So putting aside whether the Catholic church is awesome because it has old buildings or whether there’s no other possible explanation for a bunch of stuff that was clearly made up, and getting back to this miracle business:
Is there any particular reason that I should think that any particular god caused the theorized miracle? I mean, absent proof otherwise, I’d say the most likely instigator of any earthly miracles is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I mean, he’s the most plausible god I’ve ever heard of, by a pretty significant margin.
The further explanation would seem to be that the kids talked the crowd into staring at the sun for too long and they started to get dizzy / partially blinded and between that and being there to look for something weird, they were able to achieve it.
Speaking as a Jew, I constantly recall that the Moses-and-Aaron show didn’t impress the pharaoh because, well, some other guys were standing right there who could do that same magic; we’re told this happened repeatedly, with ‘snake’ magic and ‘frog’ magic and — of particular relevance to this thread — ‘blood’ magic.
But we’re to pay them no mind; their magic proves nothing; near as I can tell, it’s the point of Deuteronomy 13: who cares if a guy is some kind of prophet or wonder worker? Once he uses those irrelevant bona fides to talk up another deity, it should be met with (a) no points, and (b) the famous quote from Billy Madison.
(This is also the short answer to Why I Am Not A Christian.)
Most religions consider themselves conclusively proved by the miracles they assert to have happened. No religion has objectively better miracles than the others. Therefore, if you accept the miracles of one religion, integrity (both meanings of integrity together) forces you to believe all of them from all religions, and to accept all religions as equally valid and important in your own life.
This is why miracles are a ceramic container with excrement in it.
Uh… so we have this thing called history… and all the Schisms, Great Schisms, Protestant movements and Heresies kinda put paid to that insane idea. I mean, you went from, what, five patriarchs (the pope being the first among equals) to one?
I guess that’s because when Catholics and Orthodox split, the Orthodox no longer count as part of the whole, when the Protestants split off, they no longer cont as part of the whole, when the Church of England split off, it no longer counts as part of the whole.
I guess you think Russia is all of the Soviet Union as well.
Because NOT reporting child sexual abuse to police, then moving the perp to a new parish does not in any way reconcile with the definition he’s using. That’s why.
What’s unclear about that?
His complete refusal to address how his definition is at odds with such behaviour, is ultimately just more silence about sexual abuse. And indicative of exactly why integrity is NOT, in fact, characteristic of the Catholic Church.
The canonisation of Mother Teresa was due to the supposed *miracle *the healing of a tumour in the abdomen of an Indian woman after the application of a locket containing Teresa’s picture.
To me Mother Teresa’s ‘cult of suffering’ where she intentionally withheld basic medical care like aspirin and tied dieing children to beds because she believed that through suffering, like Christ, that they would be closer to god. Doing this while taking millions of dollars in donations that were handed to the church and not to provide basic medical care to suffering children is just about the most evil as a person can get IMHO.
This inhuman* “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it”* make canonisation the main problem. The fact that cancer does sometimes go into regresion, yet this was the proof of the *miracle * makes it hard to trust built on top of that celebration of torture. Add in that no one has ever been able to scientifically document any form of any supernatural effects means I am not going to believe in a claim that one is somehow the action of some Abrahamic god. If people could still summon she bears to slaughter dozens of children who teased them about being bald or divide bodies of water at will in a reproducible fashion I may give a chance for them to explain their claims.
To me the universe is amazing, wonderful and uplifting enough without attributing it to a god; and I don’t need to resort to invoking a god to be OK with the fact I may not understand it all.
So the Catholic church would need to offer a repeatable miracle, could at least be proven to be with an explanation why it is supernatural and why it is attributable to one particular god out of the 1000’s that have been believed in over time.
There are enough “rare” things in the world that they happen all of the time, randomly connecting events to your own beliefs without evidence is not enough. Especially when an organization has a history of providing accolades to child abusers and glorifying sadistic self-serving infliction of suffering on innocent children puts the church at a disadvantage compared to the average soothsayer on the street who’s world view is probably closer to my own desires to avoid inflicting suffering on others as much as possible. Or at least not glorifying the suffering of others to serve ones own vanity, which I know is in the book but seems optional.
