The Catholic Church control over the definition of "miracle"

What happens when a miracle occurs? You know, someone prays, and then something miraculous happens which nobody can explain. When this happens within the context of the Catholic Church the Church Authorities step in and assert what I think is a fiction, namely that miracles require an intercessor to channel Gods Magnificence to help us poor pitiful humans. The fiction is that humans are unable to have any divinity, unable to access God directly, and must instead depend on Church Authority for access to God.

I wrote some time ago about this (see: Establishing control over a society) and a story on todays Morning Edition (NPR's daily news show) seems to exemplify this to a T.

The story is that a young boy developed a dreadful disease of the sort Doctors say is normally fatal. It was a particularly ravenous fast moving form of the disease. The boys family made some contacts and pretty quickly crowdsourced a legion of people around the world praying for the boy's health. The doctors told the parents the boy would probably die, and a Priest came in and read him his last rights.

The intercession of Kateri Tekakwitha?

The story then becomes connected with Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk who converted to Catholicism and who was beatified in 1980. Kateri happened to have similar health conditions to the boy's, making for three analogous conditions between this boy and Kateri: "Number one, we're talking about two young people," Sauer says. "Number two, we're talking about two people who come from Native American ancestry. And number three, we're talking about a person who herself suffered from a disease that disfigured her face."

A representative of the Society of Blessed Kateri visited the boy and gave his mother a relic of Kateri. On that day his illness changed course. That day was described as "breathtaking" and the surgeon is quoted saying: "All of a sudden, to have this infection stop is almost like a geyser coming out of the earth with this great roar — and all of a sudden it just stops. And there's silence. And everybody's just a little bit stunned by it being over."

It does seem rather miraculous, especially when the medical doctor guy is stunned and cannot explain it.

The Catholic Church process of approving a Miracle

The story goes on to explain that seemingly miraculous events are not enough for the Catholic Church. And that's a good thing because honestly spiritual practitioners have a way of simply believing things without taking a rational look at things. Taking a rational look, however, does not necessitate always denying the action of spiritual forces unlike many skeptics would have us believe. My experience of the skeptic crowd is they have their own rigid dogma to defending, that spiritual action is always a bogus lie.

As I see it the truth is neither that miracles or other spiritual effects require an intercessor, nor that spiritual effects are bogus lies.

Instead that we all have innate access to spiritual gifts, and that we all can (and do) participate in the creation of spiritual effects.

The book these Christian people profess to believe even says so. The teacher, Jesus, is quoted saying that we would have all the gifts he demonstrated, and more.

Standing in heaven before the throne of God

Turning back to the NPR report - they describe the reasoning behind the Catholic Church designating some people with Beatification or Sainthood: "That means we have received assurances that this person now stands in heaven before the throne of God," he says. And historically, "one of the evidences of that has been miracles of healing."

The report describes a litany of people scrutinizing the recovery of this little boy. They want to determine whether it was an actual miracle, or simply luck of modern medical practice, or what. And while I like the idea of scrutinizing and studying spiritual effects, the whole story reeks of Authority stepping in and Asserting Control and Asserting their Dogma.

Is this situation an example of an intercessor who "now stands in heaven before the throne of God"? Or does this situation demonstrate the power of prayer? Especially the power of a legion of people praying together? Perhaps the miracle did not occur via the intercessionary power of Kateri Tekakwitha, but because hundreds of people joined together in prayer.

And while the NPR story discussed two points of view, it did not discuss this third point of view. The NPR piece described the Catholic Church viewpoint (miracles require intercessors), and for balance brought in a professional skeptic who writes for the Skeptical Inquirer to tell us that all spiritual practices are bogus lies and that this boy received great medical care. They did not bring in someone to discuss whether or why intercessors are required for spiritual effects to occur.

Hence, NPR is in this case acting to preserve two of the existing dogmatic -isms controlling our society without giving even the slightest lip service to a third point of view.

I wonder what others think of their story in light of what I've just written. The boxes below offer a convenient way to leave comments.

See: A Boy, An Injury, A Recovery, A Miracle?

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Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

Dear Group Members,

I want to share my article with you. This is about the link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues. The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature.

