HOAXES

LYING MESSAGES from MIRACULOUS SOURCES

Miracle is supposed to be a sign from God to show that God's message or religion is true and takes the form of a magical event an example of which would be Mary appearing at Lourdes two thousand years after her death.  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!

There are two types of miracles reported by Roman Catholicism (as well as some other religions). One, that which by merely happening in the Church infers that it is the right religion – for example, when God cures a person instantly though he does not need to it must be because he wants to show the Church is true. Two, that in which actual messages are given that testify that the Roman Church is the true Church. We want to see if these indirect and direct messages are worthy of credence.

Here are the proofs that they are not:

A miracle cannot verify a religion just by happening in it. It will appear to verify perhaps one doctrine in the religion but not the religion itself. For example, Mary at Lourdes was focused on supporting the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception. But the Immaculate Conception being verified by an apparition does not imply that the Catholic Church is the true Church. The Eastern Orthodox Church has many miracles that can compete and even be more impressive than the Catholic ones. As for healing miracles, all they would mean is that God heals and so any religion that believes in God could experience them. But if there is a true Church the only way God could possibly attract people’s attention to it would be by restricting all miracles to it. What happens is that the Church assumes that there is a true Church and that miracles back it up while ignoring the miracle claims of other religions. Then miracles are abused as evidence for an assumption that will always remain an assumption which means they are not being used as evidence at all for evidence is supposed to result in belief.

The most interesting Catholic miracles are the alleged appearances of the Virgin Mary, Jesus and angels and saints that have been reported all over the world. Mary is supposed to have appeared at Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe and La Salette to name a few. Jesus was supposed to have exposed his wounded and sacred heart to St Margaret Mary at Paray-le-Monial to popularise devotion to his sacred heart. Miracles of healing have been reported because of these apparitions. Lourdes is famous for them.

Jesus in the important channels of revelation, the New Testament writings, never gave any real evidence of ability to give revelations fully in agreement with the revelations that God had supposedly given already. Nor did he give revelations that convincingly showed that he could foretell the future. Deuteronomy 18 says that a real prophet gives revelations that are 100% believable and reliable. Therefore the plethora of miracles that defend belief in Jesus in actuality defend the view that miracles are just miracles if they happen and do not prove or support anything.

It almost comes as a disappointment when the messages delivered by apparitions are examined closely for they are full of lies and preach a philosophy that cannot be true or even beneficial in the long term and general sense. For instance, they often tell us that we are all sinners – untrue for we have unfree will – and then they tell us that we can do good works and carry these sins at the same time. Sin makes your good a sham for if you were really that good you would repent first and make the good work better. They certainly indicate that the impossibility of loving the sinner and hating the sin is possible which characterises them as hypocrisy.

They endorse evil because they command submission to all the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The apparitions of Fatima, Garabandal and the miracles and revelations of Akita are well known for this requirement. Some apparitions do it the sneaky way by not condemning the rottenness in the Roman Catholic system and by attracting Catholics to a greater devotion to the Church. They are responsible for much evil when they neglect to censure the harmful and unfair doctrine of the Church. The Church would cast them as inauthentic and satanic if the apparitions dared to condemn it but that is no excuse for the apparitions. If God is in control like the visions teach then the truth will overcome. The Church welcomes publicans to the communion table although she says that it is a sin barring one from it and Heaven to provide a needless service that leads people into the serious sin of drunkenness. Apparitions show that belief in Catholicism or any other religion should not be justified with miracle stories.

The apparitions of Mary and Co are evil because they suggest there is a life after death which is a malign belief. If you believe in a life after death you will be discouraged by that belief from availing of any scientific means of living forever. There is none at present but that is not the point. Merely by happening the apparitions say there is a life of happiness after death for if Mary is no more she would not be able to appear. An implication is that if you can’t use science to live forever then out of spite you shouldn’t want to live forever or anybody else. Another is that you don’t deserve to live forever so your life here isn’t worth much either.

Catholic teaching says that leading somebody into mortal sin is the worst sin of all for it could lead to them going to Hell forever . Yet Mirjana Dragicevic Soldo contradicted this by saying that Mary told her that the sin of abortion can be forgiven but the father and mother must do penance for it for life (page 125, The Thunder of Justice, 1993 Edition, MaxKol).  The implication is that the sin of leading others to danger of Hell is not worse.  True Catholics would see this message as coming from Satan and the Medjugorje apparitions as the Devil pretending to be Mary.

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The apparitions are more like demons than sainted beings. The apparitions prove Catholicism a religion to be avoided if evil spirits are so keen to advertise it. That is what they are trying to do when they appear in a context that leans on miracles as evidence of religious teaching.

The untruths served up by apparitions may mean that the visionaries are really seeing nothing at all and inventing the messages or that the people they see are lying to them or they could be seeing an alien or a pagan god and lying about what they are being told. No decent visitors from Heaven would depend on a person who does not tell the truth. They are promoting the lies by choosing to appear to that person if they are appearing.

If visions happen in order to cause faith then they are telling us the lie that we should believe. It is a lie because such trust is misplaced not just because of the lies but because there is no evidence that miracles are signs. Most miracle claims seem to testify to ideas that differ from miracle to miracle. You have the miracles of spiritualists and then the ones in the Catholic Church contradicting these and then you have the miracles reported by people who have experienced alien abduction. They are not signs but haphazard bizarre alleged occurrences.