I want to be clear that the OP asked for an opinion but I have no problem with individuals and their own beliefs and their own bodies. Wear a hairshirt and self flagellate if it works for you but invoking or glorifying the suffering on others is so far from OK in my belief system that the gap is probably impossible to bridge to be honest.
I’m an agnostic. Given the track record of these alleged miracles, I’ll need a higher bar than, “…at least be proven to be without immediate explanation…”
Let me posit two types of miracles. The first are granted by the His grace, but are fully consistent with known science. Rock and roll. The second type involves extraordinary claims. If such claims were put forth, and they stood up to scrutiny (both immediate and rigorous) then I would adjust my beliefs (or rather my subjectiveprobabilities) accordingly. Then again, I’m an agnostic: I do that routinely.
However, the poor track record of extraordinary supernatural claims deserves note and perhaps emphasis.
What if Jesus one day decides that He would prefer His Church to prioritize modelling the second definition of “Integrity” over the first? [del]Think he’ll stick around?[/del]
(Excuse me.) Think He’ll stick around? Or does He have less free will than we normal human beings? Or is He stuck because the RCC is the “Bride of Christ,” and He can’t countenance divorce?
As to your first question, I came to realize that I don’t, so I’m not.
Sorry, elbows, he specifically excluded the uprightness portion of the definition as applying to the RCC for the purposes of favoring it over other churches.
That is, he’s impressed enough by the ability of the RCC to trace Popes going back to Peter. With those kinds of credentials, it’s GOT to be the real McCoy. :dubious:
Every time this topic comes up, I’m reminded of the start of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Y’know, where Vogons show up and suddenly every person on the planet knows who they are and what they want. God has never met that standard.
And here’s some food for thought - if the vogons had instead announced that they were god, and the rapture was starting, would we be justified in believing that that was god? There’s never been a miracle that held up to that standard, and I think a fair number would be (wrongly) convinced.
(Of course, the main difference between vogons and modern conceptions of god is that, at least in principle, it’s possible to test a hypothesis that “it’s the vogons”.)
When we’re faced with a phenomenon we cannot explain, what we have is exactly that - a phenomenon we cannot explain. Throwing in explanations apropos of nothing (“God did it!”) has never been right.
The answer is “no”, and it’s “no” for the same reason that I don’t believe in UFOs as being evidence of visiting aliens. Given the absence of persuasive evidence, given the depth of our scientific understanding of the world, and given the propensity of social institutions to create myths and mythologies, almost any explanation for either miracles or visiting aliens would be far more likely than the mythological one. It’s an extreme application of Occam’s Razor.
No, there is always a simpler explanation, as I already noted. Usually, in fact, the simplest explanation lies in the proclivity of human societies to create mythologies that goes back to prehistory.
“Magic daddy in the sky” is actually a very generic description of the typical theist’s God. He’s your daddy (he looks after you, and in Christianity is literally referred to as “Father”), he is generally said to live up in the sky, and he definitely works magic. What could be a more perfect description?
First of all, the first part is wrong. Matter can and does come into existence spontaneously at a quantum level, if not in everyday experience. Examples: the Big Bang, quantum fluctuations in a vacuum, Hawking radiation. Second, the “must be a source” argument is logically circular because the same argument must apply to the origin of the source. “No, because it’s God, and God is, like, special” is not philosophically meaningful. One could of course make the argument that “God” is something timeless and eternal, but Stephen Hawking has presented a much more persuasive mathematical model that shows that the same concept could be applied to the universe itself, which thereby requires neither a creator nor a moment of creation.
Not quite. Science cannot disprove of some divine figure who does nothing, but as soon as this divinity supposedly interacts with reality, Science is all over that.
Virtually everything assigned to a divine being can be explained without one. Nothing in reality can be absolutely proven, but insofar as it can be, science has said a lot.
