That wear at the Faith I once had. This man's deeds do Not deserve reward.

That's the correct headline.

Taut enough?

Or do you disagree?

Oh, and your word play.

Interceded from BEYOND THE GRAVE to perform miraculous cures of two sick people?

Perhaps if you DID YOUR RESEARCH you'd learn.

Wow. It's worse than pulling teeth.

Do you believe there is a scientific explanation?

"allegedly cured after her family prayed"

"The Catholic Church launched an investigation"

"Doctors testified"

Insiders, allegedly, Church investigation, anonymous doctors...

Wow! the evidence is indisputable.

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I see none here, only second hand and unnamed sources.
I would be curious what an unbiased investigator would find, but I have neither the time nor resources to go to Costa Rica to find out.


You seek miracles to confirm your beliefs, I see a Church grasping at straws to beautify a popular figure.

Does the Church making Saints of people who never actually existed make you pause at all in your acceptance of such matters?

There are two claims here.

One, the Catholic Church sees the cure as divine intervention. That , of course, is not susceptible to what you consider proof.

Two, the claim is that it's the result of something natural, despite the lack of any evidence of that. That burden remains to be explained naturally. ("Yet" is not adequate proof.)

If you are really interested in what the medical evidence is on these two instances, I invite you to look into it. Whether you think it's a miracle or not, it's a quite interesting phenomenon.

And you have it wrong. I neither see nor need miracles to have belief. I do hold, however, that a miracle is perfectly plausible if one also believes in a supernatural creator.

And, no, St. Christopher never bothered me. Saints were proclaimed by acclamation and legends sprung up all the time about apparently holy people. What interests me about this snarky OP is that the modern process of investigating claims of supernatural events have been subject to scientific investigation but many remain unexplained.

and the Lady of Guadalupe hoax.

Now, kindly answer my question.

TIA.

How about those bleeding madonnas?

and i find the other stuff mildly amusing, like calling my characterization of the clownish canonization of jp-2 "clownish".

The name is the thing.

I would like to see more specific medical information.

As to my actual post, "this one" refers to yourself.

Stay classy, RCC. How about you just take care of your problems from within?

He was loved (for some reason that escapes me). The last Pope was a prick. There are all kinds of scandals still popping up.

No, I'm sure it's not PR.

Wow. Now that is a miracle.

Sister Marie Simon-Pierre.

For one so quick to snark with a clownish headline, one would think you at least know what you're snarking about.

That is #2.

Parkinson's is #1.

Just stop before you hurt yourself.

Why did this god of yours, this god who interceded to perform this miraculous cure for which there is no other possible explanation other than your god did it, not cure the many other devout believers horribly suffering from disease? Did they not pray well?

Let's look at some evidence.

The woman had Parkinson's for five years. She doesn't have it now. The case was studied by physicians who found no medical evidence for this phenomenon.

So, you can either trot out your "anti-God talking point #7", which you did, or explain it or debunk it. Frankly your second choice would have been a lot more interesting.

Do you believe that prayer to saints for healing etc. has any effect and if so what are those effects? Why is the intersession of saints even considered acceptable or necessary? This is a practice of Catholic and Orthodox churches that I am really unclear on and find hard to accept. Not being confrontational or critical it's just not part of the tradition of faith I was brought up in and taught.

I do think that a God who created the universe in the first place could likewise cause a miracle. Whether it happens is questionable and whether it's attributable to a particular saint is more questionable. But I don't exclude the possibility. The Catholic Church has many pious traditions but, since I'm not a pious person, they don't appeal to me.

What I do find interesting is how many of these phenemona, characterized as miracles, are carefully examined but still baffle scientific explanation. To simply say we haven't figured it out yet is, to me, as lazy as saying God or a saint did it..

Good for you. By the way the only definitive diagnosis of Parkinson's is via autopsy. Not that it matters. Explanation unknown = god did it is not a valid argument. As to god causing miracles, your "Ho hum" response to the obvious issues that belief raises is not exactly persuasive either. I prefer the ancient Greek theological explanation, the gods are frequently meddlesome spiteful tyrants. At least it fits the data.

There is a difference between intelligent discussion and sniffing each other's bullshit.

But I digress.

Where is your proof that:
a) a miracle happened,
b) this miracle was performed via the intercession of a dead person.

will it be rescinded as a performed miracle?

But I note the faith you possess by saying "inevitably".

There is no scientific explanation now nor is there a reason to consider that one is inevitable.

And they're saying it with a straight face, too.

Science can't explain it, ergo GOD!

Cured without explanation.

Feel free to try.

...trying to explain how the patient was cured would be an exercise in futility.

If you're referring to the NYT link, that's from 2007.

...many of which overlap with myriad other conditions. Between 8-35% of all such initial diagnoses may be erroneous, including those made by neurologists. At least one of the physicians involved with the patient's case believes she was misdiagnosed.

Verifying the condition would require an extensive investigation and corroboration by neurologists. With the reports I have read--a BBC article from 2011, and a Los Angeles Times article from 2010--I can't determine whether or not the patient was seen or evaluated by a neurologist herself.

