>>42479196
Our Lady of Zeitoun: atop a Coptic Church in Egypt images of Mary appeared repeatedly as verified by many tens of thousands of eyewitnesses and some kind of sketchy photos. https://benthams.substack.com/p/investigating-christianity-part-3?utm_source=publication-search

Barbara Snyder: she had debilitating MS only to be cured completely of all her symptoms after people prayed for her. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-miraculous-healing-of-barbara?utm_source=publication-search

I thought these pretty decisively ruled out atheism. As Ethan put it, “leg, no leg, leg you’re done!” https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YKE1opUBfCk The evidence seemed very good and the naturalistic explanations just seemed goofy. For example, the way skeptics tried to explain away the fact that everyone in Italy agreed that Joseph flew around all the time, and would describe it in fine detail, was by saying that he might have jumped.

On its face, it’s just such a ridiculous explanation. Can you imagine you and all your friends thinking that a guy flew 100 feet into the air because he jumped? Do you think people in Italy are total idiots?

But I’m now a lot less sure that miracles are an S-tier argument that rules out atheism. I no longer think it’s as simple as “leg, no leg, leg you’re done!” Here’s why.

>>42479203
The big thing I’ve come to appreciate is that the goofy-sounding explanations often are true. For example, a bunch of people in Iran saw the face of Khomeini in the moon. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fatima They even claimed that it was extremely clearly emblazoned on the face of the moon, so that only “miscreants and bastards would fail to see.” This is a surprising fact about human psychology! I am surprised that people can think the moon looks like Khomeini’s face.

Now, maybe I’m just a miscreant and a bastard, but they don’t look similar at all. Obviously there was no miracle here. Something very bizarre happened that seemed to require widespread truly stupendous error. If people can falsely see Khomeini in the moon, maybe they can falsely see a man fly.

Similarly, there are reports of witches stealing people’s penises https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness?utm_source=publication-search across cultures, of whole cultures thinking they’re seeing a spirit in real time, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/03/the-religious-implications-of-everett.html and of people seeing fairies in groups. https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/2023/08/20/from-malekin-to-modern-times-multiple-witness-sightings-of-faeries/ So long as we think those aren’t veridical, we must think that people have almost limitless ability to report seeing bizarre things that aren’t present in reality. The condescending, skeptical “maybe the people thought the witches stole their penis because its size changed a bit, so they thought it was missing,” just turns out to be true. The explanation “maybe the people misremembered seeing groups of fairies” also is true.

>>42479210
Or take Fatima as another example. Now that https://benthams.substack.com/p/a-clash-of-titans-the-ethan-muse?utm_source=publication-search whole books https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more worth of https://benthams.substack.com/p/are-the-fatima-children-unprecedented material have https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fatima been written https://substack.com/@splendoroftruth/p-191499192?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 about Fatima, I’m pretty confident that it wasn’t a miracle. But at the beginning, it seemed extremely compelling. Whole groups of people looked at the sun, found it not painful to gaze at, saw it move down to Earth, and saw it change colors. That doesn’t sound like normal sungazing effects. And yet it was.

Scott Alexander has an old post calling Mormonism the control group for Christianity. Indeed, Mormonism is a nice control group because it’s so obviously false. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3aov_G9G_Y The Mormon story is that God took Joseph Smith as his messenger—a demonstrable liar https://mrm.org/sharing-with-mormons-joseph-smith-lie and con artist who demonstrably fabricated textual translations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Abraham to translate texts delivering revelations of a giant ancient society in the Americas that we have no archeological, genetic, or written evidence of, which suspiciously matched up with racist folklore at the time. Oh, and part of this revelation was also that you would go to hell unless you let Joseph Smith marry your fourteen-year-old daughter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Mar_Kimball and that Joseph Smith was permitted to have a bunch of wives, including other people’s wives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Joseph_Smith%27s_wives

>>42479213
Color me skeptical that this is really from God. And yet the Mormon witnesses didn’t recant multiple people said they’d heard a voice from God declaring that the translation of the golden plates was correct. Similarly, eight people said they’d seen the golden plates, even though some went on to say they’d only seen them with their spiritual eyes.

Miracles are one in a million events. In a world of 8 billion people, events that happen every million days will happen 8,000 times per day. It’s not that surprising, then, that many of these things are weird. The miracles you hear about are one in a million events. And given the incredible power of suggestion, plus the confounding effects of memory, it’s not that surprising that we have a number of crazy reports.

