ARE HOAXES
MIRACLES
ARE NOT SIGNS
Index – Click to
Navigate:
- Signs Ignore the Basics
- Egoism and Miracles
- Why
Them?
- Miracles and Mystery
- Miracles Deny That Love Is
Enough
- In
God they do not Trust
- There is no Reason to Trust Miracles or God
- Miracles don’t make God
Attractive
- Conclusion
FOREWORD
Religion uses miracles as evidence for the truth of its claims. Miracles are not evidence for religion
being true or for the existence of God.
Why? Because we don’t really
know what they are evidence for.
The main cause of religious fervour in the world is peoples’
fascination with miracles. The sense
of wonder they get from them is addictive.
This book hopes to do something about that disorder. Miracles are events that seem to be against
nature or the way natural law usually runs.
In other words, they cannot be explained by nature. Examples are the Blessed Virgin Mary
appearing to children, the unexplained cure of incurable illness, blood
coming out of nowhere on Catholic communion wafers, the sun spinning at
Fatima in Portugal in 1917 and most importantly Jesus Christ coming back to
life after being dead nearly three days.
It is thought that only God can do these things.
Miracles have been conclusively refuted as signs for centuries now and new disproofs are appearing by the day and yet the Church plods on and just ignores the progress made. It is no better as regards its obscurantism and ignorance than the Old Testament God who in the Law of Moses who demanded belief in miracles and dared to say that the testimony of two witnesses was sufficient to verify any claim! If the religious world accepted that, it would be dead easy to create rivals to Jesus Christ. All it takes is for some obscure person to die and then two people to start claiming he rose from the dead giving them new doctrines. The resurrection body acts like a spirit so it doesn’t matter too much if the physical body is still in its grave as long as they are not saying the whole body rose. This was never said in the case of Jesus Christ though there was a mystery reported about the body not being in the tomb.
The central message of miracle, according to the Church, is that prayer is needed and miracles are said to happen in response to prayer. Miracles would be meaningless and just curiosities unless they invited and claimed justification for prayer. But prayer is evil. Prayer has insulting implications. Read my book Prayer is Evil from the side frame. If miracle justifies prayer then there is nothing more to be said. Miracle is poison and whatever is responsible is evil. Whatever is evil is hardly a good source of information!
INTERPRETATION
The claim that miracles are signs is just an interpretation that
pretends miracles are evidence for God and religion. They could be evidence that God is stupid
and needs to alter nature to correct his mistakes in which case they would
prove he is too incompetent to deserve to be called a God. If they are signs they either show that God
is almighty and all good and should be worshipped properly or they show that
he is not a God at all but a fool. His
trying to look professional would make him an untrustworthy braggart.
Cancerous tumours can disappear inexplicably and babies missing a lot
of brain matter can be normal. Because
these are not related to religion or spirituality and not to an unmistakeable
answer to prayer they are not invested with miraculous significance. If they are not miracles then the phenomena
religion brags about is not miraculous either.
This suggests that what is medically inexplicable should not be
pronounced a miracle for there is so much that we do not understand and
science is humbled by the mysteries of the cosmos.
Religion has to confess that unknown natural forces can simulate
miracles for it admits there are laws of nature yet to be discovered that
will seem as miraculous to us as lightning did to cavemen. So what business has it attributing them to
God or to the supernatural? It is like
refusing to believe that water was spilled on your kitchen floor by your wife
and that a ghost put it there.
The following seems plausible.
“Strange natural laws would not do miracles that seem to have
proceeded from some personal intelligence.
They would be reckless and haphazard things like a person exploding
for no reason or a daffodil growing in five minutes. Miracles usually do not look like the work
of blind and fluke laws of nature so they must be lies and hoaxes”. How do you know that these things do not
happen? That is the crunch! People would not report such oddities and
any that do would be laughed at.
Besides the universe is unbelievably large and we are so small that it
could be rarely that we see them.
The natural laws which keep a computer in existence should silence
those who say that nature wouldn’t have the potential to simulate miracles,
to simulate intelligence. A computer after
all is made out of nature and it is because of natural law that it is able to
do its job. For example, it can work with electricity.
Christians will retort that the computer is a miracle of God itself for
God keeps it in existence and has made the laws that allow computers to be
made and to exist. They will argue
from this that I can’t say that a miracle, creation, disproves miracles.
