Miracles Make God a Show-Off

Believers say Jesus cured the sick miraculously out of compassion. Does that mean he healed just because he wanted to and wanted them to get better? Or does it mean he always cares but has his other reasons for curing them?  They choose the latter answer.  Thus miracles are not very compassionate and are not really about compassion.  They are about show.  And those who claim to do them and those who revere them need to hang their heads in shame.

Jesus was regarded as healer - exorcism can be considered a form of healing.  We do not know if Jesus regarded illness as real or as just a symptom of a form of possession.  We don't know if his healings should be distinguished from exorcisms.  There are stories of epileptics being treated by him as possessed just for falling.  Jesus never sought out anybody to cure them despite his alleged compassion.  No miracle was done unless somebody could know about it.  Worse, when dealing with lepers and mental illness not one thing is done or said by him to address the systemic problems that cause or spread these problems in the first place.  What about people who crawled in agony out of their sick beds for help and he had already passed through the town? You need to keep looking at this through the big picture and it is not pretty.  If a man treated sick people that way we would treat him as a narcissistic magician not as a truly good man.  But Jesus gets a free pass to treat people like that and is worshipped as God for doing so.  If people did not think they could get special treatment from Jesus that leaves others in want would they bother with him at all?  Do they have the same kind of selfish faith that drove the pagans even to sacrifice their babies to their gods in the name of hope - a hope that wanted a magic advantage in a ruthless world?  Already we have shown that if the stories about Jesus are true and demons are real that the heavy burden of proof to show that this man was truly innocent of being in league with evil forces and dark magic rests on the shoulder of the Christian.  If they want the right to worship him they have to take the responsibilities that go with it as well and do the homework and show it to us.

If the evidence for Jesus' miracles is good and unassailable as the Church says then we have clear evidence that God should not be trusted or worshipped or that as Gnostics would say, God is not God at all but only imagines he is.

Miracles are events like magic. Religion says God does them. God makes all things out of nothing so he can do them. Making things out of nothing is a miracle.  Miracles are said to be supernatural deeds by God that cannot be explained by purely natural causes in which God reveals what he is like – a loving compassionate being who wants a relationship with us. They reflect how God must reach to us for if man reaches to God he is going to get it wrong and as God is what matters it follows that God must be the one initiating the relationship.

Any other definition will not do.

What is wrong with any other definition?

It will make miracles just about God showing his power instead of trying to use miracles so that we may find him through them.

It will attract curiosity seekers and superstitious people. 

It will not lead to the miracle being inspiring to those who are bad so that they might become good.  

It will lead to a miracle being done either really or by trickery but which Satan or an evil spirit is behind being taken for one of God’s. A degrading doctrine of God leads to attraction to degrading and filthy and stupid miracle claims and to further horrible doctrines.  

The definition is wide open to refutation. 

The vast majority of miracles tales do not have God creating a relationship with the recipient or showing any interest.

If people get closer to God after a miracle that is open to the problem that if b follows a it does not follow that a had anything to do with b.

Some convincing miracles with good testimony behind them show no interest in forging a personal relationship with God.

Some miracles that allegedly do have God becoming a friend through them are interpreted as doing that but other interpretations are possible and sometimes more likely.

Miracles are about power and show.

Miracles are very useless and bizarre. It is all about show. Religious people always chase after the showy miracle worker or the showy miracle shrine but if somebody had the miracle power to heal hearts and inspire evil people to become ultra-humanitarians that person would not be heard of. Even if the devotees do good, they are still no better than the rest of us. And they boast of the good fruits of following the apparition or accepting the reality of miracles as if they have something nobody else has! No wonder they want to believe in a God who shows off by doing miracles!
 
Judaism and Islam and Christianity insist that miracles are not superstition for they show the dignity of God. God does them to inspire us to honour him. If they are about showing off in any way, they demean God. Those who allege they have happened when they have not are really demeaning God. Why? Because if God does miracles to attract honour, real honour, fake miracles do not do that and indicate that he is being accused of showing off. If God is made a show-off by his miracle-working then he is made an even worse one by having miracles he never did attributed to him.
 