Now, to be sure, I think theism has a somewhat easier time accommodating miracle reports than atheism. The Calanda one, for example, seems like a problem for atheists. Obviously he had a leg during the years-long trial about his leg regrowth. So the atheist must think Pellicer carried out some bizarre conspiracy, managing to get huge numbers of people in town to remember seeing him without a leg, left behind no contrary testimony, applied for a beggar’s license twice (even though if you applied fraudulently at the time they’d kill you), and managed to get a number of doctors to falsely remember having performed the surgery.

Yes, weird things happen, but that one really beggars belief (pun intended). A number of the healing miracles, in particular, seem very hard to explain away. And I’m also more philosophically open to these kinds of miracles, because they seem to fit much better with what I’d expect God to do (where I’d be very surprised if he did a big miracle to confirm Catholicism, because I think Catholicism is false).

>>42479217
A while ago I saw a cloud that looked like a shrimp appear over a Church while I was thinking about how one should prioritize between venerating God and helping other people. I texted some friends about it (obviously I don’t think it was a miracle).

Then, a few months later, I looked back over my texts to them and realized that I had jumbled a lot of important details of the event.

Memory is highly fallible. It’s really easy to misremember how you learned some information, and to think you witnessed an event when really you just heard about it. It’s hard to place that much stock in later testimonies of miracles. There might be a kernel of truth to them, but they’re just too divorced from the core events to be trustworthy.

I also have a philosophical objection to these miracles. Put aside the weirdness of God occasionally but very rarely intervening in the natural order to stop disease. Nearly all of the effects of a miracle—like nearly all the effects of any action—is on their changing the identity of future people. If you drive to the store, you delay the people behind you. If this changes when they have sex by even a second, it completely changes the identity of their future child. That child will go on to take many acts that change the identities of still more future children.

Thus, it is plausible that every single person in the world wouldn’t have existed absent the apparent miracles. Random obscure events that occurred in 1000 BC are causally responsible for Hitler, Mother Teresa, and everyone else in the world existing, instead of some other people. Almost none of the impact of Fatima was about its impact on the people in the world at that time.

>>42479196
Miracles are probably are real

David Hume is still a faggot

>>42479239
fuck me

Miracles probably are real*

>>42479224
For this reason, the optimal miracles are likely to be strange and specific, rather than within the Overton window of society. It would be surprising if the miracle that led to the best mix of future people—maximizing the future Mother Teresas and minimizing the future Hitlers—was a healing miracle, or a sun miracle, or anything else that anyone in society would have been inclined to expect. If an omniscient being performs miracles, then, we shouldn’t expect them to be anything like what anyone would expect, or to have consistent effects across the people who witness the miracle.

Now, you can hold that the miracles are done by beings other than God who aren’t omniscient, like angels. This is probably my leading story of how miracles happen. But still, it’s an odd kind of epicycle. It also limits the theological significance of miracles, if they are not from God.

Learning about apparent miracles that aren’t veridical has also made me a lot more skeptical about the resurrection argument for Christianity. Sure, non-Christians will have to think something slightly weird happened, where people thought they’d seen Jesus. But if people can think they heard God declaring the golden plates genuine, that they saw fairies in groups, and that they saw Mary in real time, it’s not very surprising that they can think they saw Jesus posthumously.

Now, to be clear, I don’t generally think Hume’s arguments were very good. But I’ve come away from this process of investigating miracles a lot more skeptical of arguments from miracles. I’m already a theist, and I think it’s plausible that some of them happen, but I no longer think that naturalism is definitively empirically falsified by the well-documented miracle record. I’m more sympathetic to handwavy, credulous, “IDK man, the world is weird,” type explanations of apparently miraculous phenomena.

my balls are miraculous but yiu dont see me starting a religion around them

>>42479196
miracle just means something good that is currently unexplainable and it is absurd to claim that has never happened

>>42479244
>>42479239
I drank Lourdes water from an official Catholic source and literally poured it in my eyes and got zero benefit. I am actually a good person and I was open minded at the time

Prior probabilities

>>42479260
>An event or effect contrary to the established constitution and course of things, or a deviation from the known laws of nature; a supernatural event, or one transcending the ordinary laws by which the universe is governed.

>>42479261
>I was open minded at the time
Did you fully believe and was a practicing Catholic?

>>42479275
You know people have different definitions for the same word?