Subject : In a fast society slow emotions become extinct.
Subject : A thinking mind cannot feel.
Subject : Scientific/ Industrial/ Financial thinking destroys the planet.
Subject : Environment can never be saved as long as cities exist.

Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking.

If there are no gaps there is no emotion.

Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion.

When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing.

There comes a time when there are almost no gaps.

People become incapable of experiencing/ tolerating gaps.

Emotion ends.

Man becomes machine.

A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.

A ( travelling )society that speeds up physically experiences every physical slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.

A society that entertains itself daily experiences every non-entertaining moment as Depression / Anxiety.

FAST VISUALS /WORDS MAKE SLOW EMOTIONS EXTINCT.

SCIENTIFIC /INDUSTRIAL /FINANCIAL THINKING DESTROYS EMOTIONAL CIRCUITS.

A FAST (LARGE) SOCIETY CANNOT FEEL PAIN / REMORSE / EMPATHY.

A FAST (LARGE) SOCIETY WILL ALWAYS BE CRUEL TO ANIMALS/ TREES/ AIR/ WATER/ LAND AND TO ITSELF.

To read the complete article please follow any of these links :

PowerSwitch
EnviroLink
StrategyTalk

sushil_yadav
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

Archbishop of Canturbury backs evolution over creationism

Archbishop of Canterbury backs evolution ... Apparently the Intelligent Design quandry has been raised in England as well as here in the U.S. I shouldn't be surprised since it's clear the political strategists behind this are international in scope. In any case it's interesting how Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canturbury, have all announced that it's a mistake to teach creationism in schools, and how we should accept evolution into religious peoples view of the world.

The Intelligent Design crowd are fundamentalists who seem to be at odds with leading religious figures. Hmmmm.... Interesting.

Here's the Guardian article: Archbishop: stop teaching creationism ...or...

"I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories ... My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," he said.
The debate over creationism or its slightly more sophisticated offshoot, so-called "intelligent design" (ID) which argues that creation is so complex that an intelligent - religious - force must have directed it, has provoked divisions in Britain but nothing like the vehemence or politicisation of the debate in the US. There, under pressure from the religious right, some states are considering giving ID equal prominence to Darwinism, the generally scientifically accepted account of the evolution of species. Most scientists believe that ID is little more than an attempt to smuggle fundamentalist Christianity into science teaching.

It's clear these religious leaders aren't saying to ignore the Creation story and only look at Science and Evolution. The Archbishop's words seem to center on guarding the specialness of the Biblical Creation story.

In my eye the story isn't as simple as Evolution is superior over Intelligent Design. And, for that matter, its disturbing that the Archbishop seems to be saying we shouldn't be questioning or debating the validity of the Creation story.

First, consider this: Establishing control over a society ... the gist is that religion is easily be used to control the beliefs of society. The Intelligent Design debate is precisely an example of religious claims being pushed by political operatives to establish some control over society. And, further, it's an example of the people in society being expected to suspend their power of critical thought just because their church tells them to do so.

Why shouldn't the claims of religion be tested? We have the power of critical thought. We have the power of independant reasoning. Why not examine spiritual practices, experiences and beliefs?
Okay, one problem with that leaps immediately to mind. Scientists have regularly tried to test religion and ended up bashing religion, largely because they're testing it in the wrong way. Religious folk are expected to lean on "faith" and to not ask questions, leading to a dependency on something other than rational critical thought for making decisions. Scientists, on the other hand, are expected to trust only logic and equations and critical thinking, and to distrust subjective experience.

The problem is the nature of the religious claims. God is said to be something which created the universe and everything within it. God is said to be everywhere. How can a scientist hope to measure such a claim? The proof of God comes from subjective experience, the thing scientists are taught to distrust.

For example, when you pray what happens? Do you feel good when you pray? Most do. Is that a subconscious thing firing off some brain chemicals, and that because you believe God is helping you feel nice when you pray, therefore the chemicals your subconscious fires off will help you feel good? Or is there a divine presence that reaches inside you?

