What is a "miracle"?

[Käpt'n]

So Mother Teresa will be canonised later this year for having performed two "confirmed" "miracles".

But what IS a miracle? So far no one could give me a proper answer for this.
Apparently she cured someones brain tumor because someone put a picture of her on his belly while he was lying in the hospital. No one knows why the tumor disappeared.
But if healing someone from a brain tumor is a miracle, what about everyone who survived because they got a successful operation? Are those miracles? Should all those surgeons be canonised as well? And if she could heal tumors without being present herself, what about those who die because of a brain tumor? Are those negative events miracles as well?

When people survive terrible accidents or natural disasters they also often say that it was a miracle. So one person survived a huge train crash for example, but what about the couple hundred people who died?

This seems to be a pretty dodgy word to me. It always focuses on the positive aspect to put the religion in a good spotlight and the negative aspects are being ignored entirely. That is pretty cruel if you ask me! "It was a mircale that Tommy surived the plane crash but let's ignore that his parents are dead along with the other 200 people who were on the plane with him! Praise Jesus!"

It just seems wrong to me. Like a way to say that you don't know how it happened and you don't give a shit  because fuck thinking for yourself!

[WileyWarWeasel]

When it comes to religion defining a miracle is easy: it's whatever the head priests say it is ;P

[DrDingo]

"Shit! People are losing faith in our religion! What do we do?"

"That's easy. If anything good happens that you can't explain, call it an act of God. That'll keep the gullible people in their place"

[Nova]

That the yellowstone still doesnt errupt.

[Käpt'n]

5 minutes ago, Nova said:

That the yellowstone still doesnt errupt.

Nature is waiting for Trump to become president. It's the only fitting punishment.

[willow]

 

 

[Vallium]

That these damn websites still havent been put out of their misery

[Vallium]

"But if healing someone from a brain tumor is a miracle, what about everyone who survived because they got a successful operation? Are those miracles? Should all those surgeons be canonised as well?"

 

In my opinion, yeah. Brain tumors are serious matters. Doctors arent quite hailed individually like Mother Theresa but each one had been given the time to spend years to gain the knowlege to perform these miracles, an amazing feat of itself

Doctors dont need praise (neither did Mother Theresa for that matter) Mother Theresa was just a charitable woman who put herself out there to helpothers, much like any doctor. She just happens to be normal person hailed by the catholic community as if a goddess herself, her fame is quite inflated.

And you know? People do die everyday, so any one person near and dear to someone that survives may feel like a miracle, something that shouldnt have happened.

Im not quite sure I get how its offensive to those who have died or something...let people enjoy the good things that happen in life as they see fit

[Derin Darkpaw]

Mother Teresa isn't all she was cracked up to be.  She raised a large amount of money by claiming to help the poor, but very little of it actually went to help those in poverty.  She openly stated that she thought suffering was a gift from god.  Her Home for the Dying, ostensibly a free hospice for poor people, was really just that a place for people to die in.  The medical care they received was haphazard at best and possibly led to a large number of secondary infections.  Most of which would have been understandable, even if not forgivable, if she hadn't raised such huge amounts of money. 

More often her so called charitable works were just disguised attempts at conversion.  Her sisters were instructed to baptise people in secret and without their consent.  Her many supposed houses for the poor did not actually house any poor people.

This quote from Christopher Hitchens essay The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice is particularly relevant

"This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

Her canonisation as a saint is a political one rather then a spiritual one.  The Catholic church just desperately wants to seem more progressive and compassionate, but very rarely will it actually take any steps to be more of either of those things.  Mother Teresa as a saint and the most recent Pope are the poster child of the Catholic church simply trying to put on the appearance of change without any true progress being made.

As for what defines a miracle in regards to the Catholic church its really just whatever bullshit story they want to use as an excuse to make some popular religious figure a saint.

