On Miracles

On Miracles

 

“The work of wonder is not the miracle, but the belief in it, that is the miracle,” may be a way to save a more wry version of what may be Hume’s complaint not so much that miracles are claimed to have happened, but it is a miracle anybody believes in them.

That the power of the gods (miracles) and the power of men (magic) have been claimed by all people at all times, ancient and today, is so normal, so to be expected, that even the credulous True Believers, have to disbelieve almost all of it and make a miraculous exception for their own preferred deity or miracle man.

For most people who have selected a religion, and denied all others, or they believe in a psychic, or a leader, or a miracle worker, but not his competition, it is simple: they are scoffers and doubters and blasphemers of all the world’s religions and every claim to magic, miracle, divine power, prophesy, or what have you — for these are universal, all people and all religions have them, and have “proved” them apologetically and by reason and argument, such that the real miracle, as Hume might muse, is that anybody believes in any of them at all. But the poor you will always have with you.

Knowledge is less interested in what it considers and hence less interesting than belief. Even the sciences and the patient study of what actually is, rather than what is loudly claimed by charismatic confidence men, matters more in terms of what else we COULD know. The creativity. The discovery of new truths. Always the event horizon. The horizon of a new event, a new truth, the wonder that nature has revealed another of her secrets, the true magic that is technology.

Belief is doubt. What one believes in one also doubts, every single time and by definition. If you know something, you know it. You don’t prove it. You don’t travel the world to compel others to believe it. You don’t make creeds to memorize and repeat like a little magical mantra that proves something. I mean you CAN, if you are a good boy, recite the Pythagorean theorems to a professor, or some other nonsense-sauce they make you do to get a diploma. But when it comes to a magical formula that becomes more and more powerful every time you repeat it, a mantra, in other words, or as the Catholics call them, creeds, and rosaries and prayers … the same as magical charms and incantations, I will state again that ALL religions have these, and everything the Catholics for instance do were never innovations, but the lifting of rites, rituals, creeds, and the religious language, the magics and formulas, practiced the world over for thousands of years.

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Every movement is a dance and every word we say is a song. When we literally dance and literally sing we are merely practicing an epitome which in the deliberate conscious and conscientious way we perform it, we set a precedence and make an archetype for all else we do.

So, I am very much saying we as Allists and whatever our religion can make creeds and mantras, chants, and incantations for ourselves.

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There is a lot of magic in dead languages the way life comes out of a corpse. The Sanskrit mantras and Latin creeds held power especially because latin was no longer the vulgate. Hieroglyphics and scribes in general had power because they could write, and they knew hidden languages. All the occult, the entire genre, relies on ancient symbols, languages, codes, arcane and unknown symbol systems. I am saying, as TROPES, as purely rhetorical modes, they can put you in the frame of mind for that. The ridiculous and stupid FAKE LATIN of harry potter shows the hocus pocus abracadabra one can fake as a mostly illiterate author of children’s stories. Bands like Dead Can Dance and Enya and Tolkein invented languages for themselves. This can be done to some effect, if a bit affected, after all.

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People BELIEVE in miracles. That is, they doubt them and have to prove them to others to prove them to themselves. If a man just happens to have the power to pull fire from heaven or make the sun go to bed early, or whatever you want, that is just a knack, a talent, a great power a man just happens to have.

Unless he presents is as a miracle, mirari … to wonder at. Like monsters, they were portents of the gods, and so divine. A miracle worker did miracles NOT as a skill that could be taught, as if it mattered if they healed anybody or not, but as a rhetorical device: believe me BECAUSE I have astounded you. An asclepious, the god of healing whose miracles are the most attested in world history, or Jesus patterned on the same, never healed diseases as such, blindness as such, but a few reported and highly attested cases that would convince others of the importance of the persons in question. That is, the magic and miracle did absolutely zero, in terms of historical importance, compared, say, to the man who invented lenses and actually helped the blind see. The science cure actual diseases. Miracle workers built the TROPES and rhetorical subterfuge to get people to believe in them. Believe IN a person or thing is the miracle. Actually curing a disease is … science.

There is a certain crowd that slavishly believes in what it doesn’t understand and accepts as explanations whatever accompanies a spectacle that surprises them. That is “the masses,” “the herds” the “vulgar, the mob,” or to put it more democratically and in American language, “The People.”

We are of them too. We love to marvel. We love actual wonders and want to believe in them and somehow find villain in the men who debunk them. For poets like Emily Dickisnon, Thoreau, and Emerson, the childish want for santa Klaus miracles is an encumbrance. The growth of grass, the breeze, the rustle of the corn, is miracle enough — if only you KNEW! Try to see what Nature and AMA really say through you, to you, around you, through your friends, through the world, every day, and you enter a frame of mind, enchanted, yes, believing yes, but also KNOWING, and so not in a fever, like a new convert, to convert all the world with her to assuage her own doubt and disbelieve. For belief IS doubt. When we come into our own, and know what is ours to know, we no longer fever to disprove all world religions and aggrandize our own. We see the world goes rightly, and praise and adore and love those of all religions or no religion as true and eternal children of AMA herself, flesh to flesh, not adopted, not grafted in, but to real children, and also like her, an all in the making. Life is a Game everybody will win in the end!