The events designated as miracles would not be miraculous or
supernatural but simply strange and natural.
When nature can go haywire why can’t it do so in such a way that
miracles may mostly or totally seem to the activity of something
intelligent? It would only take one
miracle to arrange that. And besides
we all know that at least some of the accepted miracles were not real
miracles which invites the question of how do we know they are from something
intelligent and especially when miracles are so rare and there will be ones
that nobody mentions?
We must remember that when natural law enables us to carry out the
perfect miracle hoax it is right to say natural law has done it. So why then can’t it do it without us on
its own?
Religion says that they do not know what unknown laws of nature might
cause but they do not believe that these laws could make a woman dead for
centuries appear to Bernadette at
Perhaps all strange things like visions of the Loch Ness monster and
Uri Gellar apparently stopping Big Ben are symptoms of the wayward laws. It is when you consider all the strange
claims in the world that you see that if natural law can do “miracles” it
might have done all these things. The
religious argument depends on the laws seeming to follow a pattern but when
you consider all strange supernatural claims you see this pattern does not
exist for the things reported are so different and strange. Even the lack of credibility of some claims
does not mean that the claims are not true.
Religion unfairly bases its argument that it must be true for miracle
show it is on the seemingly credible miracles which is not fair and besides
it is unfair to say that the miracles of Jesus could not have been flukes of
nature while ignoring all the other flukes in the world or when one has
failed to do the impossible, investigate all the flukes thoroughly so that
one has the right to say that about Jesus.
Jesus did evil miracles when they lead to such evil.
Many people would not tell if they experienced a miracle so looking for
patterns to give some light is no use.
It is evil to say miracles are signs from God for that is dishonestly
arguing that God exists because he does miracles and miracles happen because
God exists. Circular reasoning is a
chief trait in religion. Many miracles
or strange events that were held to show that miracles had a cause in the
hidden powers of the human mind have been reported and inadequately refuted
or not refuted at all. These outnumber
the claims of Catholics regarding miracles.
For a believer to hold that miracles are signs after all that is
worthless for instead of having an open mind they just pretend to know it
all.
Also, there is the problem of determining what the alteration of nature
was. For example, was the Catholic
allegedly cured of cancer at
Religion sets up a doctrinal system and if the miracle fits that system
it says the miracle is true. But if
miracles are signs then there should be some standard and test outside that
system so that the sign can be identified as a sign (page 454, The
Encyclopaedia of Unbelief). You
don’t invent a system of information about somebody and then say that
anything that fits it verifies it for that is a recipe for total anarchy.
Belief in miracles being signs is just an interpretation. It is imagining that they are
evidence. To present an interpretation
of events as the fact is a bad and harmful habit.
SIGNS IGNORE THE BASICS
Our belief in free will is just an assumption for we cannot understand
or know we have free will or how it works.
We have no evidence for it. If
miracles are signs then they are signs that we should assume we are free and
that is bad. It is slandering
ourselves. Perhaps miracles are
evidence for free will? But nothing
outside of me has the right to tell me I have free will when I don’t need to
believe in it. I will not accept
miracles as evidence that there is free will unless I believe in free will
first so I am not letting the evidence being seen as it is but am twisting it
to fit my preconceived notions. So
when miracles fail to defend free will they are opposing belief in free
will. To support an assumption is to
oppose the belief because you are not sure of the belief. Miracles would mean that God has no reason
to believe we have free will either.
When free will is the basis of faith and there can be no faith without
it, it follows that miracles refute God for they deny free will.
Miracles are too illogical to prove anything and they would be
deceptive because they give weak evidence instead of the strong when it is
more honest to give the strong. To
admit miracles happen would be to admit that you could be tricked by miracles
a lot oftener than you think or that some mad miracle warps your mind to
think that 2 +2 = 4 when they are not.
EGOISM AND MIRACLES
I am more sure I exist than I am that anything else does therefore I
come first and I should be helping others only to please myself. This view is called egoism. To think that miracles are done for a good
purpose is mad for they should be happening discreetly to change our
disordered selfish desires to make us more useful to others so that we
practice rational selfishness instead of harmful selfishness. Miracles would be unnecessary and would
imply a useless God who needs them to correct the result of his bungling and
should have made our feelings ordered and the way they should be in the first
place. Miracles if they can really be
taken as signs from God imply then that we should be altruists and not
egoists so they are done to encourage suffering for altruism is evil and
demeaning. We can’t say that we should
be altruists when others need help and egoists when they do not for we can
always find something to do for others which means that we improve ourselves
in the ways of selfishness and do good for others.