What about miraculous healing? What about prayer for someone who's sick? It's been shown in several studies (double-blind etc) that intercessionary prayer helps the ones who are prayed for.
It seems to me the critical mind, the dependence on logic, can easily go too far. And that the dependence on logic interferes with subjective experience. That the way to experiment with the divine is to operate with both subjective experience, and the critical mind. Subjective experience is not to be pushed away but to be embraced. Just as we are wired for the critical mind so are we wired for subjective experience.

Hmmm... I seem to have strayed from Intelligent Design versus Evolution. Sorry....

Establishing control over a society

I want to share a realization that recently came to me. It is a way of establishing control over a society, allowing you to bend them to your will. However in practice this will take generations to really lodge into society, so you probably won't have direct benefit but your heirs will.

Step 1: Beg, borrow, steal or forge a set of spiritual writings

Step 2: Present those writings as the Word of God

Step 3: Present the writings as being the infallible source of truth

Step 4: Appoint a group of people as the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words as written in those writings

It helps to have an authentic spiritual guru deliver the writings you are going to start with. That's not an absolute requirement. The other steps serve to separate the individuals in the society from their own authentic ability to determine the truth.

The other steps make it so Truth is determined only from the spiritual writings, and that Truth is so difficult to understand that only the select anointed ones can tell what's right or wrong. Hence when someone has a question, they won't be able to answer it for themselves but instead have to turn to the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words to tell them the truth.

Once the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words are established with credibility, then can claim literally any idea as being Gods Infallible Truth. Of course this assumes the official interpreters become corrupt, and no longer be serious students of spiritual truth.

In the ideal the priesthood's role is to explore the divine and to have the freedom to devote their lives to authentic spiritual practice. But we can think of dozens of religions throughout history where it began as an authentic spiritual practice, then devolved into corruption and power mongering.

I believe we all have access to divine truth. There are many spiritual teachings which say so, and which say we can look within for the divine truth. They tend to encourage us to explore and experiment for ourselves divine truth. In my experience the confidence this gives is stronger than "faith".

Modern science and "intelligent design" and creationism .vs. evolutionary science

Apparently GW Bush threw his hat into the "Intelligent Design" camp. I've been seeing some news articles saying so, though I haven't bothered to track this down.

Intelligent Design goes against a couple hundred years of scientism becoming the Way We Think about the world. In our schools and everywhere Science is The Accepted Way of reasoning, and Science is what's led us from the dark ages of superstition to this gleaming modern age of wonders.

In case that paragraph was too subtle, let me say that I think Science is as much a Religion as Christianity is. Science demands an adherence to certain beliefs which seem reasonable and rational. We certainly can't argue with the technological success that has arisen from the practice of Science. However, in my view over dependance on the Scientific Method leads one to being an incomplete human. In my view practice of the divine is just as important as practice of the mind.

However I don't know enough about the "Intelligent Design" camp to know whether they are in agreement with my view of "evolution", which I'll get to in a minute. The "Intelligent Design" camp seems to be home to the type of fundamentalist Christians who want to drive the U.S. into a narrow hateful mindset. They seem to be as much politically motivated as spiritually motivated, and in any case the Christian beliefs they profess are easily seen to be the result of 2 millenia of political manipulation. Jesus surely brought us a good set of teachings, but it's clear that from the Roman Emporarer Constantine on forwards, that Christianity has manipulated and twisted those teachings for political purposes.

It's clear from the wikipedia article that the "intelligent design movement" is politically motivated, designed to get certain teachings of christianity inserted into school curriculum. This is part of the overall narrow minded fundamentalist christian movement that has basically taken over the U.S. government through electing representatives who espouse these narrow minded views of the world.

The wikipedia article above identifies The Center for Science and Culture (web site) as the main proponents of the "intelligent design movement". On the CSC entry they describe a 20 year agenda of

• To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
• To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts.
• To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

And that they would supplant theories such as evolution with their theory of intelligent design. To do so the current effort is to establish the right to "teach the controversy", pointing out the rights of academic freedom inherent with being a teacher, and that it's short-sighted to place so much weight on one theory since theories come and go. Why is Darwinism given so much credence over other theories? That's the question they're trying to establish today as teaching material in schools.