>>42479278
No but I had recently gone to confession

>>42479275
>or a deviation from the known laws of nature
do you speak english?

>>42479288
lol what
Bernadette herself stated, "We must have faith, we must pray: this water will have no virtue without faith!"

You expect to much; also YOU not experiencing Miracles ≠ Miracles don't exist

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676 KB PNG

>>42479196
Miracles literally exist and David Hume was a gay fat masonic retard

>>42466104

>>42479196
>I owe David Hume an apology
You know Humes empiricism is self self defeating

>>42479310
If I don’t personally witness miracles, all the reports of documented miracles suck and my prior probabilities >>42479224
>>42479247 say miracles probably don’t exist then I must conclude miracles probably do not exist. Get better at epistemology

according to Catholics non Catholics have already witnessed catholic miracles so there’s no reason I could not have

>>42479337
>according to Catholics non Catholics have already witnessed catholic miracles so there’s no reason I could not have
Maybe because miracles are rare?? have you ever thought about that

>Get better at epistemology
>Takes David Hume seriously

>>42479369
>>42479247
>Now, to be clear, I don’t generally think Hume’s arguments were very good.

>>42479378
I don’t generally think Your reasoning against miracles were very good.

>I haven't experienced a extremely rare event them hence they probably don't exist
We are heading to big boy territory now

>>42479394
An* and remove the them

mb I'm on phone

>>42479394
That’s a straw man >>42479337

>>42479416
No its not lol
this is a fallacy fallacy though

>>42479427
>>42479427
The Healing of a Muslim Woman at Lourdes

>Among the 70 officially recognized miraculous healings at Lourdes, and the thousands of unconfirmed ones, are testimonies from non-Catholics. For instance, the Church has documented cases of Muslim pilgrims from North Africa visiting Lourdes out of respect for Mary (who is highly revered in Islam) and experiencing profound physical healings.

Islam is obviously and provably false. It is full of evil rules and blatant contradictions. If Muslims can be healed miraculously then so can atheists especially virtuous agnostics
>>42479427
It absolutely is a straw man. The reason I think miracles probably don’t exist is not merely that I user Lourdes water and have still never personally witnessed a miracle that is merely one piece of evidence against miracles. >>42479337
The other evidence I gave is that the documented miracles of other people suck. Witches do not steal penises and Mormonism is clearly false along with its miracle claims.
Plenty of innocent people have been wrongly convicted based on the testimony of people who misremembered or misinterpreted something they saw

You will appear to be making a pencil levitate but they will just see you as a schizophrenic and you will be hospitalized

>Consider what you're fighting here: the temporal pressure of the entire multiverse. The same thing pushing you forward into the future your entire life - and an overwhelming number of worldlines where if you know on that level and you're all alone. The natural result is dropping into a secondary worldline wherein you were a solo wizard - right up to the point where you show someone and the pressure driving their reality pushes you into full blown schizophrenia to stop it from working again. This is the main point I was trying to get across with the pencil example and with the warnings about not sharing and about how possibilities change in each moment: we coexist in a shared reality and everyone gets 1 vote. If EVERYONE knows they can levitate a piece of paper then it will work for everyone, and it will be as mundane to everyone as blowing a piece of paper across a desk. If only you and maybe a handful of others know it, then sure, you can levitate a paper all you want in private, and the knowledge will rip your mind apart because it desyncs with the perceptions of everyone else.

>It's the same sort of thing: it's literally the physical morphology of the brain which directs your consciousness across worldlines - ALL possibilities exist, there is a certain amount of play in what can be accepted from a moment - this is why things like being a solo wizard levitating shit on a table can drive you actually insane: because that chain of thoughts - of showing people and laughing maniacally as you make a fucking pencil float a foot off a table is going to mesh with the rest of reality MUCH more frequently where you're literally just a crazy person seeing shit (probably shortly before being institutionalized) than it is in that 0.00000000000000000000000000000001% chance of worldlines in which you exist wherein it happened.

