We don't discard the Old Testament, it's just that the ceremonial laws of the Jews and similar things don't apply to Christians. As for homosexuals, we don't hate them, any more than we hate murderers, thieves, liars, etc. What we hate is sin. We don't hate sinners, since all of us are sinners. Anyway, the New Testament does talk about homosexuality, for instance in 1 Cor. 6:9-10, Romans 1:18-27, etc.
That's part of the Law of Moses, and doesn't apply anymore.
Acts 10:10-16 And he became hungry and desired something to eat; but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance and saw the heaven opened, and something descending, like a great sheet, let down by four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. And there came a voice to him, "Rise, Peter; kill and eat." But Peter said, "No, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean." And the voice came to him again a second time, "What God has cleansed, you must not call common." This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven.
And even before that, it was their stance that they just go to hell. In fact, that's the very reason why babies started being baptised. It used to be adults, but people didn't want their children going to hell if they died before they were old enough.
Actually, the Bible says that, in Apostolic times, entire families were baptized, not just adults.
Acts 16:15 And when she was baptized, and her household...
Acts 16:33 And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway.
1 Corinthians 1:16 And I baptized also the household of Stephanas...
The difference is that the Bible and the teachings of the Apostles (and natural law, in many cases) explicitly tell us that extramarital sex, homosexual acts, etc. are wrong; but the Bible doesn't say anything about what happens to unbaptized children who die.
Unbaptized children don't have justifying grace (which is normally received through baptism), and so they shouldn't be able to go to heaven. On the other hand, they haven't personally sinned, so they shouldn't go to hell either. One theory that attempts to resolve this problem is that unbaptized babies go to Limbo, which is a place without the supernatural happiness of heaven (since they don't have justifying grace), but with perfect natural happiness (since they don't deserve punishment). So unbaptized babies would live for eternity happier than anyone ever did on Earth. This is pretty nice, and I tend to agree with the Limbo idea. The good thing about this theory is that Limbo at least has a Biblical parallel in the Limbo of the Fathers, where good people from Old Testament times went until the opening of heaven to them by Christ (Luke 16:22).
On the other hand, maybe God gives unbaptized babies something similar to a baptism of desire, and so they can go to heaven... This is a bit more speculative than the Limbo idea, but not impossible.
Well, the souls of aborted babies may or may not go to heaven, but even if they did, it would be wrong to encourage people to have abortions. The end doesn't justify the means. So if you convinced someone to have an abortion, maybe the baby would go to heaven, but you and the person who had the abortion probably wouldn't, since she had her child murdered, and you encouraged someone to commit murder.
By your logic, we should kill baptized infants, since they definitely are going to heaven if they die. But that would be murder, so it's wrong to do so, even if we had a good intention. Again, the end doesn't justify the means.
There is not a single verse in the Qur'an that prohibits making or having pictures of Muhammad or people or animals or trees.
[...]
However, the vast majority of Muslims are Sunni Muslims, who regard six authorized collections of hadiths as the highest written authority in Islam after the Qur'an. The hadiths are records, often very detailed, of what Muhammad taught and did. [...]
Where multiple trustworthy hadiths agree, Sunni Muslims will take this as binding. [...]
Pictures of Muhammad are "not exactly" forbidden in the hadiths either. The hadiths do not single out Muhammad's picture. Rather, in the hadith we find the prohibition of all pictures of people or animals [...]
The values that made America be able to unify came out of centuries of darkness in Europe, followed by something called the Enlightenment. Without that movement, the ideas of natural law, the rule of law, and limited government could not have taken root.
These things already existed during what you call the "centuries of darkness". For instance, St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century) talks about natural law here. And it was precisely the Enlightenment that brought about big government. During the Middle Ages, each level of government was limited, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. But with the Enlightenment came the centralization of state power ("L'etat, c'est moi": Louis XIV (17th-18th century)), Socialism/Communism, etc.
Monte Solberg, who may end up being Canada's new Finance Minister (he was the opposition's Finance Critic before the election), has a pretty good blog.
The dark ages are a prime example. Societies turned their backs on logic in favor of mysticism and people were afraid to pursue knowledge lest they be labeled as heretics. It took a lot of bravery in those times to stand up for any ideas that ran contrary to the religious beliefs of the day.