Again, what's more likely: a pope cured this woman from beyond the grave, or her doctors made a (relatively common) mistake?

The reports by the examining physicians are what govern.

Your question is meaningless without the reports. Facts trump internet speculation.

So one explanation for remission is "god did it", without of course any actual data to substantiate that claim, another explanation is: not Parkinson's. The latter explanation fits the known data without introducing any extraordinary claims at all.

Patients are being treated for Parkinson's, ergo they have Parkinson's? Did you go to Upstairs Hollywood Medical School?

The fact is, treatment is dictated by diagnosis.

A diagnosis is not ipso faco proof of a patient's condition. It is an opinion reached by careful evaluation of symptoms and test results. As the only definitive test for Parkinson's involves taking tissue from the midbrain post mortem, any standing diagnosis for still-living patients is at best a very educated guess, based entirely on the physician's inability to exclude Parkinson's as a possible explanation.

As you are fond of saying, the fact is: some people being treated for Parkinson's disease may not have Parkinson's disease at all.

I suppose physicians are just blindly treating Parkinson's hoping that when their patients die the autopsies will show their diagnoses were correct.

Parkinson's is diagnosed via differential diagnosis. To dumb it down: the fucking process of elimination.

As Parkinsonian symptoms exist across myriad other conditions, it is incumbent upon the specialist to rule these other conditions out. Presently, the only way to do this with absolute certainty is to wait for the patient to die, and then test midbrain tissues for the presence of abnormal protein aggregates called Lewy bodies. As this is impractical for the purposes of treatment, specialists will treat for Parksinon's while periodically reviewing the diagnosis as the disease progresses. Because Parkinson's is degenerative, it develops over time. Patients with advanced cases are, therefore, the most easily--and accurately--diagnosed.

I should add here your miracle nun was diagnosed at the age of forty, which is well below the average age of onset for most Parkinson's patients.

And because you seem to think I'm making this shit up, here's some peer-reviewed scientastic goodness for you, as you obviously lack a subscription to PubMed.

You are conflating your antipathy towards religion with your ignorance of medicine.

My hat is off to you rug. Your willingness to keep on fighting even after all your limbs have been hacked off rises to pythonesque levels rarely seen here.

30 minutes later. Or Skype immediately. It's always something you can't put your finger on or something someone can argue with by saying, "You're not giving proof it didn't happen." It's the old 'prove a negative' ploy. It seems it's demons, internal disease, being cripple etc., always internal problems or something that can be faked easily, with the direct intervention of God through some earthly being who speaks directly to God. Why is it that a person must make a 'public display' of such an intimate thing as curing a disease through God. I think it's the result of desiring narcissistic attention with the deception of not wanting to seem narcissistic. It's a conundrum for folks who want to appear holy or somehow above the average person.

The last thing a humble person would do would be to 'publicize' the fact that they know God personally enough to get him or her to perform personal miracles. That is not humility and humility is exactly what Jesus' teachings advise.

Why do octopi regenerate appendages?



But, returning to the event at hand, there are medical tests revealing both the presence of Parkinson's and then its absence. I grant you these results are not as dramatic as sprouting an arm.

Must be like the when Jesus was tested by Satan. When he asked Jesus to throw himself off a cliff and save himself to prove he was Divine.

There are many like that.

My favorite is: Why did God reveal himself in such a murky, ambiguous and contradictory way?

I don't have an answer. But for, me, it's not a deal breaker question, just a damn good question.

interesting ideas and things to ponder. It's nice to exercise the brain as opposed to use it as a nothing but a place holder for some one else to fill with their preconceived notions. My perception is that no one can ever know the mind of God any more than one can know the exact feelings of anyone else and that there really is no answer. Or, could it be the universal mind idea that U.S. Anderson postulated in his book that we are all God so therefore God's mind is our mind. When we try to conceive of something greater than ourselves the understanding becomes great. It's like trying to understand the reasoning behind a distant planet.

who hears and can answer their prayers to restore their amputated limbs.

iron chariots, which might be interpreted nowadays as modern technology, especially cameras.

is simply a fallacious Argument from Ignorance. In other words, no evidence of anything except what the right people in the RCC have decided they want to be true.

Science can't explain it! Therefore MIRACLE! Didn't you hear?

I don't know how they take themselves seriously.

I was glad to hear it. He was a very good man.

People at DU would have NO PROBLEM calling him a conservative prick for his policies and stances.

But, hey, he was the leader of the RCC so I guess all the shitty things he did makes him a great man.

Fraud/scam about beyond the grave miracles performed by the man shouldn't be required for recognition, and is an abuse of that person's memory in order to further a mythology. It's a despicable practice.

who was Pope when it was revealed that the Church had spent decades hiding and protecting child rapists?

Was that a Saint?


Who was it that opposed the use of condoms, condemning people to AIDS?

A Saint?

A saint alright.

Argument from ignorance and "god of the gaps" are not explanations of anything. Why on earth are these people, who apparently hear voices in their heads, not considered anything but insane?

Spontaneous remissions occur in every single disease on the face of the earth. In addition, Occam's Razor applies. The most simple explanation is that the disease went into remission.