>>42479546
>Reality isn't real and consciousness is all that exists.
Physics/reality are an interface for consciousnesses to communicate with one another.
You can see this testing conspiracy theory tech in private: it will work a bunch of the time, pretty much any time you believe it.
If you get overly excited and show it to a physics PhD it will fall apart.
If you show it non-physics-educated people, then stoner nerds, then nerds obsessed with physics but not formally educated, then those formally educated in physics but not working professionally in it, THEN a physics PhD, the effect will hold, but typically the physics PhD will obsess over it for a month or three then move on to something else because they never actually had a mind for physics to begin with (that's more or less what academia selects for these days.)
Controlling reality in private is easy, pushing those effects to a wider audience is harder because reality is an interface to communicate, not a real thing. All parties involved need to be able to not necessarily make sense of or comprehend it, but for it to mesh with their own worldview/reality.
A good example is relativity vs quantum mechanics - both are "real," both work, both have predictive capacity, and both are completely irreconcilable with one another - essentially two distinct rulesets for reality which were widely held by everyone who cared to look and accepted as truth by everyone else until they became real.
Electrodynamics and aether theory imo pose the greatest potential currently to merge+expand on "physics," just keep in mind it's all a bunch of bs and try not to paint yourself (and everyone else) into a corner like they did with QM and GR by failing to understand that

>>42479487
Dham man take a chill pill dot have to tag me 3 times lol

>It absolutely is a straw man. The reason I think miracles probably don’t exist is not merely that I user Lourdes water and have still never personally witnessed a miracle that is merely one piece of evidence against miracles.
No lol

>according to Catholics non Catholics have already witnessed catholic miracles so there’s no reason I could not have
maybe because miracles are rare, dumbass

>>42479577
don't*

>>42479196
If none of these miracles involve my ex contacting me about getting back together I'm not interested.

>>42479196
Reality alone is miraculous. Stop searching for something that is right in front of you.

:)

>>42480193
this
>>42479597
^

>>42479552
I love most of this. However, both " relativity vs quantum mechanics" as you mentioned are two inaccurate conclusions based on incorrect interpretations of data, and this can be seen to be true in the way neither fits the reality of our situation.
This is more than what you're hinting at in the first portion of your post. It's materialists being all-too materialistic in trying to make the world into something it's not.
It's more than mere reality bending. These are evil or ignorant actions taken by those who wish to deceive more than to enlighten or seek truth.
Still, you put that so well I'm going to save it and re-read your post again in the future.
This is something rare to see, and I'm glad someone else gets it.
Thanks. Not Anon you replied to. Also, considering a united medium explains so much, referring to Aether-Theory, but by any other name, the medium such theories describe is more important than the name they go by.
Thanks again.

>>42479196
also,

“Miracles are probably not real”

HAAAAA

ever heard of the Gospel?

>>42480193
It definitely speaks of something higher, and eternal.
We are mere imprints of the higher logos.

>>42479487
>>42479224
>>42479217
>>42479213
desu, isn't using mormonism as something that has to be exactly always wrong and lack some level of power wrong?.

anti-miracles from satan could be a thing, or maybe god was planning some sort of test that mormonism failed at , or maybe the miracles were something that god did to redirect mormonism to something palpetable for him.

>>42481080
and about the memmory stuff, I think the argument is one you should always argue with yourself , but it can very much be sticky and circular.

it could even get to the point that someone could make the miracle real on demand for a period of 20 years , and you might still argue it has to be a trick.

because for most skeptics is a mistery with no solution, because when you eliminate the imposible you are left with the improbable.

and we don't have the source code for the human brain, it will always bow against the laws of physics , chemestry , etc........
for that reason, at least if people asume the laws are being broken.

>>42481088
a sorry for using agresive language OP, I am still on my retard mode for a recent dabte.

>>42479203
Atheism is simultaneously babby tier and also higher in station than 99% of religion for a reason.

>>42479196
David hume was insane and a reality denial ad lol w Intel morninggaytheist ad jewa satanic faggots need the be killed no dumbass David d hume budget sm and higoim.and he debunks the catholcism has the miracles you are liara David has me in hell a retard a reality dbrr ad nutcase fake moon rocks earth is not a ball in motions n jews and their freemasonry go to hell zeitoun warraq assirut tens of thousands inbred satanc c demon n possessed teats Fatima our lady in Columbia rock miracle and Guadalupe this is coming from the same retarded inbred non human not sane needing to be killed manichean heretical shit

>>42479213
Zeitoun warraq assirut and Columbia our lady right ck appairuin with glass created in the ock painting and trn Guadalupe David Hume was an inbred subterfuge lying faggot ball earth and heliocentrism is anti science anti logic anti sense Ani treason Polaris moves half pipes aka conve vectors you are not one you satanc reality denying demon damning souls in a gonna be container you did not buiildng

Stars already fell out of the firmament on Marx pike and their Jewish lying skulls

