James Miller2 said:I believe those personal testimonies aren't bad since they encourage people to change.
Human beings rarely change (unless something is life-threatening).
And improving one's life is necessary for health and survival.
How would you explain it if, for example, a doctor told someone they had an incurable disease, and then that disease vanished after prayer and fasting?
You cannot simply dismiss that as fantasy or positive thinking.
There are specific conditions and miracles required for shrines; I am not particularly familiar with them, so I cannot comment.
In a way, that's true. Because stories hit you on an emotional and symbolic level, they bypass the rational, critical part of the brain. That allows them to trigger shifts in behavior at a more instinctive, irrational level.
It can be a positive thing, but it can also be negative.
There are psychotherapies and therapists who use carefully crafted, suggestive storytelling and communication styles for that exact purpose. If that’s what someone needs, it’s better to turn to professionals who follow established ethical guidelines and professional oversight.
With religions (
including cults and sects—they're essentially the same thing), the primary goal is indoctrination. At the very least, it's about maintaining the flock, and for most, it's about recruiting new members. Everything else is secondary to that goal, including (
more often than not, highly exaggerated if not outright fabricated) potential benefits.
The other issue is that these benefits are often short-lived—more like a temporary fix than a permanent cure.
Personality traits are hard, if not impossible, to fundamentally change in adulthood. However, through constant indoctrination and social pressure, a person can develop a sort of "pseudo-ego"—a permanent role they play just to fit into the religious narrative.
That said, you usually notice that once someone leaves a religion, sect, or cult, they revert back to their core personality. There wasn't actually any lasting change.
How would you explain it when, for example, doctors tell someone they have an incurable disease, but then that illness vanishes after prayer and fasting?
You can't just dismiss that as fantasy or positive thinking.
There are specific conditions and miracles required at shrines; I'm not really familiar with how that works, so I can't comment.
I will say, however, that the "fantasy" lies in how those events are interpreted.
Reality isn't binary. Nothing is strictly mortal or immortal. There are cases where people die laughing, and others who survive free-falling from a plane (
without a parachute).
Both are extremely rare, but they happen. The reason we consider falling from a plane deadly and laughter healthy isn't based on absolute certainty, but on high probabilities.
Take a disease with a 99% mortality rate. We call it fatal, but there is still that 1 in 100 who survives.
Most people are believers, and everyone prays when their life is on the line. Even people who aren't religious tend to find faith in those moments.
This means it is statistically quite likely that the one person who was going to survive anyway happened to be praying. That single instance is then held up as proof of a miraculous healing, while completely ignoring the thousands of people who prayed and didn't get better.
It's the same story with shrines or canonizations—"miracles" are pulled out of thin air without context, relevant data sets, control groups, or statistical analysis. How many people visit a famous shrine? Hundreds of thousands a year? Millions? It's incredibly easy to find a cluster of healings in a group that large. It isn't evidence; it's just math.
The only way to actually prove something like this would be to demonstrate that, in practice, people experience significantly more healings through prayer or divine intervention than a control group of similar individuals who don't engage in those rituals.
As far as I know, the only studies of this kind I've come across were conducted right here in the States, and they failed to show any solid positive correlation.(
One study even suggested a slight negative correlation—worse health outcomes for the group being prayed for, which most likely points to a nocebo effect.)
Since there are plenty of educated people working within the church who understand how to conduct research aimed at objectively testing a hypothesis, I’m left with one conclusion: when it comes to formal procedures like canonization, they intentionally use outdated methods. It doesn't prove anything; it just creates a pseudo-scientific illusion of proof. In other words, it feels like a deliberate hoax.
