LYING MESSAGES from ALLEGEDLY MIRACULOUS SOURCES

A 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. For example, it is not right to condone one person being miraculously healed by God while a person in a worse state is left to suffer and die on faith reasons. You need 100% proof that you should condone. Faith is not enough.  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!

Religion is kept up by people of faith and people who feign faith. A religion that uses indoctrination on children and vulnerable adults through the agency of parents and schools and the clergy has something to hide - period.  If faith is a gift of God as they say then that is not needed.  Indoctrination should not be needed full stop.  The real cause of people assuming they have faith is indoctrination.  If miracles happen to validate faith they are really validating not faith but indoctrination posing as faith.  The method of getting faith is in a sense more important than the faith.  Loving God because you are informed about him and drawn to him is one thing.  Being conditioned to love is just a mockery of spirituality and morality and faith.  So a miracle that happens to validate a faith that is too dependent on indoctrination is intrinsically unfair and manipulative and insulting.

Some studies done by psychology bodies find that far-fetched stories are shown credible by being far-fetched.  What happens is the witnesses become convincing and accurate just because they cannot believe what they have experienced and have to make the effort to report correctly.  That only applies to those who are checked out quickly instead of a decade later!  But other studies challenge this research and find that imagination and the fear of being wrong or shown wrong corrupt the story.   So we may decide that a story is not made more credible by being far-fetched or that we cannot know either way.  Verification of miracles then has to be unreliable for we need the underpinning of studies that show people are generally or reasonably reliable when faced with an alleged miracle.
 
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 The Sacred Heart of Jesus. 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 of Mary 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. A sin is a shorthand way of saying bad person. To hate the sin is to hate the sinner at least partly.
 
The apparitions 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. She says publicans are barred from it for getting people drunk and encouraging that. They are barred from Heaven as well for they 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 of Medjugorje apparition fame 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.
 
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. 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 unverified? 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.
 
Miracles encourage lies. The Church claimed to authenticate that Mary appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes in 1858. It did not. What it authenticated (leave aside the question about whether the authenticating is of any validity) was that Bernadette was having trances that couldn’t be explained by doctors and that a spring appeared and that healings took place. None of this proves that Bernadette really saw Mary. She might have lied or misunderstood. Or the vision might only have been pretending to be Mary. She may have went into a miraculous trance that affected her brain to make her imagine she saw the Virgin Mary. For the Church to say that it authenticated the apparitions of Mary at Lourdes is simply for it to lie. So here we have an extraordinary claim, that Mary appeared for which there is little evidence if you want to be generous. But the truth is there is NO evidence at all. So the miracles of Lourdes did nothing only support lies. We know that the stranger or more unlikely the claim, the evidence needs to be of a standard and strength to match the strangeness of the claim. The evidence needs to be in proportion to the level of unbelievableness of the claim. You don’t need the same evidence that Charlie met Annie at Loch Ness that you need to justify believing that Charlie saw the monster there. Lourdes and all the accepted Catholic apparitions deny this truth and so are evil and trying to drag us into superstition.
 
The God of the Catholics is a God who made all things out of nothing meaning he has infinite power because there is an infinite distance between something and nothing. So he is his power to create if he is infinite meaning he is the creation. So even if the miracles say, as most do, that God is not the creation they are lying because he is and no miracle should be relied upon. If we are God then the craziness of God doing miracles to get himself to believe in God is evident and all miracles are silly. If creation out of nothing has really happened then that is a miracle so any other miracle is from the Devil because God would not do things just for a display.
 
Miracles would mean nothing unless we thought they were encouraging us to love the sinner and hate the sin. Loving the person gone wrong and hating what they are doing to themselves is different. People often get them mixed up. Loving somebody so that you hate the way they endanger themselves does not mean you are making any moral judgement on them. It is not about them being sinners but being in danger. Loving the sinner and hating the sin is impossible for it judges the person as guilty of sin and therefore deserving of punishment. It is hypocrisy to call a person a sinner and then to say that the sin must be separated from the sinner so that the sinner is loved and the sin is hated.
 
Miracles are ploys to get people to accept a brand of religious doctrine. Those who reject religious dogma often make the mistake of thinking that they have to prove that miracles don’t happen to justify themselves. This is incorrect. It is sufficient to prove that even if miracles happen they don’t imply that any religion is true or that God exists. It is enough to know that if they proceed from a personal supernatural being at all they proceed from a liar. So we ought to just ignore what they say.
 
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 an error.
 
It is awful to expose the unsuspecting to the lies and untruths of miracles and apparitions.  The corrupt like such tales too for they form religious social constructs on them.