None of this rules out confabulation in the slightest.
I would like to gain an understanding of what smart, logical people such as yourself and the SD members have to say about an event such as this.
I was ready skepticism, but I didn’t expect people to start asking me questions. I asked for opinions assuming that the info was fact. But people started asking me questions instead, partly to try my thinking. And that’s ok. They didn’t want someone to get away with telling this type of story scott free. Fair enough.
“You people” are the SD members. Who else would I be referring to? A single group here? No, a consensus was my hope.
How do you know, Fuel, per your comment:
That it did not run its course? I may have overlooked a post by you in which you described an after-illness physical by a doctor in which the diagnosis was confirmed, for one (I note a post in which you indicate that “When I saw the doctor, I only had the minor symptoms that I described in my OP. So, there was nothing to diagnose when I saw him, only a fever and such.” and as such that it was Herpes Zoster remains in question). Secondly, how are you able to say with 100% certainty (again, please correct me if I am neglecting to read something) that the prayer was the sole thing that kept your situation from worsening? I think you are neglecting the very real possibility that something other than a miracle occured, and this fact is being borne out in your posts in a manner that is not complementary to you in any way.
Were either of you informed by the doctor of the non-fatal nature of the disease you cite in the OP? Because to me, I would be more overwhelmed by the sudden and obvious disappearance of a potentially fatal illness than one that does not appear, from your cite, to be life-threatening to you.
I may, of course, be wholly incorrect, and I welcome such correction. But it seems as though you may be looking for something to bolster your faith (and your faith in prayer, more specifically), and I do not believe this is something upon which you can stack as much as you have.
I don’t understand. I quoted the relevant portion of your testimony – you said that you still had a fever and some “minor symptoms.” I’m serious in asserting that it sounds like a pretty piss poor miracle if he didn’t even heal you 100% of the way. If I hired some movers and they moved all of my boxes but left the heavy furniture, I’d say that they did a piss poor job of moving me, no matter how much I appreciate the work that they did do.
**
I don’t really get what you’re going for here. I have never had a serious illness in my entire life (unless you count chicken pox, I guess). Does that mean that God loves me more than he loves you?
That’s a good point. I’m an atheist and I’ve never had a serious illness, a mild case of chicken pox probably being the closest. I’ve never even had a cavity. Shouldn’t god be smiting my ass to send a message?
There’s really nothing remarkable about the story at all. I’ve gotten hives from allergic reactions a couple of times and they’ve gone away after 45 minutes or so. I didn’t pray.
what you have here is your mother making a post hoc ergo propter hoc association. If it makes her feel good to think it was a miracle then let her think it, but as long as there is a prosaic explanation for the event (and there is) there is no need to extropolate miracles.
As for being afraid that God will be pissed at you for doubting it as a miracle, what would that say about God?
It gose without saying that a God who arbitrarily decides to answer some prayers while ignoring the prayers of others who are losing their loved ones is not much of a God. If we are going to resort to “mysterious ways” to explain who God chooses to help and who not to help, then we also have to acknowledge that prayer can play no causal role. If God’s decisions are made independently of prayers, then the results are indistinguishible from random chance.
Hey, it’s not like my mom is trying to recall detailed facts and concepts here! Right?
I got sick for 2 weeks give or take a day, got blisters, dad left, got swollen, prayed words, immediately looked down, blisters gone, swelling gone, I stand up and tell her I feel fine, dad returns to see me fine with no blisters.
As far as remembering these things right after they happened, there could not be a wide array of different recollections here. It’s not like my mom was trying to remember the color of the car of the mugger who took her purse outside our house one time. She said it was white, I said it was blue, to the cops. This is different in that it happened over a good deal of time, not a split second. The default should be to accept my mom’s testimony within a standard deviation. The whole story is not on the line here, I wouldn’t think?
I agree. You saw I said a similar thing in a previous post, right? Just checking.
For a “fun story to tell the folks”, there would not be this degree of certainty required.