>>42479196
Wrong Satan miracles tens of millions before crhrist and Zoroaster was a catholic priest defrocked three wisemen fact zoiasterr the latin vulgate and was reading all 73 books of the latin vulgateand heretic history denying scum ad all came to pass denying history and the truck Jan etruscans an Atlantis catholicism their priesthood miracles daagd have John loftus draelis inbred are not people Shlomo sand debunrs Judaism Jews af their lrs Zionist and illuminisst can ap are not ratiinap

>>42479196
Miracles are real sll earth s not real video games and this flat open world of maps d bubk eidwine ad Newtom Tesla Marconi hertz votaerdt mach

>>42479196
These are satanc debunked seminar botnhim ad. H satanic deluded realty denying cock sucking

I go by the credo "be worthy of a miracle".
I'm not there yet, but one day I hope to be.

>>42479196
Fuck, I wish I could regrow my foreskin

>>42479196
Miracles are very real, if you can't see them or preform them then you can't picture an apple inside of your head (soul).

>>42483332
I think $10,000,000 could double the chances of foreskin regeneration happening soon, or perhaps bring it forward by 10 or 20 years in expectation, and I know people who are actively seeking funding to make this happen. Once the procedure is available this can be self-funding - an estimate based on Aella's research https://www.hegemonmedia.com/p/survey-data-shows-the-foreskin-regeneration gives a $200+ billion market for foreskin regeneration, another indication of value - and as a cultural phenomenon this could lead to much lower circumcision rates or even speed the banning of it in developed countries.

>>42479196
Immediately disregarding the fact that millions of people claim to encounter miracles or supernatural events is peak brainlet. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

>>42483396
Like aphantasia?

There are different types of miracles, and classifying them can be tricky. I prefer to think about it in terms of the locus of relation. A miracle can come from within an individual, within a collective, or within an environment. Objectivism has led us to only consider environmental loci as nontrivial, but this is a mistake. The human capacity to coordinate on a subconscious seemingly telepathic level has not been explained, it's simply disregarded by objectivism as currently being beyond reasonable evaluation. The same is true for personal miracles, like suddenly finding the strength/endurance to overcome a seemingly impossible trial.

>>42483466
Millions of schizophrenics also exist

>>42480193
I don’t think it’d be surprising under atheism and naturalism for reality to exist and consist of a bunch of electrons moving in a straight line or something like that. The existence of consciousness however is surprising

>>42480241
It’s not my post it’s by the Quatism.com/theory.htm anon im pretty sure

>>42481458
>>42481468
Based schizo

>>42483585
schizo isn't real, it's just a umbrella diagnosis for people who experience things that are unexplained. It's a atheist worldview problem

>>42481080
Mormonism is unsalvageable complete and absolute garbage.
The Eastern Orthodox agree about miracles because they say it’s hard to know if they’re from God or Satan
>>42481088
But there’s already plenty of people who believe in human historical non miracle events that happened hundreds of years ago so it’s possible for it to be reasonable to believe in events you didn’t personally witnessed but miracles like Fatima are not as good as something like genghis khan capturing a specific city

>>42484048
>Mormonism is unsalvageable complete and absolute garbage.
but that is the exact reason why miracles (or satan sorcery) could happen.
that is what I ment, who would need a miracle more, than a horrible horrible butchery of the religion the miracles come from.
my main argument is that mormonism by the nature of being absolute garbage is a flawed control group , in the same way you would not assume satanists to be a good control group

>>42484048
genglish khan capturing a city isn't inherently that goes against the entire worldview you have.

its just , historical events are analised to never go agaisnt the hard sciences unless they seem close enough , or suported by other hard sciences , that makes sence.

but the problem with miracles is that it is a inherent problem of history against everything else.

it becomes expected to assume any excuse you pull out out of your ass is better, because the alternative is something that you can't consider.

>>42484388
But that sounds non falsifiable

I don’t think that is the point of a control group. Mormonism is about proving that gigantic human error mass delusion and unwavering false testimony can perfectly replicate the evidence of a real miracle even when the miracle does not exist

If a group of people can say until the day they die that they saw golden plates and heard the voice of God for a known con man it proves the human brain has an almost unlimited capacity for lying and tricking yourself

It’s about showing that the human witness way of proving something is deeply broken so the historical reliability of any miracle claim collapses. Humans can so easily fool themselves with a miracle claim they want to believe and want to be true

bump

>>42487039
9