When I am most sure I exist nothing outside of me, be it an apparition
of Jesus or some other miracle, has any business judging my motives or
accusing me of doing wrong deliberately.
I must judge myself which is another reason why it is so important to
have a fully rational basis for the chief things like God and right conduct
in our lives and why religion must be fought for it is wrong. So, nobody outside of me has any business
telling me I have free will for that accuses me of being sinful. I know I can do bad but nobody knows if I
meant it or not for nobody can be me but me.
They can judge my actions but not me.
Thus unless I can prove by my own individual experience that I have
free will and can sin or be immoral (that is, do what I believe to be wrong
of my own free will) I should not believe in it. (And experience does not prove it or even
give evidence of it. It gives the
opposites for I see how feelings and thoughts work up to the thought and
desire that causes me to act just the way they would if they were a response
to some force controlling me. They
work like the reactions inside a computer that lead to the computer carrying
out your command. But that’s not relevant
here.) So for an apparition, religion
teacher, minister or priest, Bible or anybody else to tell me that I am a
sinner or have been immoral or have free will is for them to degrade me and
endeavour to trample upon me.
All miracles, assuming they happen at all, are evil.
WHY THEM?
Wrong objections to miracles need to be avoided for our enemies can
make much use of our mistakes. They
can be turned against us.
Some people say that miraculous cures cannot happen because they knew
somebody that wasn’t cured. It seems
that by itself this argument is no use for there might be a divine plan which
explains that. For the argument to
work, the doctrine that God cares for his creation has to be demolished. Luckily we can do that.
If you were a holy enough saint, God would do a miraculous healing for
you because you have such a crucial and indispensable role to play in his
plan so by helping you he helps his plan to make others holy. Helping somebody like you would be worth
more than helping many people for if he helps you many will be helped
anyway. So if you are not healed you
can blame yourself for not being holy enough and God says all can be saints
though it is hard. He promises his
assistance. Miracles are cruel. To support them is to sanction cruelty
whether you realise this or not.
Attaching credence to them can only be inspired by trickery or error
or by demons.
People are ashamed to be seen as healers and miracle workers for they
know that these claims imply that they are special people and are superior
and more valuable than others. So what
they do is indulge in some mischievous misuse of language and claim that some
force working through them does these things and not them and that the force
is not making them better than anybody else.
This is unreasonable. If some
force supplies healing energy and you use that energy you are a healer just
as much as the other force is. A
doctor may get his medicines from a drug company but that does not mean that
the drug company and not him is what is helping people. The healers and miracle workers would be
far better and admit the truth about what they do. Their attempt to steal the label of
humility makes them worse not better.
Chances are that when they are like that they are exploiting
statistics and faking and exaggerating their powers too! There has to be something special about a
person before they will be chosen as they put it. For God to choose somebody at random would
be as bizarre as him doing miracles at random which would be beneath his
dignity. We conclude that anybody who
claims to be a miracle worker of any kind, healer, psychic or saint, that
person is claiming to be a superior human being and is wholly opposed to our
notions of equality. Such claims have
to be forbidden. The devout Catholic
will prefer Padre Pio or Jesus Christ to some ordinary person. If there is a choice between Pio/Jesus or
an ordinary person being phased out of existence they will choose the
ordinary person. To choose a person
such as Pio or Jesus to remain in existence just because they have
preternatural powers is purest unjust discrimination.
MIRACLES AND MYSTERY
Who says that when a miracle happened it happened for a sensible
reason? God.
But God is strange and full of mystery and we cannot understand fully
what he is up to. We might think God
made a tyrant sick to soften the tyrant’s heart when the tyrant is a changed
man when he recovers. But how do we
know the tyrant has changed for holy reasons?
He might be just trying to exorcise his guilt or appear superior. So we are none the wiser about what God was
up to.
Religion is full of stuff that it says it cannot explain. It calls it truth beyond reason and not
against it. The three persons in one
God, God allowing us to suffer, the Son of God dying on the cross and the
nature of God are examples of such mysteries.
