Miracles and Intellectual Dishonesty: Religion only permits belief in miracles that suit its agenda and its theology
Catholics believe that God only uses miracles to bring people to the true faith, the Catholic faith. So they say he can't do any miracle in another religion that can be taken as indicating that the religion is true.
The Church lies about miracles being signs from God that Christianity is the true faith. Jesus claimed that miracles showed he was the Son of God and his infallible voice.
Every religion has the attitude: We will ignore any miracle claim that doesn’t fit our ethos.
The Church says we cannot dismiss miracle reports as mistakes or lies or the meanderings of deranged minds for that would be like saying human testimony is worthless. And then the Church turns a blind eye to most miracle reports, for example, alien abductions and ghosts – many of which are accepted by expert investigators. The Church will not accept or even bother investigating the vast majority of reported miracles, like visions of Mary, that happen in her midst! It pays none at all to those without. Yet it says miracles show the claims of the Roman Catholic Church to be correct. That is blatant deceit and dishonesty not to mention bigotry. It is just sifting the evidence, its being biased and selective with the evidence, and not letting it speak for itself.
The sheer spectrum of different miracles indicate that if they happen they are just freak events. They often happen without a propagandist purpose. The Church refuses to admit that miracles mean nothing for that denies its dogma that miracles are signs from God pointing to the religion that has the truth or to verify that Jesus really is the only saviour.
Reliance on miracles as signs is a sign for only three things: arrogance and deceitfulness and seeing only what they want to see. It is pretending you have debunked all miracle reports except those of your Church which is impossible and you know it. With these nice attributes the Church cannot be trusted in verifying miracles or God in speaking to us through them.
It is blasphemy to say God does the miracles. God set up nature and does not need to change it unless he wants to give signs. Miracles are not signs therefore God is incompetent, having to fix the mistakes he made when he set up natural law. The miracles that happen in the Catholic Church then support a doctrine that the Church rejects and it is this: that miracles are not signs.
What if God does a miracle of healing in Islam when somebody prays to him for a cure? The suggestion that God is doing this to show that he is there not that Islam is true but to show that he exists fails. The suggestion that God is not saying to the Muslim that the Catholic faith is true but that their beliefs about God being there are right fails. Why would God change the normal order of nature just to show he is there? The Muslim already thinks he is there anyway. If he is doing miracles in other religions only to defend where that religion agrees with the Catholic Church then maybe he did the same with the resurrection of Jesus. Maybe he didn't raise Jesus to show that Jesus was saviour and son of God at all. Maybe he only did it to give us hope that we will rise again and Jesus, though not ideal, was the best hope of getting that message across? The miracle, if a sign, can only be a vague sign that some power can help us and keep us alive beyond the grave.
A miracle of healing outside the one true Church doesn't tell the recipient to think anything other than that some being decided to heal him or her. The being could be the Devil. Such miracles have to be confined to the one true faith - if there is one!
Even the most ardent Roman Catholic would not believe the pope if the pope testified to seeing Jesus murder the Virgin Mary.
If a miracle appeared saying that Ron Hubbard was God and that we must all eat frog spawn to gain his salvation, religion would say we should not believe in the message for it is ridiculous. This contradicts the religious claim, "God does miracles to show or indicate that the doctrines he has revealed are true. We believe in the doctrines because they are proven or shown plausible by miracles." To say God does miracles then is to accuse him of doing wonders without any concern for helping us to become better people. That would be superstitious and undignified.
If a miracle appeared saying that only people on macrobiotic diet will go to Heaven and avoid an eternity in Hell, religion would say we should not believe in the miracle for it is ridiculous. If we should not believe even when we see such a miracle, then clearly religion is admitting that the only real argument for belief in miracles - ie a reliable witness said the miracle happened so it probably did - is not much of an argument!
The Church might say that it is true that it would dismiss miracles with absurd implications. It would say that it does not need to worry about such miracles for they will not happen. But how does it know? What about the reports that say absurd miracles have happened? And what is a sane miracle for one theologian is a crazy one in the eyes of another. And the point is not the miracles being absurd. The point is not the miracles but that that religion denies that miracles are guides to truth. It is the religious attitude we are talking about.
If some miracles are absurd then should we believe any? There is seemingly satisfactory testimony to some absurd miracles. The testimony proves that evidence for miracles is not justification for belief in them. They are evidence against the evidence because their absurdity proves them to be myths regardless of the evidence for them.