The fact that some verified religious apparitions are untruthful proves that all are and here is one way how they do it. The Catholic Church has verified apparitions which are now known to be dubious like the visions of St Bridget of Sweden. And it has been the progress made in science and historical analysis and psychology that has led to recognition by sane people that they are dubious. When the Church recognises a new apparition it will check if it fits previous apparitions. But if the previous ones are not all authentically from God that will make the Church misjudge. So one apparition verifies the rest indirectly and they all stand or fall together.

Even if some apparitions being lies did not prove that all were lies it would mean that a question mark has to hang over whatever is said by a vision that did lie and also over other apparitions that can’t be proved to have lied. And if the verified ones deserve this attitude how much more the ones that are not. The honest Catholic will not take any apparition seriously until it is authenticated – but then the problem is has any apparition ever being authenticated properly? Also, if verified vision X lies and no evidence is found that verified vision Y lies vision X is evidence that Y should not be trusted for they claim to have the same origin. A lying miracle or vision is evidence that miracles are not to be trusted when they seem to or try to give a message.

A vision has no business telling me that it proves the religion it speaks for or whatever is true for when it claims that it just verifies other visionary people’s evidence to me and it never refutes all false apparitions and the like that provide false evidence. So it verifies the false and the true miracles together!

Doctrinal reliance on visions is worrying. The only thing they imply is that the Devil rules the universe but that is not true for we would suffer all the time. But they logically lead to the worship of evil and so they should be suppressed.

Lying visions make it probable that the visionary saw nothing at all. If they did see something and demons were behind it the demons would tell us to be evil in return for everlasting blessings in Hell.

Miracles are evil and are never good and the good is just like the good that results from a murder for every cloud has a little bit of silver lining and so anybody who testifies them should be ashamed and is a menace and should face a healthy opposition.

We can trust no signs even if only one out of a thousand supports an untruth for we don’t know what ones are reliable for religion is so mysterious. Religion makes us accept loads of beliefs we cannot understand. Our beliefs are forced on us by the evidence we see and we have no free will so superior beings lying to us is completely malign and pointless.

Jesus said that a man who looks at a woman with lust commits adultery in his heart and he said that if your eye causes you to sin it is better if you gouge it out (Matthew 5). He said this to indicate the abhorrence that he considers to be due to even a harmless sin of lust. Jesus said we must hate sin so much that we would rather lose an eye than use it to look lustfully at a woman (Matthew 5). Christianity accordingly then teaches that we must love the sinner but hate the sin. This is impossible for we do not hate sin for it is not a person and we feel personal about it. Sin is not an act but it shows what a person is – a bad person. So sin is not about actions so much as what kind of person is doing the action. Sin reveals the sinner so to hate the sin is to hate the sinner. To praise Mary’s poem and not Thomas’ is to say that Mary is better than Thomas – therefore a more valuable person. It is saying Thomas is bad or inferior.

The Handbook of Christian Apologetics states that it is true that we cannot avoid being Pharisees when we go on about right and wrong and cannot hate sins without hating the sinners (page 127). Strangely, the book conflicts with Christian teaching in saying that to hate evil is to give in to evil and become evil and negative. The reason the Handbook says this is that hating evil can make us hard and cruel too. But they are not suggesting we should not care about sin or love it for that would be worse than hating sin in their opinion. So they do want us to hate sin as the lesser evil. And they would say that if you really hate sin, you will hate it because you love the sinner so no matter how much you hate sin and how harsh and stern you get you are only doing it because of love and so you cannot be called hard and cruel at least as far as your intentions go. The Handbook gives the solution to the problem of how you can hate sin and love sinner as forgiveness which it sees as a miracle that God causes us to perform for it is so unnatural and because we CANNOT love the sinner and hate the sin so we need to be lifted above nature to be able to. Granted if we really love the sinner and hate the sin something which is more than just unnatural but impossible then this is direct experience of a miracle. It would be the most important miracle of all. Without this miracle nobody can be a true servant of God or a true believer. This would mean God couldn’t possibly use any other miracle as a substitute.

Here are the conclusions.

No other miracle – not even seeing the resurrection of Jesus Christ – would be as good for loving the sinner and hating the sin would be an internal experience of a miracle. A miracle happening inside of you would be stronger evidence than one outside of you. The Church claims it is only historical investigation that verifies the resurrection of Jesus and not everybody will believe such evidence. That is what happens with evidence. It means the external miracles were not needed as signs so we can safely ignore them.

No miracle can do you any good unless you experience the power to love the sinner and hate the sin. So no other miracle is necessary. External miracles then are not the works of God for whatever is doing them is showing off or working tricks or they are human hoaxes. They are too ridiculous to be considered as possible.

No external miracle would have the right to distract the believers from the miracle within but none of them not even apparitions put any emphasis on it.

The internal miracle of loving sinners and hating sins would be doing the impossible and makes no sense. It would prove that this miracle is a contradiction and irrational and we have no right to ask rational people to believe in it. It would mean we cannot use external miracles or this one either as signs from a God designed to appeal to our intelligence and our hearts. Murder would be right and wrong at the same time if you can love a sinner and hate the sinner at the one time.

There is no doubt that most miracles tell us lies or have been used to encourage devotion to false religion. Paying any attention to anything a vision or sign seems to be saying is stupid.

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