Do you believe in miracles? This might dissuade you.

I believe things happen that we cannot explain with our knowledge of nature and those things appear as miracles to us.

I do believe in miracles, and fake reports like this just show how eager people are to have proof of the living God. So yes, we are this primitive still.

There’s a balance between science and faith. This just shows how wrong people are to indulge in either one to the exclusion of the other. (ducks and covers)

Thought I saw an image of christ in my Hot Chocolate once, turned out to be a Sexy Thing though…which was nice.

Ybarra, the first to feel the alleged tears of God, said the inclusion of bugs into the miracle doesn’t change anything for her. “It is [still] the work of God manifesting here on earth,” Ybarra said.

Ya know… I don’t really mind some harmless belief in miracles. But it’s kind of scary when the belief in such is so strong that science won’t be heard.

I believe in miracles I always will.

The biggest miracle would be if people stopped believing in miracles . The real world is so much more fantastic and magical when not obscured by absurd superstitions and magical-thinking.

I have not heard of anything happening that can’t be explained by everyday cause and effect. Take the supposed miraculous appearance in 1858 of the VIrgin Mary to a very impressionable 14 year old peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous. This supposedly happened in a grotto near Lourdes, and ever since, the faithful by the millions flock to Lourdes to be healed. 66 people have experienced what was deemed a miraculous cure of some serious, life threatening illness. But well over 6 million pilgrims go there each year. I’m sorry, but sugar pills would run a better cure rate than that.

Most people believe in Bronze Age myths. They had no way to prove or discover why anything happened. Hence, a god and miracles.

Now we have science. Still, somehow people believe those Bronze Age myths.

Whatch gonna do?

“Humans! They lived in the world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and anzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time…”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

Is my giant pink candle that melted into a large phallic shape on my deck and formed an image of the virgin Mary encoded in the head, a miracle? lol

My gramma brought back a bust of the Virgin Mary and a necklace for me from Lourdes.

@Coloma No. But praying for someone in a bad medical situation and seeing them completely restored, and having it documented by medical professionals is. I’ve personally seen it, twice. Me? I knew it was a miracle, because I was the one who was praying. The doctors simply had no explanation (performed tests) and really didn’t believe it at first.

@snowberry Do you think that if you hadn’t prayed, the person wouldn’t have gotten better? What was wrong with them, anyway?

@snowberry Similar experience here, and many more.

There’s always been naysayers and always will, but I think they just aren’t open to the experience.

Some people claim to see ghosts, I’ve never had an experience and I’ve actively sought them (I work in a supposedly haunted building), but I’m not completely discounting that ghosts exist – lol

Relevant

@KNOWITALL It’s not about not being open to the experience or just being some smug naysayer. What you don’t seem to realise or accept is that many of the so-called “naysayers” understand that we humans have a strong capacity for self-deception. Personal testimony and anecdotes are inherently flawed and liable to be inaccurate, all because of the nature of our cognitive processes and how memories are retained.

It is with this understanding that I, and other “naysayers”, are particularly cautious and reluctant to jump to any conclusions when the only information available is based on testimonies and anecdotes, and nothing from good controlled experimental data.

Incidentally, I have actually see a ghost, vividly so, and I still later concluded that it wasn’t a real ghost, and that ghosts likely do not exist and are entirely imagined. Why? Because I probably imagined it myself, understanding that we’re sometimes prone to hallucinations, and more so under particular conditions (no, I wasn’t high or on drugs.)

What did you see @Kropotkin?

Although the link that @tinyfaery posted showed that it’s possible that people who know they are being prayed for can get stressed out, I would think that just knowing people who cared for you were there would be beneficial to recovery.

@Kropotkin Oh honey, I admire cautious and reluctant, since most public ‘miracles’ have been debunked.

The part that irritates and dismays me is that ‘good controlled experiments’ are easy to believe because you have hard proof, but our personal miracles are not in public settings nor would anyone believe them if we shouted them from rooftops. People seem to have no faith at all anymore in anything they can’t see, touch, or prove. To me, that’s very sad.

