Oh, well. As long as it is a ‘recognized’ miracle it must be true then.:rolleyes:
Poor amputees. NO SOUP FOR YOU!
Jesus does heal the unbelievers and though it is usually done through a believer. I would assume that it is done to help bring the unbeliever to believe and to strengthen the faith of the believer who He used to preform the healing.
Here is a scripture about 10 leprods cured
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But the main purpose is stated above, to bring praise to God, not to cure man.
Miracles just don’t have the effect that Jesus wanted, bringing people to Him. Teachings seemed to work better. But that does not mean He doesn’t use them, even if it only works for 1 in 10.
In other words, God heals people, but only in ways that can be expected to occur occasionally without his intervention, such as cancers regressing or painful joints becoming less painful, but never anything that we would genuinely not expect to happen naturally. And he does this in order to strengthen people’s faith, helping to convince them that he really exists, instead of a more direct method such as simply showing up.
Since everything we see is exactly as we should expect if there is no God, how can your convoluted explanation of healings survive the thought process?
So he’s the creator of the universe, but he bats only .100 when he tries to heal people? And it just so happens that his batting average is exactly the same as what we would expect the body to do naturally?
I don’t know how you believers do it.
To sum up: in 1637, a young man named Miguel Juan Pellicer fell off a cart, and his leg was run over. A few days later, he was taken to a hospital. The leg developed gangrene and was amputated. In 1640, the leg suddenly reappeared while Miguel slept, complete with some scars he’d had since childhood.
Here is an article about the event in English, referencing this Italian book about it. The author of the book says he “…discovered that the fact is documented in a way to satisfy even the most skeptical and rigorous historian.” He doesn’t specify what the documentation is, though, except for this:
Only how did he question witnesses “just hours after the event” when he arrived “two days later”? I suppose that’s probably an error on the part of the article’s author, not the historical record, but it would be nice to know which it was. And what the rest of the documentation amounts to.
Here is another article in English, admittedly from a Catholic site, that has some more information on the events surrounding the “miracle,” but no cites. It does contain this interesting bit:
I am skeptical in the extreme that God miraculously made his leg grow back. Still, it is a puzzler.
What you call “the interesting bit” is what makes me scream “fake” the most. If you are omnipotent, restoring someone’s leg, why would it not be perfect straight away? This isn’t the nurse in Harry Potter restoring bones. This is point and click, new leg time.
What the recovery time seems to say to me is an attempt to add a level of “healing process” to the story.
Why would god who is in charge of everything change his mind. he had some noodley reason to take someones limb away. Now you want him to put it back. Not likely.
So, it’s exactly as if his leg was not really run over and people made a mistake about what was seen.
From this, the royal notary just interviewed people and wrote down what they said. This is not an investigation, nor is it proof of anything.
1637? We have to go all the way back to 1637 for something? C’mon, is that the best god can do? Why is it that there are more miracles the further back in time you go, when people were more ignorant about science and less than rigorous in their investigations, and none now, when we can give them a good going over?
Seriously, we have no answer to this. Why doesn’t god restore amputated limbs?
No, I’m not agreeing with his assertion. I assert that to regrow a leg, nothing is required that doesn’t already occur in nature, i.e. according to natural (physical) laws.
And I’m not sure I agree with this. You seem to be saying that there’s only one possible thing that any particular molecule could do at any given moment without violating natural laws. In other words, acompletely deterministic universe. Which, it’s my understanding, isn’t the case at the quantum level. And couldn’t undeterministic events at a quantum level have effects that appear at higher levels? And what might the limits to such effects be?
This is all speculation on my part. I admit a great deal of ignorance when it comes to what is or is not possible (with or without violating “natural laws”), and how God can work, and how God does work.
No quite the opposite, dramatic immediate healing
Ultimately He does it to bring glory to God. He uses both methods (and others). If you had a choice would you like Jesus to heal your life threating condition or just stop by to say hello?
The Word of God states how, it also states that
This is for the non-believer, but for those who have God’s calling, the way to understand and see these things you must come to God as a child, actually as a infant, and learn His ways.
No all were healed, only 10% came back to Jesus however
I can speak to this, from personal experience.
Night before last, I was contemplating with sadness a poor, shrunken appendage on my person. Then I found myself in the presence of a beautiful, beautiful person, and I felt the spirit move within me, and my appendage grew fantastically in the space of several seconds. It’s a miracle, I tell you. A miracle!
But then she did some laying-on of hands, and a few minutes later my appendage had shrunk again, and remains so now. But it’s comforting to know that this miracle can be worked at any time.
That’s not really what I meant - the molecules would normally have done X, which would not be part of healing. But God intervenes and makes them do Y instead. He makes the molecules do something they would not otherwise have done.
To me, quantum indeterminacy is different - I don’t have the impression that healing miracles are such that they could be covered by the uncertainty principle.
ETA: Cervaise: Hallelujah!
So Cervaise, what you’re saying is that while Jesus made a lame man walk, she only cured your limp.
Except for the miracle part.
As a confirmed atheist, I think we’re all missing one important point: God, as defined by Christianity, doesn’t really care about our current, physical life. It’s all just batting practice for the great afterlife. And if you buy into that, it even makes sense. Our human lives are just a speck in the ocean even just compared to the history of the planet. Compared to Eternity, the span of a single human life is peanuts. So why should God pay attention to such a small thing, the real ball game is getting you into Heaven.
That said, this opens up a whole new discussion about why God would be so monstrous as to place someone in an eternity of suffering based on the very dubious, mutually inconsistent claims of the various religions, but it sets to right the general lack of caring by God in our physical lives.
On the gripping hand, faith healers do be able to claim that they can cause God to intervene in a physical human life, but I feel that those people merely suffer from a poorly thought-out theology.
Just IMHO, IANATheologian, YMMV, All Rites Reversed, etc etc.
I don’t know about cured, but she certainly alleviated the symptoms.
But it will take a little longer to perform that miracle unless she gives you a few minutes to recover.
Miracles yesterday, miracles tomorrow, but never miracles today.
CurC got my meaning exactly. Whether you call it supernatural or not, the difference between God regenerating a leg which wouldn’t otherwise have regenerated and curing cancer which otherwise wouldn’t have been cured is a difference in degree of physical manipulation. I don’t think it’s fair to say “Well of course He can’t restore a lost limb, but He can certainly change the number of electrons or protons in those atoms that make up these cancer cells”.
Perhaps the question needs to be refined just a bit to clarify why we are skeptical of any miracles: Why doesn’t God restore amputated limbs as commonly as other “miracles” such as curing chronic pain syndromes?