Not at all. It is actually the Christian faith that led to science.
WORLD: How is Christianity unique in emphasizing the idea of progress?
STARK: The other great faiths either taught that the world is locked in endless cycles or that it is inevitably declining from a previous Golden Age. Only Christians believed that God's gift of reason made progress inevitable--theological as well as technical progress. Thus, Augustine (ca. 354-430) flatly asserted that through the application of reason we will gain an increasingly more accurate understanding of God, remarking that although there were "certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp . . . one day we shall be able to do so."
Nor was the Christian belief in progress limited to theology. Augustine went on at length about the "wonderful--one might say stupefying--advances human industry has made" and attributed all this to the "unspeakable boon" that God has conferred upon His creation, a "rational nature." These views were repeated again and again through the centuries. Especially typical were these words preached by Fra Giordano in Florence in 1306: "Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end to finding them."
WORLD: But a lot of us learned that Europe fell into the "Dark Ages." How did that historical understanding originate, and what's wrong with it?
STARK: The Dark Ages have finally been recognized as a hoax perpetrated by anti-religious and bitterly anti-Catholic, 18th-century intellectuals who were determined to assert their cultural superiority and who boosted their claim by denigrating the Christian past--as Gibbon put it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after Rome came the "triumph of barbarism and religion." In the past few years even encyclopedias and dictionaries have begun to acknowledge that it was all a lie, that the Dark Ages never were. This always should have been obvious since by the end of the so-called Dark Ages, European science and technology had far exceeded that of Rome and Greece, and all the rest of the world, for that matter.
WORLD: Could you be specific? What were some of the "Dark Ages" innovations that show the folly of considering Greek and Roman culture the apex of civilization until recent times?
STARK: How about the perfection and widespread use of waterwheels, windmills, and pumps, the invention of the compass, stirrups, the crossbow, canons, effective horse harnesses, eyeglasses, clocks, chimneys, violins, double-entry bookkeeping, and insurance? This list doesn't begin to do justice to this era that historians of science now refer to as an age of remarkable innovation and discovery.
The Pope isn't the lord and master of other Catholics, he's their servant: the servant of the servants of God ("Servus Servorum Dei"). He certainly works more for me than the other way around...
As far as his teaching goes, when the Pope speaks infallibly, he is doing nothing but teaching the truth. Catholics don't believe such teachings due to being forced to do so; rather, Catholics freely believe what the Church teaches because they love the truth.
And yet, I believe not one of those things, while simultaneously being Catholic.
Actually, to be a good Catholic, you'd have to believe some of those things (and rightly so). Specifically, you have to believe that masturbation is wrong:
2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action." "The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."
None of the other things have to be believed. But just in case someone's interested, I'll discuss some of the other points.
While it is not automatic that "people who commit suicide will go to hell", one does have to believe that suicide is a mortal sin, since one is committing murder. Of course, mental illness or something like that could reduce or eliminate one's culpability. And as the Catechism says, we are allowed can hope that suicides repent of their sin before it's too late:
2280 Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.
2281 Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.
2282 If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law.
Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.
Homosexuals are not evil as such, but their sins are; just as someone tempted to kill isn't evil for being tempted, but he would be evil if he were to kill.
That unbaptisted children go to hell is a possibility, since they haven't received the grace of justification through baptism; but on the other hand, the Catechism says that we can hope that God will save them despite that:
1261 As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them," allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.
"Ever hear of this guy. He was right. He almost got burned at the stake. There are thousands more like him, a lot of whom did get burned at the stake. For what? Being right."
Actually, no. He was told he could teach heliocentricism as an unproven theory, which was the case back then. He agreed, but then he broke his word, so his legal problems were actually more along the lines of breaking a contract or something like that.
He didn't get into trouble for being right; his model of the solar system (perfectly circular orbits) was actually worse than the geocentric models used at the time when it came to predicting the movement of the planets in the sky. So, based on what was observable scientifically at the time, Galileo was wrong.
The Greeks also invented the kimono. Kimono is come from the Greek word himona, is mean winter. So, what do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe. You see: robe, kimono.
