Friday, 27 May 2011

Personal Miracles

In my experience, people often invoke miracles as evidence toward the existence of God. A miracle is an event within the physical world. It is for that reason that I am quite fond of them. Physical events can usually be tested.
In this chapter, however, we will deal only with the case of personal miracles. Those are the kind of miracles which most commonly remain within the realm of a single individual. Most often pertaining to miraculous healing or divine intervention in such cases as accidents or war. We will not, in this chapter, discuss other claimed miracles such as the parting of specific seas or the miracle of child birth. Those will be discussed in the future I hope.

As far as miraculous healing is concerned, the test is fairly simple. It is a well known medical fact that, sometimes, sick people heal. Cancers sometimes go into remission. Every once in a while infections subside. However such cases are rare enough for doctors not to consider them a viable treatment option. Later, we hear the stories of people who were told they have a month to live and then survived another twenty years. It’s a miracle.

But not every type of sick person heals. If it were God who is healing the sick, we would assume he does so by his own plan or morality. We would not expect him to do so based on an individual illness. God is almighty. He can heal anything. Right?
If this is the case, then why does God only heal people who suffer from ambiguous disease's? Disease’s which could have healed on their own anyway. And yet God never heals amputees. Surely there are amputees from all strata of the moral realm. Surely not all such people are evil and undeserving of a miracle. And yet this never happens. Never. Not rarely. NEVER!
Which leads me to the conclusion that God either hates amputees or people intemperate the good things that happen to them in the way their parents told them to. Religiously.

What about the other form of personal miracles? People survive accidents and war every day. Many of these are considered miracles. “I should have died in that car accident, but God intervened and saved me.”
These sorts of miracles are the same religious interpretations as the ones mentioned earlier. These, of course, harder to make fun of without the ready example of amputees.
But why don’t we just call this sort of interpretation by its real name: Narcissism.

“I was supposed to die in that car accident, but the almighty God, creator of the heavens and the earth, intervened in order to save me. I must be such an integral part of his grand cosmic plan that he suspended all of the laws of causality and physics for me to keep living. I am that important. Now I know I should run for president.”

Or maybe you just got lucky.

http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/

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