UNDER CONSTRUCTION

 

The benefits you have come from people who did the thinking.  So you must think a bit more carefully in return.

 

Those who want to lead you into mistakes are personally but subtly attacking you.  To wreck your power to think and make the best informed choices is attacking the way you are made.  Most harm in life is subtle and crafty.

 

A sceptic knows that possibilities are interesting but they do not count.  Let the evidence guide your thinking.  It does not matter if aliens created Christianity by putting false memories in people in 50AD.  It does not matter if Jesus was raised from the dead by the only witch who ever lived and not by God.  What matters is what the evidence says and if we can trust the data.  Probabilities count.  The sceptic is not out for herself or himself but for the evidence.  Remember that.

 

Lies and errors breed more lies and errors.  They breed too much fear and uncertainty. Lies backfire for more people see through them than you think.

 

Be aware that religious and supernatural lies have the power to last longer than a lie should.  Why?  Because they avoid testing and because people are made to feel they are rebelling against a loving higher power if they scorn them. There are many reasons including how we are all conditioned to some extent in childhood. 

 

One big feature is that the absence of evidence is taken for evidence of absence.  It is not.  Absence of evidence that a miracle is a fraud does not mean it is in fact true.

 

Your errors are never your own business.  You are part of society and to avoid impacting others perhaps in ways you don't realise, you need to work through them.

 

The truth is not about what you want to think or even what you think.  It will always be bigger than you so go along with it.  There are more important things than brief comfort.

 

Armed with these truths we will examine some of the most famous and well "verified" miracle claims of all time.

 

Here they are.

 

Jesus' mother did not appear at Fatima and make the sun spin in 1917

 

Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet was a fraud

 

No church has the right to put a person through the trauma of an exorcism when proof of possession is impossible

 

'Believers' in magic/miracles/supernatural events are not believing but guessing

 

Catholicism despite the proof says that it has bodies of saints who never decayed

 

Lanciano Miracle when bread really turned into "Jesus"

 

Padre Pio was manipulative and did not have unnatural wounds

 

Guadalupe apparition and the miracle picture have serious credibility problems

 

Lourdes shrine has problematic apparition reports and healings

 

Turin Shroud may be strange but it does have tell-tale man-made errors

 

New Testament has no right to ask us to agree with its interpretation of reports that Jesus came back to life

 

Prayer is feeling good about an activity that violates decent principles - you have zero right to trivialise somebody's suffering by saying it fits in a plan of God's