There was also a study, I wish I could find, it that looked at people going through severe illness like cancer and they looked at attitude and how it affected recovery and they found that people who were negative and sure they were dying compared to people who always felt positive and believed they would beat had no significant difference in getting conquering an illness. The most sgnificant thing was course of treatment. The people with better attitudes may have psychologically felt better throught the whole ordeal, but it didn’t make them heal better. Like Katie Couric says, the cemetaries are full of people who fought hard and stayed positive and lost. it is similar to the prayer studies in my opinion.

@KNOWITALL I actually agree with you that our own personal miracles are important and don’t need explaining or to be scientifically proven.

I always loved how people would use “it’s a miracle”. IE house catches on fire and burns down killing 4 of the 5 residents of the house but a brave firefighter risks his life to save the last resident(lets make it a little kid as well) and OHHH IT’S A MIRACLE!! First off, wtf kinda miracle is that where ya needed 4 people to die for it to happen and second I always felt this took away from the praise that the firefighter deserves.

@uberbatman A firefighter deserves praise always, just for being willing to risk their lives to save another’s life, like our military and police.

A miracle is something that occurs when 100% of science and other methods give you 0% chance, that kind of thing.

“A miracle is something that occurs when 100% of science and other methods give you 0% chance” And a documented example of that would be?

@uberbatman Sure, here’s ten for ya to ponder on. I specifically searched ‘with documentation’.

http://listverse.com/2008/07/14/top-10-astonishing-miracles/

This is also interesting.
https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/WhyNoMiracles.HTM

It isn’t a miracle unless it’s approved by the Catholic church!

@KNOWITALL
Incorruptible Corpses (and that picture on your link btw , St. Bernadette , it’s a wax mask.)

People with random wounds(stigmata)/crying statues…..really. I can’t imagine any possible way that one could have achieved these things.

Then there is the flying man of the 1600’s…. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a street magician do anything like that before…

The miracle of the sun , ever hear of a sun dog ? I’ve seen them in Honduras and it sounds like what happened in fatima based on what your article stated. To add to that, go stare at the sun for a while and tell me that it doesn’t start moving around on you.

It’s interesting to me as well that many of these miracles happened quite a long time ago. God not doing miraculous things anymore?

One could still argue that some of these events you claim are miracles are unexplainable, but so have been many things throughout time. It’s not a miracle every time lightning strikes but it used to be believed Zeus was raining lighting down from the sky. It’s quite possible that these things have a perfectly normal explanation that we have yet to figure out or not enough evidence was documented from the event.

“Allegedly miraculous events can be, and have been, cases of real but rare natural phenomena. So dismissing an event simply because it is alleged to be miraculous is fallacious. The event could be a rare but real natural phenomenon.”

“Even if an unquestionably anomalous event occurred, not explainable in terms of any known laws of nature, we cannot rule out the possibility that the event is due to unknown laws of nature. Hume was right; no amount of evidence for a miracle can rule out the possibility of some hidden flaw in the evidence or unknown natural explanation. ”

I’ve been really busy lately, so I haven’t had time to tell you the back story of my miracles. Both would be long posts. But I sure wouldn’t want to have any miracle I’d seen become fodder for news people, which is likely the only way someone here would hear of it. They are some of the most unscrupulous folks around (including the big names such as ESPN, etc).

Most news people are not interested in anything more than a good story. If they can stir up gossips and haters, so much the better, because it makes an even better story which of course people love. Bottom line, stuff like that advances their careers.

For two long years I lived it, and I have seen the worst.

^^I want to hear them.

Don’t stop following this question, and sooner or later I’ll have time to post.

Regarding my two year nightmare, that had nothing to do with miracles, just a lot of gossip and a bunch of haters, and very little actual truth! But the media took it and ran with it anyway, because it sold a lot of newspapers, etc., and it advanced the career of at least one journalist. It was a national story. I’ll never trust anyone in the media again, ever.

Definitely want to hear! You can trust us!