To establish that a miracle occured … well, are you aware of the requirements to establish that a miracle has occured? I am unable presently to arrive at what I consider to be a cite unbiased enough as to present a definition of “miracle” as it is considered by the RCC (who are the people who make the fuss about miracles in the first place), but here are a few cites Google listed when I did a search: cite.
What you have posted is not incompatible with a rare occurence or even an uncommon occurence from what I have seen posted. Further, that you and those involved are unable to explain it surprised me not a bit, and should not surprise you, as you nor your mother are not a licensed medical professional; if one of you were, I feel sure that you would have mentioned such.
That is precisely the issue I and others have raised. As I said previously, if you wish to present your case for a miracle, it is unfair to present facts as immutable and perfect. You must be able to answer credible, relevant questions for such to be considered. But really, since none of us is a governing religious entity, what matter of difference does it make what we think? What does the governing body of your religious beliefs think on the matter, and how did they arrive at that conclusion?
I apologize if I seem to be attacking you. This is not the case. Rather, I am trying to show you that it seems to me (and, evidently, to others) that you have been less than rigorous in your attempts to figure out if this was a miracle (or even Zoster).
I saw it. I’m just concurring with that and offering an opinion that I don’t think you need to fear that a loving God woukd condemn you for using the mind that he gave you to analyze the experience. Like Trisk said, it’s really your mom’s miracle. I think God would be happy as long as you respected her feelings about it.
Anyway, it’s not like God doesn’t already know that you’ve doubted, is it? 
Well, it’s not every day that the boards get to play devil’s advocate, in the most literal sense.
This thread got me thinking about miracles in general, and about verifying them in particular. I figured that there must be some criteria out there, some way of verifying claims of the miraculous, and lo and behold, there is. The Catholic Church, of course, has pretty strict criteria for miracle acceptance, seeing as two verifiable miracles are de rigeur in order to become a saint. One even has to be performed posthumously.
Anyway, it seems that their criteria are rather stringent. From this page on the [url=“http://www.elpaso.net/~bank/elpasohistory/sheen/shnfoun1.htm”]canonization of Archbishop Sheen
[/quote]
:
Anyway, your Mom may not be up for sainthood, but you should be unsurprised that when someone looks at an event and says “It’s a miracle!” and then tells a bunch of diverse people all about it, there will be some who examine the event in detail, looking for another explanation.
This thread is, in a way, an echo of the trial-like atmosphere by which canonization was accomplished up until the 1980s; the Church defended the person up for sainthood, against a prosecutor who was charged with representing the other side of the argument. The advocatus diaboli.
That’d be us.
I was under the impression, Mr Visible, that three miracles were required for canonization. One for Veneration (or possibly Beatification), two for Beatification (see previous), and three for Canonization/Sainthood. Cite for the three miracles. This, however, seems to have mixed results. One hopes Polycarp or tomndebb (the two who spring to mind as most likely to know this off the top of their heads) will either do vanity searches or stop by in the morning to relieve me of my ignorance:D
I am doubtful that two residents of the same house would come down with the same non-contagious disease in such a narrow timeframe. If your blistering was indeed a case of herpes Zoster, it was either an amazing coincidence or God, making a point, chose to punish the nanny.
As I said to my wife’s charismatic pastor after he gave me a 30 minute talk about all the healing he had been involved in
“so what exactly do Christians die of then?”
The basic skeptical view: If I stand on a busy street praying “God, let this traffic clear so I can walk all the way to other side”, probability gaurantees that my prayer will sometimes be “answered”. If I say the prayer, let’s say, 30% of the time and the traffic quickly clears randomly, say 10% of the time then prayer will be “answered” 3% of the time. Better odds than the lotto. Basically, when A precedes B we are not justified in concluding that A caused B. This doesn’t prove that A didn’t cause B either but the mere fact of temporal juxtaposition is not a proof of causality.
I said:
The OP responds:
Here is the OP’s “end of [his] 3rd post”:
Nothing in the above suggests that God was the causitive factor. I agree that it’s “fact” that your mom was assigning a greater importance to prayer in the months leading up to your sickness. That’s an objective and verifiable fact. But you said that God was impressing the importance of prayer on your mother at this time in her life, and that this was a fact.