First of all, the Muslims invaded Christian lands. All the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea used to be Christian. And at the time of the Crusades, the Holy Land was probably still majority Christian.
Anyway, the event that triggered the first Crusade was that the Turks started attacking Christian pilgrims.
Note that this doesn't say "earn eternal happiness", but rather "earn title" to it. Christ did earn our salvation for us, and we could never have earned it for ourselves. However, Jesus did explicitly say that we are rewarded for the good we do once we are saved; with the help of God's grace, we do earn a reward for ourselves. See the Catholic Encyclopedia article on merit.
There's nothing wrong with the Crusades as such. Don't Christians have the right to defend themselves when Muslims attack them?
Not that there weren't certain war crimes committed during the Crusades (against Church teaching), but that's a separate issue from the morality of a call to defend Christians. In the same way, the various war crimes committed by Allied forces in World War II doesn't mean that there was anything wrong with fighting the Germans and Japanese.
Matthew 15:19 For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.
2 Corinthians 12:21 lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and I shall mourn for many who have sinned before and have not repented of the uncleanness, fornication, and lewdness which they have practiced.
Galatians 5:19-21 Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Everything in the Universe is caused by something else, requiring a cause to exist.
One imperfect thing may be caused by another, but the causer needed to have been caused by something else (since it is imperfect and requires a cause).
If imperfect things exist, there must be a being who can cause them, but having the characteristic of not needing to be caused himself (and this being we call God).
If there were no God, nothing imperfect, requiring a cause, could exist.
"There isn't a single religion with any kind of hard evidence in favour of it"
Sure there is. The Catholic faith has lots of proof to back it up. Have a look at all the miraculous healings that have taken place at Lourdes, for instance. And that's just one place with lots of miracles, investigated by medical experts. There are many more miracles that happen all the time; each canonized saint has at least two miracles (healings) that have been investigated and found to be impossible without supernatural intervention.
I think you mean the Catechism. It seems you read from the "beta" version of the Catechism; below are the quotes from the final edition. In short: homosexual acts are bad, but we should be kind to homosexual individuals. Homosexuals are called to chastity, and to holiness.
2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity [Cf. Gen 19:1-29; Rom 1:24-27; 1 Cor 6:10; 1 Tim 1:10], tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." [Persona Humana 8] They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't discard the Old Testament, it's just that the ceremonial laws of the Jews and similar things don't apply to Christians. As for homosexuals, we don't hate them, any more than we hate murderers, thieves, liars, etc. What we hate is sin. We don't hate sinners, since all of us are sinners. Anyway, the New Testament does talk about homosexuality, for instance in 1 Cor. 6:9-10, Romans 1:18-27, etc.
That's part of the Law of Moses, and doesn't apply anymore.
Acts 10:10-16
And he became hungry and desired something to eat; but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance and saw the heaven opened, and something descending, like a great sheet, let down by four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air.
And there came a voice to him, "Rise, Peter; kill and eat."
But Peter said, "No, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean."
And the voice came to him again a second time, "What God has cleansed, you must not call common." This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven.
And even before that, it was their stance that they just go to hell. In fact, that's the very reason why babies started being baptised. It used to be adults, but people didn't want their children going to hell if they died before they were old enough.
Actually, the Bible says that, in Apostolic times, entire families were baptized, not just adults.
Acts 16:15
And when she was baptized, and her household...
Acts 16:33
And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway.
1 Corinthians 1:16
And I baptized also the household of Stephanas...
The difference is that the Bible and the teachings of the Apostles (and natural law, in many cases) explicitly tell us that extramarital sex, homosexual acts, etc. are wrong; but the Bible doesn't say anything about what happens to unbaptized children who die.
Unbaptized children don't have justifying grace (which is normally received through baptism), and so they shouldn't be able to go to heaven. On the other hand, they haven't personally sinned, so they shouldn't go to hell either. One theory that attempts to resolve this problem is that unbaptized babies go to Limbo, which is a place without the supernatural happiness of heaven (since they don't have justifying grace), but with perfect natural happiness (since they don't deserve punishment). So unbaptized babies would live for eternity happier than anyone ever did on Earth. This is pretty nice, and I tend to agree with the Limbo idea. The good thing about this theory is that Limbo at least has a Biblical parallel in the Limbo of the Fathers, where good people from Old Testament times went until the opening of heaven to them by Christ (Luke 16:22).