Mystery means paradox. It looks
like a contradiction and we only have the word of the religion that it is
not.
The rule that we must not see mysteries where we need none tells us
that instead of believing that evil and God are compatible in some way beyond
our intelligence we should believe that God is beyond good and evil, amoral,
not immoral (unless you hold that a being that refuses to be moral is being
immorally amoral) for that eliminates the mystery. Miracles are evil when they call on us to
believe because of them for we should check out the reasons against them
being signs first and they don’t encourage that. The doctrine that evil is a mystery is more
important and foundational than revelation through miracles so this doctrine
has to interpret miracles for us and it is a mistake to let miracles
interpret it. But the mystery is
illicit and so are miracles and so miracles more probably indicate an amoral
God if they indicate a God at all.
Miracles are mysteries beyond reason as is the purpose for which they
were done if they point us to the mystery of God and if they are the work of
that God. If it is fine to assume that
miracles authenticate mystery then it is fine to assume that miracles prove
nothing for they say nothing for they could be a mystery themselves so we
cannot presume to know why they happened or who performed them.
Miracles are mystery if they are signs for they show that instead of
God giving us more light to see what is right without miracles he chooses to
do miracles so that we will bend the knee before prophets who will tell us
his will. So miracles are saying that
you must not think for yourself for you will only lead yourself astray but be
obedient to these prophets and agree with what they tell you. In Catholicism, miracles are taken as calls
to rules we cannot understand and which nobody accepts such as birth-control
being sinful. So miracles tell you to
turn away from what you think you know and forget about it. They don’t care if you were right the first
time! Miracles and religion empower
men.
Religionists cannot fully explain why evil and suffering happen in a
way that makes sense. They take refuge
in the insulting cop-out and tedious cliché, “It is a mystery”. If God exists all he wants from us is a
choice. And that choice is if we will
follow him or want him or not. We
therefore do not need to be able to kill or be too bad. If we cannot comprehend the methods of the
Lord then it is would the Lord think we are humble when we assert that he
does miracles to give us theological light.
Would or could anything be stranger than God raising Christ from the
dead and not delivering the world from sorrow and if not sorrow then
religious error? Why didn’t he send a
pile of angels disguised as men to every area so that everybody who is open
to the truth could learn from them?
The angels can see the heart so they would know what to say and how to
impress the person. Miracles except
angels doing that testify only to divine incompetence and stupidity. To applaud miracles is to applaud black
magic. And there are several reasons
for that estimation and most of them we have met.
Miracles cannot be signs from God when all we can do is assume that
they are signs but we cannot use them as the basis of faith.
The miracles-are-evidence doctrine is leads to bigotry for it is a
lie. Catholicism has no right to order
people to take out of miracles the meaning she wants. If the miracles claim to be evidence for
faith then they are deceptive.
MIRACLES DENY THAT LOVE IS ENOUGH
Miracles that are supposed to be signs imply that sincere and open-minded
love coupled with research into ethics is not good enough. One needs religious dogma and obedience to
religious authority more than that.
And that is a worrying insinuation.
Miracles imply that faith in love is not enough. You must also have the correct beliefs
about God and Jesus or Buddha or whatever.
Thus miracles are used to support the bigotry of the many religions
that put dogma before facts for if the religionists didn’t they would change
dogmas all the time as new light comes up on each dogma. For example, the Catholic Church considers
its dogmas irrevocable. If evidence
comes up proving that Jesus was not God they are saying they are going to
turn a blind eye to it if it is irrefutable (if that is sincerity then I’d
like to see them when they are insincere!).
The miracles are saying that being stubborn and refusing to consider
contrary evidence is a wholesome and good thing. Why do I say this? Because the dogma that stubbornness is good
is the dogma that the dogma of Jesus being God and all the other dogmas
depends on. It is the thing that makes
them dogmas and so it is their basis and is more important than them. So when miracles advocate dogmas they advocate
the dogma they depend on, more than anything else and that is the dogma that
the Church should adhere to its teachings at all costs. Many feel that the love that religion
preaches about is evil when it is based on and fed by religious faith.
