spiritual pleasure and devotion to the apparition that he causes. Since apparitions are seen by the Church as private revelations Satan might be using them to separate the visionary from God or to try to and might have no other sinister purpose.
CONCLUSION
The Roman Church cannot be trusted when it reports miracles. The miracles are not from God for they back
up a silly theology that says we must believe the Bible miracles and don’t
have the same obligation in relation to miracles that happened since Bible
times. The miracles that are regarded
as true are arbitrarily selected. If
they suit the
Further
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 Case for
Faith, Lee Strobel, Zondervan,
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan,
Headline,
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline,
The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief Volume 1, Gordon Stein, Editor,
Prometheus Books,
The Hidden Power,
Brian Inglis,
The Jesus Relics, From the Holy Grail to the Turin Shroud, Joe Nickell, The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2008
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