On the other hand, maybe God gives unbaptized babies something similar to a baptism of desire, and so they can go to heaven... This is a bit more speculative than the Limbo idea, but not impossible.
Well, the souls of aborted babies may or may not go to heaven, but even if they did, it would be wrong to encourage people to have abortions. The end doesn't justify the means. So if you convinced someone to have an abortion, maybe the baby would go to heaven, but you and the person who had the abortion probably wouldn't, since she had her child murdered, and you encouraged someone to commit murder.
By your logic, we should kill baptized infants, since they definitely are going to heaven if they die. But that would be murder, so it's wrong to do so, even if we had a good intention. Again, the end doesn't justify the means.
Are Pictures of Muhammad Really Forbidden In Islam? Several examples are listed at the link above.
The values that made America be able to unify came out of centuries of darkness in Europe, followed by something called the Enlightenment. Without that movement, the ideas of natural law, the rule of law, and limited government could not have taken root.
These things already existed during what you call the "centuries of darkness". For instance, St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century) talks about natural law here. And it was precisely the Enlightenment that brought about big government. During the Middle Ages, each level of government was limited, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. But with the Enlightenment came the centralization of state power ("L'etat, c'est moi": Louis XIV (17th-18th century)), Socialism/Communism, etc.
Monte Solberg, who may end up being Canada's new Finance Minister (he was the opposition's Finance Critic before the election), has a pretty good blog.
The dark ages are a prime example. Societies turned their backs on logic in favor of mysticism and people were afraid to pursue knowledge lest they be labeled as heretics. It took a lot of bravery in those times to stand up for any ideas that ran contrary to the religious beliefs of the day.
Not at all. It is actually the Christian faith that led to science.
A few excerpts from an interview with Rodney Stark:
WORLD: How is Christianity unique in emphasizing the idea of progress?
STARK: The other great faiths either taught that the world is locked in endless cycles or that it is inevitably declining from a previous Golden Age. Only Christians believed that God's gift of reason made progress inevitable--theological as well as technical progress. Thus, Augustine (ca. 354-430) flatly asserted that through the application of reason we will gain an increasingly more accurate understanding of God, remarking that although there were "certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp . . . one day we shall be able to do so."
Nor was the Christian belief in progress limited to theology. Augustine went on at length about the "wonderful--one might say stupefying--advances human industry has made" and attributed all this to the "unspeakable boon" that God has conferred upon His creation, a "rational nature." These views were repeated again and again through the centuries. Especially typical were these words preached by Fra Giordano in Florence in 1306: "Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end to finding them."
WORLD: But a lot of us learned that Europe fell into the "Dark Ages." How did that historical understanding originate, and what's wrong with it?
STARK: The Dark Ages have finally been recognized as a hoax perpetrated by anti-religious and bitterly anti-Catholic, 18th-century intellectuals who were determined to assert their cultural superiority and who boosted their claim by denigrating the Christian past--as Gibbon put it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after Rome came the "triumph of barbarism and religion." In the past few years even encyclopedias and dictionaries have begun to acknowledge that it was all a lie, that the Dark Ages never were. This always should have been obvious since by the end of the so-called Dark Ages, European science and technology had far exceeded that of Rome and Greece, and all the rest of the world, for that matter.
WORLD: Could you be specific? What were some of the "Dark Ages" innovations that show the folly of considering Greek and Roman culture the apex of civilization until recent times?
STARK: How about the perfection and widespread use of waterwheels, windmills, and pumps, the invention of the compass, stirrups, the crossbow, canons, effective horse harnesses, eyeglasses, clocks, chimneys, violins, double-entry bookkeeping, and insurance? This list doesn't begin to do justice to this era that historians of science now refer to as an age of remarkable innovation and discovery.
The Pope isn't the lord and master of other Catholics, he's their servant: the servant of the servants of God ("Servus Servorum Dei"). He certainly works more for me than the other way around...
As far as his teaching goes, when the Pope speaks infallibly, he is doing nothing but teaching the truth. Catholics don't believe such teachings due to being forced to do so; rather, Catholics freely believe what the Church teaches because they love the truth.
