WHAT THE HELL?

MIRACLES

There are many unexplained phenomenon in this universe, and spontaneous remission of disease is one of them. Sometimes although a disease seems to be following a common progression from bad to worse, it suddenly just ups and disappears. That doesn’t make it a miracle, even if you were doing something meaningful at the time. People who have no faith in God or angels or anything spiritual at all have spontaneous remissions just as often as the devout. We don’t know why, but it has nothing to do with faith. Maybe some day we’ll figure it out.

There are sites and people and the bones of saints purported to perform healing miracles, but take a moment to consider. Are there three or four “cures” a year? Out of how many visitors? At a guess, let’s say there are 1,000,000 visitors to this site per year. Out of so many, let’s say a whole ten are cured (an uncommonly high number). That’s .001% of visitors cured. Cases of spontaneous remission are 10 in 100,000. That’s ten times more likelihood of spontaneous remission than the chances of a miracle cure. Visiting such places is not only expensive, but leads to unnecessary disappointment and even seems to decrease your chances of being cured. Not to mention the damage done to people who think they are inadequate because their prayers aren't answered! How that failure stings.

As for holy relics, I’ve heard it said that if you gathered all the fragments of the “true cross” you’d have enough lumber to build Noah’s arc. There aren’t any existing pieces of the “true cross” that we know of, nor any other verified authentic relics from the time of Christ. Yes, we’ve found some, and no, they weren’t authentic. Yes, that includes the Shroud of Turin.

Let’s examine a common faith healer. If he or she can cure disease – let’s take arthritis, for example - by the power of their hands or faith or prayer, then instead of building a multi-million dollar chapel and starring in their own TV show, why aren’t they traveling in an ever-widening circle starting at their own home, and visiting every elderly care center in the world to end the residents’ suffering? If I could cure arthritis, that’s what I’d do – I’d cure arthritis. Not become my own corporation, pressuring my faithful followers for “donations” to enable me to buy a bigger jet. If this “healing” is a gift from God, don’t you think He’d prefer that way? Do you believe in the kind of God who gives someone such a gift so that they can make the maximum possible profit out of it? And they won’t just stop and heal anyone on the street! No, to perform their miraculous acts of healing, they require a primed audience, a few shills, a postulant who’s a good actor, and some false x-rays or other “medical evidence.” They need a microphone and a back-up choir. (See also “Good And Evil” and “Statistics”)

While we’re on that subject, the same is true of someone who purports to tell you the future. It’s easy – and probably accurate as well – to say that you’re misunderstood, that there’s a romantic relationship in your future, that you’ll get a better job, finally be appreciated, and come into some money. Plus these are all things you want to hear. But why pay to hear them? If this psychic could really tell the future, why don’t they stop asking you for money and pick the winning lottery numbers? Simply because they can’t see the future. It’s that simple. If they tell you they have a message for you from the “other side,” that “someone has been trying to reach you,” and that message is that someone close to you has died, that they’re happy, that there was no pain, and that they love you and forgive you, again, it’s easy to guess that you’d want to hear that.

Night club acts may make it seems as though a blindfolded person knew what was in their assistant’s hand from across the room – such item being totally random – but actually, the words they use to say “You can guess now” contained the information about what they should “guess.” It’s a trick; very clever, but not magic. Look up debunking psychic tricks.

Everyone feels unique, everyone thinks they’re an excellent driver, everyone thinks they have a great sense of humor, everyone has felt misunderstood at times, everyone has hoped for a better life, career, relationship. Most people have always wanted to travel, to be rich, famous, successful, loved and happy. All a mind-reader has to do to part you from your money is to convince you that they see all this in you, and will gladly tell you more for a fee. Everyone has lost someone they loved, and can be brought to tears by being told that person is always with them, has forgiven everything and forgotten nothing, is happy, and is watching over them. Everyone knows someone with an “M” in their name, everyone has a keepsake or souvenir they treasure, everyone has lost a pet sometime in their life. I could go on and on.

One of the oldest cons in existence is a trick called “cold reading” where a “psychic” looks at your aura or holds an object you own, or gazes into a candle or crystal ball, or uses some other little pretext to get your curiosity going, then “read” your responses to general questions to gage what you want to hear. Using general observations like those listed above, they proceed to watch your reactions very carefully and subtly proceed to say what startles and pleases you the most. The same con is run on people who’ve lost a loved one and hope to communicate with them from beyond the grave. Don’t you think that if the dead could communicate with us, they’d have told us long ago what life is all about? But they don’t. All you’ll hear are general soothing platitudes; no actual information is forthcoming at any price.

When someone seems to know things about you that “no one could possibly know,” just know that yes, it IS possible for someone to know that. Especially if you’ve filled out an “audience participation card” in advance, or spoken of private things while waiting in line or waiting for the program to begin; someone could be listening to all that. Or maybe you were referred by a friend, who doesn’t even realize how much they gave away about you. Alternatively, any general phrase such as those listed above and credited to fortune tellers can be used here as well. Is what they’re telling you really so private, or really so unique? Do you have a ring you play with when nervous? If so, it’s sure to come into the conversation.

Just to round things off nicely, there’s no such thing as “magic” either. There’s sleight-of-hand, which can be very convincing. Real magicians are rare, and unbelievably clever. They use charm, misdirection, imagination and using your assumptions to trick you into seeing things which aren’t really there or see processes you don’t really see but only think you see. The tricks professionals use have been exposed and can easily be studied online. One of the most famous is pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and as it turns out there’s no magic to it at all. But the fact that they can make it SEEM like magic is the magician’s joy and his or her real trade. Some sleight-of-hand tricks are centuries old, and they still seem magical even when you know how they’re done. Their tricks can be very polished, and even though you think they did something on the spur of the moment, I assure you, it was very well planned. It’s just not actually magic.

Sometimes our intuition makes a leap without us being aware of why. Sometimes we hear a word we’ve never heard before several times in one week. Sometimes there are coincidences which seem like synchronicity, usually just because we happened to notice them (the same thing could have happened on any day, but today – like the unknown word we keep hearing - we happened to notice). The likelihood of coincidences and seeming synchronicities are greater than you think. If you use statistics to study the probabilities, you’ll probably be surprised to find that it’s not at all unusual for you to have spoken to someone on a plane who knows someone who knows someone you know. It’s not magic, it’s just kind of amusing that you managed to identify the contact you have in common; it means you had to make a bit of an effort, that’s all. You were both flying from the same place to the same place, you are of the same economic class, you are of a near enough social class that you felt comfortable having a conversation, etc. It’s not a miracle. Maybe you’ll come to believe that this person came into your life for a reason, and maybe they did, but it wasn’t due to angelic, psychic, or astrological magic.

Scientists would love to get hold of a real psychic and study their effectiveness, how they came to have that gift, how it works, whether their brain looks any different, etc. In fact, former magician James Randy has offered a million dollars to anyone who can prove they’re psychic. That million has gone unclaimed for decades. As Tim Minchin puts it: “Throughout history, every mystery ever solved, has turned out to be... not magic.”