Pope tells of God guiding bullet and saving his life

February 19, 2005

The Pope has for the first time described publicly the moments after he was shot in 1981, saying he was fearful and in pain but had a "strange feeling of confidence" he would live.

He said his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, "understood that above his power ... there is a greater power".

The Associated Press reported that in Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums, the pontiff's soon to be released book, the Pope remembered his rush to hospital but did not recall much after he arrived because "I was almost on the other side".

"Oh, my Lord! This was a difficult experience. I woke up the next day, around noon," the Pope says. The book, his fifth, is essentially a transcript of conversations he had with two friends in 1993, the political philosopher Krzysztof Michalski and the late Reverend Jozef Tishner. It will be published on Wednesday in Italy. An English version is planned.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Pope-tells-of-God-guiding-bullet-and-saving-his-life/2005/02/18/1108709439156.html?oneclick=true

MI6, CIA, Mossad and FSV must be splitting their sides at this story....

Suckers!

I swear this line of thinking just boggles my mind.

All those beautiful children, whether they be hapless victims of a drive-by in the inner city, or victims of our guns and bombs in Iraq and other places around the world. God has better things to do, like saving decrepit old men from bullets (the dozens of body guards surrounding them can't hurt) and making sure some dipshit actress wins an Academy Award. Fuck the millions of human beings who die horrible deaths every day.

I just don't get it. How about God doing a real miracle and stopping the bullet in midair - or preventing the shot entirely? And then all those less-than-worth people who DO get shot - were their guardian angels sleeping? On vacation? What?

I hate angel talk. It's so utterly nonsensical, and even cruel.

If bullets generally stopped in mid-air, so that no-one ever got shot, then

a) such events would not be regarded as miracles, but would be thought of as a normal occurrence,

and

b) we would simply modify what we think are the laws of physics.

However,

c) the physics of a world in which bullets stopped in mid-air would be so drastically different from ours that it's not clear that it could even be coherently formulated in mathematical terms, or that it would be consistent with the development of life at all--though you'd have to ask a reputable theoretical physicist to be sure.

One might suggest that God only stop bullets in mid-air 50% of the time, but in that case

d) rational agency would be practically impossible. For it wouldn't just be bullets God would have to stop in mid-air a good deal of the time, He'd have to stop bombs, and mortar rounds, and spears and arrows, and indeed anything that might harm people, if He was to be as consistent and fair about preventing harm as you seem to think He ought to be. But again, such a world would radically undermine the possibility of rational expectations. Half the time we'd try something and X would happen, and half the time we'd try the same thing and X wouldn't happen. The possibility of rational minds existing in a physical world requires that the world be consistent and predictable.

Moreover

e) Without rational agency, moral agency would also be impossible. The latter needs to be grounded in intentions which conform to rational expectations of what various courses of action are liable to lead to. But the whole point of an ethical God creating human beings as distinct from toy creatures is that the humans are granted full powers of moral agency---to choose and act upon the good, or the bad. If our choices and actions were not in large measure predictably effective, then we would not be able to form our own moral character with any consistency.

However

f) It doesn't follow from any of the above that miracles are impossible. It just follows that they have to be, by definition, rare. It seems that this may be one reason why God instantiated a world governed by quantum mechanics rather than Newtonian mechanics. Very low probability quantum events are not impossible, but are by definition relatively very infrequent. Any subatomic particle has some small probability of being found, when observed, at a location other than where it would normally be expected to be found. So perhaps this is one way in which God can work a miracle---not by violating the natural laws of His own design (which would suggest irrationality or imperfection in the creator), but rather through choosing natural laws that are inherently probabilistic--such as is the case with the quantum mechanical laws governing our world.

In short, if God is rational and wishes to create rational physical creatures endowed with effective moral agency, including the power to choose radically to reject God (by radically rejecting goodness and love--for instance by trying to kill someone), all of which is what theists have generally claimed about God, then there are perfectly understandable reasons why 'miraculous' escapes from harm will be relatively very rare.

As to why God would choose the pope over others--well, maybe God wanted the pope to suffer from the toils and sufferings of this life, rather than end his sufferings sooner, as a penance or punishment for the pope's sins. Whereas all the folks who were shot to death no longer have any sufferings in this life and are hopefully even in paradise now, poor old JP2 has to carry his cross and soldier on for another 24 years (so far), and be subject to various ailments to which the flesh is heir.

I can't say for sure. But if divine providence was at work in this incident, I'm sure God had His reasons, whatever they are.

Or "God wants me to have this expensive house and expensive car".

So those people who get killed by a bullet, lose the game, or are poor are not favored in some god's eyes.

A disturbing line of reasoning.

How easily religion is used.

Why not cause it to miss entirely? Why permit it to happen in the first place?

It's what I was replying to that doesn't, for the reasons outlined in post #12.

Can you boil it down to something (less than a screen-ful of text) that a simple-minded person like myself can understand?

does not entail that it makes no sense.

... or putting into a digestible sentence or two? Even a paragraph or two? What are you afraid of?

what are you afraid of, pal.

"Pal"?? :eyes: My! How delightfully passive-aggressive.

So... Back to my question. Will you simplify your circular double-speak? Will you summarize and condense your response into something that's not trying so hard to sound important and heady?

We all know that your "trade" is philosophical argument... but surely a genius like yourself is capable of reducing their voluminous screeds into a brief message that laypeople can understand. If Carl Sagan can do it, so can you.

Unless you're cutting and pasting someone else's words, then surely you can shorten your response to be more direct. Surely you understand your own words well enough to be able to capture their essence even if you use simpler language and less complex sentences.

Your unwillingness to do so indicates fear to me. So that's why I was wondering what it is you might be afraid of.

just like to jam as many words into as few ideas as possible.

in the actuality of heaven. He knows he's a fraud.

and shitting bricks over the impending implosion of Banco Ambrosiano.

Maybe JP2 has forgotten the 10 Commandments, especially the one that suggests Thou Shalt Not Lie....

Commandment in the Book, plus some unmentionables not even listed.