OUG....its we that have reached you, not the other way around.

Kat

All this debate....OUG....its Friday or Saturday depending...please take some time off.

A song just for you....enjoy...and all the best.

http://tinyurl.com/kk8sa6m

It will be all here tomorrow.

Ka

Dan S de Merengue,

>> My common sense tells me that reptiles don't magically turn into birds. <<

I agree and I am sure so do all scientists: The word “magic” does not appear in any scientific explanation of anything. Neither does it appear in the vocabulary of a believer, e.g. Christian - scientist or not - who gives reasons for his beliefs and their eventual compatibility with evolution, gravitation, quantum physics, multiverse or what you have, theories.

Science tries to explain how the physical reality WORKS, not WHY it works like that (including us, humans, as embedded in that reality). The WHY is a question religion - from its most primitive, naive up to the most philosophically sophisticated, forms - tries to answer. There are people, among believers as well as unbelievers, who confuse these two levels - physical and metaphysical - of understanding and/or deny the one or the other its epistemological legitimacy.

>> Why are so many here (such as the author of the article, Matthew and others) wanting to define 'religion' when we don't want to give the religious any special privileges? <<

Because we have to know WHAT we do, or do not, want to give special privileges to.

>> It's said that he who makes the definitions controls the debate. <<

No, he who provides a definition of a term he wants to argue about tries to make it clear what it is that his views are referring to.

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Dear George,

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You wrote :

« Do you mean to say that a “miraculous healing” should be carefully planned beforehand? »

In my experience, anybody diagnosed with a serious illness consults more than one doctor or specialist. He usually consults his general practitioner (GP) or family doctor first, who, if the matter is particularly serious, refers him to a specialist in the domain concerned.

If the specialist diagnoses an incurable illness it is common practice for him to refer the patient to a clinical professor of medicine or hospital professor who may or may not confirm the diagnosis.

Most people leave it at that, accept their fate and follow whatever medical treatment the professor prescribes. Others, if they have the will and the financial resources, fight for their lives. They do not content themselves with this or that professor, they travel to whatever country they have to (often the USA) in order to consult whoever is reputed to be the best specialists in the world for whatever illness has been diagnosed.

If that fails, they may turn to what is known as “alternative medicine” :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_alternative_medicine

Others, in their desperation, consult various occult heelers who claim to have supernatural powers. Here is a list of occultists :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_occultists

As a last resort, 6 million every year (mostly French and Italian), make the pilgrimage to Lourdes.

Who could doubt that those who make such a tremendous effort, after having tried everything else, with further suffering and death as their only perspective, do not place all their hope and faith in a miraculous cure ?

Can it be said that they are carefully planning a “miraculous healing” beforehand ? Of course they do. They plan it and prepare for it mentally, psychologically and spiritually with all their might. They know that it is their only hope? Their last chance.

Does it work ? Usually not.

Is it reasonable to let them think that it might ? Perhaps the privileged few who benefited from miraculous healings would have done so without going to Lourdes. I guess we'll never know.

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Dear Banjo,

I was wondering (sorry for the sarcasm) if you meant that the miraculous healing was planned by the Vatican who should then have made sure that the original diagnosis was confirmed by “qualified, independent experts, prior to the healing”. This is different from the affected person HOPING for a miracle, although I do not think that even he/she finds it a priority to get all the proper documentation so that in case a miracle happens Vatican will have reasons to recognise it as such.

Otherwise, what you wrote is how I see it. You mention 6 million pilgrims per year hoping for a miracle (though I am sure there are many healthy, just pious, people among them as well as just curious ones). I do not know how many people buy a Tattslotto ticket every week hoping for a major win, but the two motivations are probably related. Of course, mathematical statistics can give you the odds of becoming a winner, unlike in the Lourdes case.

>>Does it work ? Usually not.<<

Again, the number of those who did not get what they hoped for, can be exactly evaluated in the case of Tattslotto, not in the case of Lourdes since you have not only those 79 whose healing was officially recognised as being beyond medical explanation, but also those who wanted to have their miraculous healing recognised but failed (7000-79|, those who also felt they were healed but did not bother to have it officially recognised, those who felt their healing was only on the spiritual level, those who were disappointed with not having experienced a miracle but did not talk about it, and finally the disappointed ones who sought satisfaction in telling unbelievers about their disappointment.

One can only speculate about their relative numbers, however if the last group is by far the most significant, why would so many people keep on coming every year? Again, you can ask the same question about Tattslotto.

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Dear George,

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I agree

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Dear One Under God,

.
…
The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
…

Where is there an end to it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable -
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.
...

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant -
Among other things - or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.

…

(from : T.S.Eliot – “The Dry Savages”)

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