Having established that miracles try to support the view that sincerity
and kindness are not enough we see that the implication is that God could
reject a person for all eternity for having the wrong beliefs and perhaps on
the excuse that those who do not believe will have to pay for their own sins
which amounts to the same thing. The
fact is, that sincere open-minded love that tries to learn and grow should be
enough. Miracles are disgusting for
they are hostile to this truth and they, with real rancour, tell us that we
cannot and should not believe what we like as long as it does no harm. Religion tells us the same thing so you
can’t really expect miracles to improve on anything. Miracles incite us to fanaticism and hatred
and violence against our inner selves and against others. If that does not happen then it is a
reflection on us not on the miracles for miracles hope to make it something
that should happen. They do not lead
to sincerity but to insincere faith because anybody who claims to believe in
a doctrine and hates the case against it and wants it suppressed is no more
sincere than a cat is a bird. If it is
right to be so wicked then religion has no business opposing any wickedness
for it is just hypocrisy to condemn.
Miracles are pro-mystery because they tell us that simple honest and
careful commonsense in our dealings with others and how we treat ourselves is
not enough.
We don’t need belief in God. To
say there is no morality without God is saying that there is no morality and
we need God to invent it. Miracles, if
from God, definitely imply that we need the goodness of faith in God and to
learn about right and wrong from him.
Otherwise there is no point in them.
So when they are so keen for us to follow the gospel according to men
we need to ask if they are really supernatural at all. A religious tyrant finds a God who can
invent morality to be the perfect thing with which to further his own agenda
when he pretends to speak for that God.
Miracles 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 if
they are hoaxes to destroy his reputation.
They even imply that believing in the essentials and God and not in
Jesus or anything more is evil! The
truth is that to make too many moral rules is to be evil for the rules are an
extra burden and anybody who breaks them is slandered and hasn’t done wrong
at all.
If miracles were about persuading and encouraging us to be more charitable
people eager to do good for each other then why don’t miracles happen to
promote charities not churches? Why
don’t miracles take place to draw attention to charities and attract cash and
volunteers to them?
Many would say that miracles are suspiciously too disinterested in love
and charity and too interested in furthering the agenda of the Church to get
power and money and influence.
IN GOD THEY DO NOT TRUST
God is supposed to be the one who creates out of nothing. God can't expect us to believe a miracle comes from him when it shows no sign of being an act of creation out of nothing. If blood appears on your statue out of nowhere - it does not mean it really came from nowhere or nothing. The devil could be moving the blood from a hospital on to your statue.
No Catholic or Christian or whatever ever believed in God’s miracles
just because of God or because of God who they say is all that matters. How interesting that the signs that God
alone is to be loved show that he is not to be loved at all!
They believed in what the religion said were miracles so they were
believing the religion more than God.
There is a difference between trusting in God and in trusting in God
because of the Church.
If A says that B can be trusted and you trust A you are really saying
that A is the one that can be trusted for you believe in B because of A. You are looking at B the way A tells you to
because A tells you to. It is not B
you care about but the image of B that A wants you to have for it is just A
you trust. You act as if you trust
B. You will say that you trust B. But it is all because you trust A. by trusting B you are indirectly trusting
A. A is the real focus here.
Trusting in God because of the Church is really trusting in the Church
alone. When you believe in one of the
cures accepted by the Church as miraculous at
When you trust another person or the Church you are not honouring them
but yourself for you are honouring your judgment of them. It is yourself that you are putting your
trust in. That is the simplest reason
why it is madness to believe that a miracle is really a sign no matter how
much it might look like one. What is
the point of a God looking for your trust by doing a miracle when you can’t
give it to him?
The miracles are not from a God of truth and decency and so they are
not signs.
After reading all this it must look more certain than ever that
religion could be doing magic tricks or controlling and sifting the data
about visions and miracles it would like to declare authentic and from God so
that the contrary evidence is phased out and twisted. Another point in favour of this view is
that a God of miracles would do one for all the world to see when only what
we see can bring us to true faith in him and not what others report. The Devil must be doing all the miracles if
they are miracles and there are no aliens or whatever to do them.
Miracles must happen for a very serious reason for they are much the
same as breaking the law of nature.
