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A Journey of Denial: Don't Stop Believin'

The miracle of denial caused by miracles is undeniable. 

When a "believer" encounters a "miracle," which is something that they are convinced is always an intervention of God's grace superseding the normal operations of a material universe (leaving the rest of us to wonder why He doesn't do this more often, if it's as easy as simply thinking about it), they see it not as proof of their own ignorance about a seemingly infinitely complex universe, but as undeniable and unequivocal validation of how ingenious they are to hold the particular brand of religious "beliefs" they do (which, by the lottery of luck, they usually have for no other reason than that they happened to have been born into it).

That two people of very different Christian faiths can both interpret the same miracle as both a validation of their own particular brand of Christianity and an invalidation of the Christianity held by the other "Christian," never causes either Christian  to doubt for a second that their own interpretation of the cause and meaning of the "miracle" is the true one, objectively speaking, and that the others is sinfully flawed in a way that they can only see things subjectively, and should therefore turn over their right and indeed their obligation to think for themselves on certain matters (which are always the biggest matters of all), so that the "Church" may do the thinking for them, while pretending to be only a guide.

Like a self-righteous wolf clad in the humility of religious piety, this desire (for some it's actually a need) not only belies an underlying hubris that only assumes both an adequate knowledge of how our infinitely complex world really works, and why, but it is also a habit that the "believer" often singularly applies to their religious belief alone.

For example, the person who encounters a problem with their car or their computer, their washing machine or their refrigerator, does not assume that a "miracle" must have taken place, simply because a problem may seem to have fixed itself without some "divine" (i.e. human, or even just "intelligent") intervention. And this is because, in part, the person is willing to acknowledge their own ignorance of how a car or computer, or even a refrigerator or washing machine, may actually work.

But even though each of those systems have a finite amount of complexity (the 50 million lines of code in Microsoft Windows is still pretty small, compared to infinity), most if not all of which a person can freely learn about on the internet, they nevertheless insist they have enough knowledge of the world - an infinitely more complex system of which we are always discovering something new that dispels the certainties we had for so long relied upon, forged as they were from the herculean efforts of brilliant people through both science and religion, over the course of centuries - to know with absolute certainty that a "miracle" could only ever come from God.

And it could only ever mean one thing, immortalized by the band Journey in 1981: Don't Stop Belivn'

(Cue sound track.)



   

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