[Xaende]

A miracle is a synchronicity in the grand scheme of things. Be thankful when they happen. I'd say that it's miraculous for one person to survive a plane crash that killed dozens. Life can be brutal... but sometimes God, fate, the universe, whatever you want to call it, makes exceptions. The aircraft may have been traveling at a particular velocity and struck the ground in such a way that the impact and debris did not kill the survivor, and the individual may have required a team of surgeons to survive the first few days, but that doesn't make their survival any less miraculous as far as I'm concerned.

[Astus]

A miracle is something we define to usually be something good that happens when the odds are stacked in the other direction. People tend to stick their religion on places that makes them feel like it's all valid so they can make themselves feel safe in a constantly changing world.

[Endless/Nameless]

I believe in these things called "miracles".

And, if I might ask, where perchance doth thou hail from, ye senual being?

[Strongbob]

A miracle in laymen's terms is defined as "an explanation for unlikely events for those who have a poor understanding of probability."

[Endless/Nameless]

I should say, I do actually believe in miracles. But not all "miracles" are necessarily miraculous in nature. Sometimes things just happen to turn out well. But then we get into the whole matter of "are coincidences necessarily just coincidences??" and at that point I think we need to just shut up and accept the gift. 

[Käpt'n]

10 minutes ago, Endless/Nameless said:

"are coincidences necessarily just coincidences??"

Yes, they are. Just because something isn't explainable right away that doesn't mean that some sort of holy intervention took place.
The problem that I see is that believers like to use "miracles" as examples why their religion is true when in truth the whole thing simply boils down to an argumentum ad ignorantiam.

[Endless/Nameless]

1 minute ago, Käpt'n said:

Just because something isn't explainable right away that doesn't mean that some sort of holy intervention took place.

Correct.

But you can't prove it didn't either.

It's a matter of personal conviction.

But all that matters in the end is whether something nice happened.

If it did, neato.

[#00Buck]

Magnets. How do they work? 

[Derin Darkpaw]

9 hours ago, Endless/Nameless said:

But you can't prove it didn't either.

Actually most miracles can be proven(as much as anything can be proven if you want to go super into the philosophy of epistemology and the problem of skepticism) to coincide with any number of much more reasonable and physically plausible explanations.  For example the curing of tumors in the case with Mother Teresa is more easily explained by the fact that sometimes cancer just goes into remission.  Other possible explanations could be that the cancer was a misdiagnoses that wasn't caught until after the supposed miracle, or if the patient was  receiving medical attention at the time it could simply be a result of that.  There is no reason to assume the existence of any divine intervention or supernatural force when there are any number of perfectly reasonable and physically possible explanations.

Times like this are where Occam's razor is very important.  Occam's razor is a scientific/philosophical principle which states that one should never make more assumptions than the minimum necessary to explain something.

[Endless/Nameless]

Just now, Derin Darkpaw said:

Actually most miracles can be proven(as much as anything can be proven if you want to go super into the philosophy of epistemology and the problem of skepticism) to coincide with any number of much more reasonable and physically plausible explanations.  For example the curing of tumors in the case with Mother Teresa is more easily explained by the fact that sometimes cancer just goes into remission.  Other possible explanations could be that the cancer was a misdiagnoses that wasn't caught until after the supposed miracle, or if the patient was  receiving medical attention at the time it could simply be a result of that.  There is no reason to assume the existence of any divine intervention or supernatural force when there are any number of perfectly reasonable and physically possible explanations.

Times like this are where Occam's razor is very important.  Occam's razor is a scientific/philosophical principle which states that one should never make more assumptions than the minimum necessary to explain something.

I totally agree. My statement was referring to the fact that people's beliefs in relation to the cause of circumstantial events cannot be scientifically disproven, due to the nature of the thing. Not the how, but the why. Of course that has little scientific importance, but it is a fact nonetheless.

Occam's razor, my favorite scientific doodad

[FlynnCoyote]

Teresa was a wolf in sheep's clothing in the truest sense of the phrase. This move by the Vatican is a joke. Much like almost everything they do.

[#00Buck]

Making evidence of decades of child abuse disappear is the real Catholic miracle.