The Miracle of Faith Over Reason

All religions are based as much on the belief that people are mostly if not perfectly rational creatures, as they are on a story that such rational creatures must be capable of considering and accepting to be "true," of their own free will. Human rationality, in other words, is the sine qua non of all religions. 

Yet contrary to the idea that we are rational beings, who can therefore be held culpable for our failure to "believe" in one of the different brands of god offered by religion as necessary to secure our salvation - which is an idea upon which all religions necessarily depend to support their claims - people are not particularly rational. In fact, people are not even mostly rational. Instead, as everyone from politicians to advertisers have known for well over a century, and religions have known perhaps since their inception as tools of control, people are mostly irrational, and driven by fears and emotions, which are all highly manipulable; and as much by priests and politicians as by psychologists, public relations experts, and advertisers.

To the atheist, of course, this should be obvious by now, since religion is to science what emotion has always been to reason. Religion itself, then, is simply the collective example of how the vast majority of people have always preferred to put their faith in the irrational, because reason requires a lot more effort and  on your own it often doesn't get you anywhere anyway, while the former is as easy as drinking cool aid at a picnic with tons of friends, and gets us as high as heaven and beyond. 

Our preference for irrationality over reason can be seen most clearly in our religions, whenever anyone cares to take an honest look at them, that is. Christianity, for example, is the story of how God murdered his own son and got humanity to do it, by convincing humanity that doing so was the only way God would forgive them for being the natural born sinners He "intelligently designed" them to be. It's also a religion that claims all human morality should be based on the Bible while denying that the only reason the world is as bloody and violent as the Old Testament is because it has been for roughly the last two thousand years.

The New Testament likewise reflect this irrationality, it should be pointed out, because it is simply the story of Old Testament Israel, with Jesus Christ being simply the anthropomorphized man-god of Israel, who was Yahweh, who was symbolically murdered  when Israel choose David to be "the king of the Jews" - with Israel's breaking of the First Commandment being reflected in the sign Pilate had nailed over Jesus's head like a crown - the same way the Jews choose Barabbas (who's first name was also Jesus) over Jesus Christ, who Christians claim was the God they had rejected. Put simply, Christianity is simply the worship of the Yahweh of the Jews in the form of Jesus, after the Jews voted for David to be their King. Catholic then followed their lead and committed the very same offense to God, when they elected Peter to be their pope, which is basically their spiritual Caesar. And anyone who dares to challenged the authority of either one is treated no better than Jesus was by the Sanhedrin. 

This irrationality can likewise be seen in the belief that a God would rely on miracles to relay His affections to his "children," once or so every few thousand years; which is like me saying I know the government loves me because it once sent me a rebate a hundred years ago. Why? Because if God really wished to convey any kind of message or meaning to "believers" through an act of divine intervention, a miracle is perhaps the most ambiguous way of doing so possible, since no miracle carries with it any indication of which brand of religion to convert to, or even which of the 50,000 different versions of Christianity that exist today, is in fact the one "true" faith. The Christian thinks this ambiguity imbues every miracle with a crystal clear meaning that we should all worship God, while the atheist sees this ambiguity, if miracles do indeed come from a God, as evidence that that God wishes to keep us all dazed and confused, through religion. One sees miracles as evidence that their own brand of Christianity is the right one, while the other sees them as not indicating God's support for any religion at all, let alone a specific brand. And why a God who Christians believe took the time to write an infallible Bible about himself would then switch to trying to communicate to his beloved children through the morse code of miracles, which are all so ambiguous in their meaning that they only produce more division among "believers" than agreement about the nature of their God and what He's trying to say exactly, is a question that every Christian on the planet is left to simply ignore. 

But perhaps most importantly of all is the fact that all such miracles are simply God's way of interfering with the "free will" of believers, since each miracle seen or experienced operates as a Pavlovian form of behavioral conditioning, one which only compels the individual emotionally to believe in God all the more for fear of eternal damnation if they do not, by a God who is said to never intervene in people's free will, no matter how much suffering everyone from politicians to pedophile priests may inflict on God's children.  Miracles, in this respect, are simply commercials for God by God, according to religion. And since God, who knows our every thought, is said to know us even better than we know ourselves, miracles should more accurately be described as simply divine acts of mind control. Not only do such commercials really tell us nothing about the true nature of the manufacturer, however,  but like all advertising today, they are designed to be a form of behavioral modification, one that increases docile acceptance and conformity by anesthetizing rational thinking and exploiting irrational fears and emotions.

Like companies that now rely on psychologists and "behavioral economics" to seduce customers into "buying trances," and marketers who use "neuro-marketing" techniques to bypass rationality and addict customers emotionally to an ever greater consumption of things they don't really need or want, such miracles are simply mass marketing techniques designed not by a God but by religion, to addict customers emotionally to one brand of "beliefs" about one God or another, as sold by one species of religion or another.  For the "true believer," however, these types of miracles serve as propaganda for God, all of which are "intelligently designed" to teach the faithful that their eternal soul depends necessarily on their willingness to forever subordinate the power of  their reason to the mystery of their faith; and more specifically, to hitch the fate of their eternal souls to all those who proclaim their sacred religion holds the answers to that mystery.

The miracle of faith over reason likewise explains why a Christian may be willing to believe that what happened to Frank Martin was a genuine miracle from God, as if God had a particular place in His heart for male college basketball players at the University of South Carolina in 2006, even though that same God did nothing to stop the sexual abuse of thousands of other children by his own Catholic Church, even though the pope claims to have an infallible Bat-phone to God's moral opinion on things. And the fact that the Catholic Church canonized Pope John Paul II, the very pope who facilitated that abuse by both protecting the clergy responsible for it from legal consequences and by refusing to engage in any thorough investigation of the matter, despite the ever growing number of allegations and reports he had received, only makes the Catholic God look a hell of a lot like Jerry Sandusky!

What's more, the fact that God would perform a miracle at Fatima in 1917 that He choose to hide from the rest of humanity, is like God's decision to save Jesus from King Herod's "massacre of the innocents" while allowing all of the other children to be slaughtered. In the New Testament, for those that don't remember, the Massacre of the Innocents is the incident in the nativity narrative of the Gospel of Matthew in which Herod the Great, king of Judea,  to protect his own power, orders the execution of all male children two years old and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem, much in the same way Lucifer and his minions are said to have been thrown out of Heaven by a God, and for the same reason This would be like God using dreams to protect his own child from pedophile priests while allowing everyone's else's children to be abused. And how Pope John Paul II could be considered a "saint," when he is the very pope who's inaction aided and abetted the sexual abuse of thousands of children by Catholic priests around the world over the course of decades, is either proof that the Catholic "God" is really Keyser Söze, or it is a miracle of religion that even God will never be able to understand.