However, remember what their long term goals are. Aren't those long term goals just as closed minded as todays dominance of Darwinism keeping out all other theories?

The questions still remain. How did we get here? Why does this universe exist the way it is?

In the wikipedia articles they make distinctions between two points of view:

• On the one hand you have scientists, with their scientific method in hand, trouncing out superstitious beliefs. The scientists have been at this for a few hundred years, e.g. Copernicus and his theories of Astronomy.
• On the other hand you have the proponents of intelligent design. They wear their christianity on their sleeves, and claim: Intelligent Design movement proponents allege that science, by relying upon methodological naturalism, demands an a priori adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses out of hand any explanation that contains a supernatural cause.

In my view both sides of this debate are bonkers, and there is yet another view to consider that neither are talking about.

Where I'm pointing at is some views in quantum physics. These views correlate with experiences I have as a spiritual healer. I know these views as written by Dr. Amit Goshwari, but I believe other scientists work with the same views. They are discussed in these books:

• The Self-Aware Universe
• The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment
• Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality
• ...etc...

His contention is that the basis of physical matter is intention and consciousness which causes the quantum probability wave to collapse into matter. The consciousness is intermingled with every particle of everything in the universe. This consciousness is what created the universe.

That sounds like God to me. A much more rationally described God than the one of the Christian Bible.

To make it clear, what I understand from the reading and the experiences I have is this: everything in the universe is part of a whole. This "whole" is the wholeness of everything in the universe. Our belief that things in the universe are separate is an accident of the limited perception we humans have. And if this sounds like Buddhist doctrine, that's not exactly an accident. I did arrive at this view without becoming a practicing Buddhist.

However an interesting thought has come while researching this article. Consider this statement on the wikipedia pages:

Critics point out that the principle of naturalism (i.e. materialism) allows falsifiability and that supernaturalism is unfalsifiable, meaning any suggested policies or curicula put forth by the center that rest on supernatural suppositions are by definition pseudoscience, not science.

This gets back to the two points of view I described earlier. To understand this, we first need to understand the term falsifiability. If you're like me, that's too long a word to make sense of.

Falsifiability is an important concept in the philosophy of science that amounts to the apparently paradoxical idea that a proposition or theory cannot be scientific if it does not admit consideration of the possibility of its being false.

Okay, this helps me understand the previous point. In scientism the adherents believe, I suppose, that you can only propose theories. Theories are your best guess at the moment, and may well be false. By admitting the theories may well be false, that makes the theory falsifiable.

They suggest that any theory rooted in a supernatural power (and, they're getting to define what powers are super-natural) is inherently unfalsifiabile. That is, you can claim the super-natural entity can do anything, so therefore you could propose any old random theory and thereby say the super-natural entity is capable of performing whatever the theory says.

I seem to see a conclusion to this article now. And it is to draw a distinction between the Christians, and this proposed Intelligent Design concept, and the view I see in my spiritual background and the new physics such as taught by Dr. Goshwari.

I'm reminded of a quote from Albert Einstein which was in effect "I'm trying to understand the mind of God".

That is, I propose there is a consciousness which created and designed this universe. Under that proposition the phrase "Intelligent Design" is a great label to use to describe my viewpoint, but actually I am not going to accept that label. The reason is the approach to understanding the nature of the intelligent designer.

Thinking about Christianity, and the tone of the presentation on the The Center for Science and Culture web site. They are confident that they know the nature of God, and that their God is the one who wrote the Bible, that their God led Moses to the promised land, that their God told the various Kings of Israel to smash thine enemies, etc. In other words it's a very predetermined view of who and what God is.

I think about the makeup of the Universe, and I think about the consciousness that is interwoven with every particle in the Universe, that designed every particle, every atom, every cell, every butterfly, and every galaxy, and I think .. what an awesome creature. How can you bind such an awesome consciousness into a little book and say that's all God is. I am like Einstein, I am experimenting with the universe, and I am attempting to learn the nature of the mind of God. I am not predetermining what the nature of the mind of God is, I am observing and learning.