Actually, to be a good Catholic, you'd have to believe some of those things (and rightly so). Specifically, you have to believe that masturbation is wrong:
Catechism of the Catholic Church - The sixth commandment None of the other things have to be believed. But just in case someone's interested, I'll discuss some of the other points.
While it is not automatic that "people who commit suicide will go to hell", one does have to believe that suicide is a mortal sin, since one is committing murder. Of course, mental illness or something like that could reduce or eliminate one's culpability. And as the Catechism says, we are allowed can hope that suicides repent of their sin before it's too late:
Catechism of the Catholic Church - The fifth commandment Homosexuals are not evil as such, but their sins are; just as someone tempted to kill isn't evil for being tempted, but he would be evil if he were to kill.
That unbaptisted children go to hell is a possibility, since they haven't received the grace of justification through baptism; but on the other hand, the Catechism says that we can hope that God will save them despite that:
Catechism of the Catholic Church - The sacrament of Baptism
"Ever hear of this guy. He was right. He almost got burned at the stake. There are thousands more like him, a lot of whom did get burned at the stake. For what? Being right."
Actually, no. He was told he could teach heliocentricism as an unproven theory, which was the case back then. He agreed, but then he broke his word, so his legal problems were actually more along the lines of breaking a contract or something like that.
He didn't get into trouble for being right; his model of the solar system (perfectly circular orbits) was actually worse than the geocentric models used at the time when it came to predicting the movement of the planets in the sky. So, based on what was observable scientifically at the time, Galileo was wrong.
Here's a link: OriginLab
The Greeks also invented the kimono. Kimono is come from the Greek word himona, is mean winter. So, what do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe. You see: robe, kimono.
The Church didn't reject Copernicus.
Here's a patent the inventors got for this in 2003:
United States Patent: 6,581,375 - Apparatus and method for the recovery and purification of water from the exhaust gases of internal combustion engines
First of all, the Muslims invaded Christian lands. All the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea used to be Christian. And at the time of the Crusades, the Holy Land was probably still majority Christian.
Anyway, the event that triggered the first Crusade was that the Turks started attacking Christian pilgrims.
Note that this doesn't say "earn eternal happiness", but rather "earn title" to it. Christ did earn our salvation for us, and we could never have earned it for ourselves. However, Jesus did explicitly say that we are rewarded for the good we do once we are saved; with the help of God's grace, we do earn a reward for ourselves. See the Catholic Encyclopedia article on merit.
There's nothing wrong with the Crusades as such. Don't Christians have the right to defend themselves when Muslims attack them?
Not that there weren't certain war crimes committed during the Crusades (against Church teaching), but that's a separate issue from the morality of a call to defend Christians. In the same way, the various war crimes committed by Allied forces in World War II doesn't mean that there was anything wrong with fighting the Germans and Japanese.
"The Bible doesn't prohibit premarital sex."
Sure it does:
Matthew 15:19
For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.
2 Corinthians 12:21
lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and I shall mourn for many who have sinned before and have not repented of the uncleanness, fornication, and lewdness which they have practiced.
Galatians 5:19-21
Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
You're thinking of Mozart:
Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel
You can play "Taps" (the military trumpet tune) with only C, E, and G. It sounds pretty good.
There are lots of tunes that use only 5 notes (the black keys on the piano).
Everything in the Universe is caused by something else, requiring a cause to exist.
One imperfect thing may be caused by another, but the causer needed to have been caused by something else (since it is imperfect and requires a cause).
If imperfect things exist, there must be a being who can cause them, but having the characteristic of not needing to be caused himself (and this being we call God).
If there were no God, nothing imperfect, requiring a cause, could exist.
But imperfect things exist, therefore God exists.
"There isn't a single religion with any kind of hard evidence in favour of it"
Sure there is. The Catholic faith has lots of proof to back it up. Have a look at all the miraculous healings that have taken place at Lourdes, for instance. And that's just one place with lots of miracles, investigated by medical experts. There are many more miracles that happen all the time; each canonized saint has at least two miracles (healings) that have been investigated and found to be impossible without supernatural intervention.