When God has to go that far the need must be great. So to say miracles are signs is to imply
that that people need miracles and need God and need conversion and so are
serious sinners. Miracles then call on
you to judge and condemn. Since to
oppose the sin is to want to hurt and oppose the sinner too, miracles clearly
incite to hatred. To be against the
sin is to be against the sinner and since hatred is condemned because it
makes you hurt people it follows that this is practically the same
thing. Why is it okay to hurt a
criminal to punish them for a crime and wrong to hate them even when the hate
might not or will not be carried out?
Oh the hypocrisy of the God-botherers!
Free will denial means you condemn the flaws in somebody that caused
evil but not the person but to say they are a sinner or a free agent who
created sin means you condemn and hate the sinner. To say John’s work is a disgrace is to
insinuate that John is a disgrace so if miracles speak of a loving God then
God loves the sinner and hates the sin and is a total liar for its
impossible.
The main alleged message of the miracle is that God has the power and
the desire to protect the upright. The
Bible advises confidence in God no matter how bad things get. Nobody would be interested in miracles at
all if it wasn’t pretended that miracles were a sign that God cares. However the corollary of this idea is the
totally objectionable belief that anybody who doesn’t prosper and who suffers
is cursed by God or being punished for sins.
THERE IS NO REASON TO TRUST MIRACLES OR GOD
Religion just assumes that God would not lie in his miracles. You know it is bad to trust anyone without
knowing a bit about them first so miracles are bad. A stranger who asks for trust except in an
emergency is up to something. Yet
miracles are the only way God can talk and when they happen so rarely and are
hard to verify it follows that we cannot trust God. He might be trustworthy but we don’t know
that. When you see a miracle you
should get evidence that God can be trusted before you trust it for you have
no evidence that it can be trusted.
Some people say you should assume when somebody tells you something
that it is true even when there is no evidence that the person is being
truthful. But that is what you are
doing, assuming not trusting or believing – assuming is trusting yourself not
the other person and not trusting yourself to be right about what is being
assumed but to be doing the right thing.
If you assume A and B follows from A and you say you believe B it
follows that you do not believe B at all for when its foundation A is an
assumption it must be one too. No God
is going to do miracles to have us assume that he tells the truth. He’d want better than that when he goes to
the bother of doing miracles. If
miracles act as evidence and just get us to assume then they are failures and
are not done to convert us at all. If
miracles lead us to assume that religion is true then they hamper the faith
that the Bible asks for and they do what the Devil wants – to destroy faith
and loyalty to God. Who do you think
then is doing them now?
Even if you can prove that some visionary is miraculously seeing
something that does not prove that what the visionary says about what he or
she sees is the truth. The visionary
could be seeing the Devil or an alien and lying about it. After all, the visionary and the Church say
that what he or she is seeing is a private revelation just for him or her
though he or she can share it with others.
To treat such miracles as signs is really to say that the witness’s
word is being taken for it that the miracle is from God. So we will not look at God but at what
people say about him. The result is
that the only God we end up with is an idol as good as created by man. You are honouring the man who reveals God
more than God for it is what he says about God that determines what you think
about God and how you relate to God so you are relating to that man’s
creation.
When others tell you how to perceive God then why not do the logical
thing when you should be egoistic and make God in whatever image you
like? You should for you come first in
your life.
God or gods or aliens or whatever cannot be trusted for they force
apparently sane people who are actually psychotic to lie. That is the same as lying themselves. They made the laws that compel the
psychotic person.
MIRACLES DON’T MAKE GOD ATTRACTIVE
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 God we should and be autonomous for that is merely being adult and
mature. The message my The Gospel
According to Atheism teaches is the logical conclusion of the self-help
program of Fr Anthony de Mello and shows that God must be forsaken both in
concept and in fact. Miracles fully
deserve to be treated as diabolical phenomena or even better as nonsense when
they do not focus on this program. The
last thing they deserve is to be afforded any right to be classed as evidence
for religion and revered. To say they
are is to declare war on humanity.
We know subconsciously that the de Mello system with a few minor
modifications is right and that is the only thing we need and we degrade
ourselves by letting miracles and God and religion in the way. God is wasting his time doing miracles
except if he wants to deceive us in which case he is not worth worshipping.
CONCLUSION
To believe in miracles as signs is evil and a thoughtless insult
against all who live on this planet and any God out there if there is
one. Miracles or supernatural events
are hopeless when it comes to searching for support for any dogma or system
in them.
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