Now, you may be personally convinced of it… just as I am personally convinced of God’s having taken an active role in certain events in my own life. But you cannot simply state that it’s a fact, without evidence, in a proceeding in which you are asking to be taken as a fair-minded observer.
- Rick
I’m a latecomer to this thread, but I’m still not sure what it is about; Fuel; you seem to want people to accept things as fact when they may not actually be factual, then draw a conclusion anyway, kind of like:
Assume for a moment that pigs can fly, right? we’re going to accept flying pigs as fact, OK?..
…then…
Wow! pigs can fly! aren’t flying pigs amazing?
But I don’t think we can take everything you posted as factual; for example - does the sudden onset of the blistering match the pattern of symptoms for Herpes Zoster? As a person who has suffered attacks of shingles in the past, I can tell you that no, the blisters don’t suddenly appear in half an hour (I’m not talking about their sudden disappearance when your mother prayed); they develop gradually over the course of a few days (in fact the link you provided in the OP says this).
Catholic verification of “miracles” is not exactly a scientific process, regardless of what they claim. If the Church could actually “prove” a miracle it would be the biggest news story in history. There is no such thing as a “verified” miracle from any genuine scientific standpoint.
Fuel, howzabout this for a different, “true” story (that is, it’s an accurate description of my memories of an event):
When I was fifteen and just starting to study witchcraft, paganism, and magic, one summer night we were eating dinner on the porch when we saw our cat in the driveway below us, shivering.
We went down to see what was wrong with her. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, her mouth was open and drooling, and she did not respond to us at all. She just twitched in our arms when we picked her up.
We raced her down the road to an emergency vet clinic. My father, a physician, told me that she was showing symptoms of nerve poisoning, told me she’d probably gotten into someone’s freshly-pesticided garden, told me she was unlikely to live.
I ignored him. While we waited for the veterinarian to come to the examining room, I closed my eyes and performed a mental ritual that I’d read about in one of my books on witchcraft. I meditated, sending my consciousness deep into the earth, and drew up power from the earth. Placing one hand on the spasming cat’s head and one on her back, I let the power flow through her, and called on images of prowling wildcats, hot suns, strong blood beating through her veins. I gave honor to the Mother Goddess and asked her to heal my cat.
My father asked me if I was all right. I ignored him. A few minutes later, I ended the ritual and opened my eyes.
My cat had stopped spasming, was breathing normally. A couple minutes later, she had gotten shakily to her feet and was hobbling around the exam table. By the time the vet came in, she’d hopped off the table onto the floor. We took her home without treatment, and she never showed any further ill signs from the episode.
I was stunned. Stunned. It was the confirmation I hadn’t dared hope for, that magic worked and that I could work it. For years, that episode more than any other was the foundation of my belief in the efficacy of magic.
Now? Well, I remember the emotions well, I remember the sense of wonder (and, to be perfectly honest, of power) that I got from the experience. And I’m really loathe to give up that feeling. It’s a wonderful feeling.
But when I look at it closely, I remember some other stuff. I remember that the vet suggested she may have just had a concussion, that maybe she’d been hit by a car. I remember that her recovery wasn’t instantaneous. I remember other times when I tried to use magic to heal animals and the animals ended up dying anyway.
I hate not being able to believe in magic. But if I’m going to be honest with myself, I have to remember everything about the event, and I have to count it all.
I’m more inclined to believe in the supernatural events in my story than in yours, but I’m not inclined to believe that either story had supernatural elements. What would you make of my story?
Daniel
Fuel -
I haven’t bothered to read this whole thread, because of what I’d like to say here:
This board, as wonderful as it is, may not be giving you what you want. You said you wanted people’s opinions, and you got them, but
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Not many people here are willing to think that maybe the story is even close to accurate.
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A fairly large contingent is willing to be sarcastic about anything less serious than the 9/11 attacks.
You’re getting a good view of what a group of “witty” intellectual non-Christians think. If that’s what you want, then good. If you want a discussion that doesn’t sort of devolve into a slamming of the idea of anything beyond the material, this may not be the place for this thread.