A miracle happens. What is the biggest thing is, is that it happened. The next biggest thing is what kind of power did it, say God or magic or the supernatural. The last thing is to ask if it has a message or not. Clearly even if a miracle carries a message, it is chiefly about the show not the message. For example take the alleged apparition of Mary at Lourdes in 1858. The show of power was the supernatural enabling a woman who had died centuries before to appear there to a girl. The sign was the message.
 
Miracle is superstition - superstition indicates an disrespectful attitude to God as well as a tendency to believe in rubbish. It is superstition because the notion of a God setting up nature to work the way it does and then interrupting it to show off is vulgar.
 
What takes priority?
 
* Proving that the event is not naturally possible and possibly if not certainly supernatural?
 
or
 
* Proving that the event is edifying and encourages people to treat one another and God better?
 
* Both?
 
The examination should be firstly about whether or not the alleged miracle has had good fruits that would not have happened without it. If visionaries of the Virgin Mary were whoring and drinking heavily and they are doing that during or soon after the apparitions then the event is possibly not from God. God has the power to influence the heart towards conversion. If Mary and God are so irresistible that alone should cause a conversion.
 
Then when the alleged miracle passes that stage, it can be checked if there is any possibility of believing that it was a miracle from God.
 
Miracles if they are signs and edify in fact are only helpful for those who believe in and who resolve to keep the commandments of God. That is not real edification at all from the viewpoint of unbelievers. If we really believe in love, we will not need to believe in a God to command us to do it. A loving God cannot command or obligate us to love. Love is by nature free.
 
The Church might say that there is no mention in this reverence for God's commandments of a relationship with God. But God cannot command us to have a relationship with him - even if he is owed our love. The commandments are supposed to be rules we have to obey to maintain the relationship. It's unhealthy. God commands a relationship. This is heavy handed and ridiculous. A relationship is made not because of duty but because one wants to be in it. A God that does miracles to attract followers to his commandments that he has no right to make is attracting them to serfdom.
 
Belief in miracles forces us to pretend that Jesus didn’t do miracles of healing at random. We are compelled then to think he did them with the purpose of showing love and compassion so he did them to heal. First of all, Jesus could have cured them without the theatrics. He could have cured a child in India by distant healing without anybody knowing how the child got better. Second, his real goal was not compassion but to make displays of power. The message is that power matters most. Convincing people to have specific and certain religious beliefs is more important. Third, the miracles were random – it just didn’t look that obvious. They were random when Jesus didn’t do them according to the need of the people. What about people who were worse off in other countries? Christians will say he did them according to his own need but if his resurrection was the only miracle that mattered the others were random and that is that. Besides obvious miracles are unnecessary for healing people and so the miracles were random for that reason. Fourth, Christians want to believe that miracles are only true if they are not random and done for a loving purpose – well, they are out of luck! If miracles happen at random or don’t, they are still true. Christians invent their theory of how miracles should be and only accept the miracles that fit their theological agenda.

Should Christians define miracles as proofs or at least evidences or indications of divine power and strength? Or should they define them as proofs or indications of God's love and goodness? Or all of these?

A decent God will do them if necessary as signs of love and goodness and not of power. But he can do that without doing magic. He is said to have raised Jesus to give us hope of salvation in body and soul. He can help us hope to live forever in resurrected bodies without showing off by raising Jesus from the dead.

Miracles accuse God of wanting to flaunt his power like an immature dictator.

If miracles are divine conjuring tricks and about showing off, then they give us a picture of God as petty and immature and frivolous. Christians say that God does not do those kind of miracles. They would!

The miracles are not done for true edification. They are done totally for the display of divine power.
 
Religion may say that there is no other way God can give the sign except by power. But since the show is the not the biggest but the only thing, it follows that the sign which is not so important cannot justify it.