Wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday about the ridiculously vague miracle attributed to Mary Mackillop and it ended up published (along with a bunch of other people unconvinced by this “miracle”):
Where is the real miracle here? How about showing us one amputee who has been healed? Surely not too big an ask for any god worth his/her salt? Prayer is a placebo, nothing more. Mary MacKillop herself was proof of the idea that two working hands achieve more than a million hands praying. So let’s not belittle the good she did by ridiculous superstition and the Catholic Church trying to boost falling numbers. If prayer worked there would be no need for people like MacKillop to try to fix things.
Nathan Lee Coogee
Prayer has been shown to be beneficial to the individual praying in the same sense that any other placebo can be useful: positive thinking. That’s not the same as a miracle. You can (and many people do) get the same result without the need for supernatural appeals.
Clik here to view.
How to think you're helping at the expense of actually helping!
The point I made was that Mary Mackillop (for all her sky god beliefs) did good by going out there and doing stuff. She didn’t sit around and pray to try and fix the world. I’ve absolutely no beef with anyone who is out there trying to help people. Whether wasting time trying to convert them or push an irrational belief system on vulnerable people is morally “good” is another matter (or indeed you’re pushing that ideology and don’t buy it yourself e.g. like that fraud Mother Teresa..).
Our bodies have a remarkable capacity for repair and capacity to function: that’s not a miracle either. It’s amazing biology and shows how fantastically sophisticated our bodies have become after millions of years of evolutionary fine tuning in a harsh environment.
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Mary wrote on occasion too, only fair I should write about her.
Here’s how the miracle of Mary Mackillop “cured” cancer:
Kathleen Evans, 66, whose anonymity has been zealously guarded until now, spoke at the Mary MacKillop chapel in North Sydney this afternoon about her incredible survival.
Surrounded by her husband Barry, family members and sisters from the Josephite Order, the mother of five, grandmother of 20 and great-grandmother of two, told how she had smoked since the age of 16 but had given up in 1990, three years before she got the devastating news that at 49 she had cancer.
The tumour, in her right lung, was particularly aggressive and quickly spread to her glands. Within a few months a secondary cancer was found on her brain.
She was told it was inoperable and that chemotherapy and X-ray treatment were considered pointless.
“Besides,” she said, “the odds were just not worth it.
“‘I was only given a couple of months at the most to live so I said thanks but no thanks.
“All I had left was prayer.”
A friend in the Hunter Valley gave her a picture of Mary MacKillop and a piece of her clothing, so Ms Evans, her family and her parish all began praying.
Yep, that’s the “miracle” there. This half baked explanation of how worshipping a piece of cloth (that Mary Mackillop may or may not have wiped her nose with or worn at some stage which she is so attached to that she pays attention) cures cancer.
Just how many other people at some stage have been told their situation was dire and they had better get their affairs in order? How many have subsequently recovered? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
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The data so far..
The world is full of people who were told they would die by a certain age and found a way to beat the odds to keep alive and kicking.
What’s the real story?
What we have here is a lady who smoked from the age of 16, gave it up, they found (a gift from God?) cancer and her body was (fortunately) able to clear it up once it recovered from the years of smoking abuse.
Just like someone who’s diagnosed with heart problems or high blood pressure who gives up the burgers, starts going for regular walks/swims and eats healthily has a pretty good chance their body will get back to a good state.
Had we had two identical twins who had identical smoking habits, who were diagnosed with the identical cancers in the same spots in the body at the same stage and one prayed to the grubby bit of Mackillop cloth and the other didn’t THEN maybe we’d start to have something interesting to investigate. Even then though, all it would really be testing would be the power of positive thinking/placebo affect. That’s why I asked for an amputee cure as proof of a miracle (it won’t be long and science/medicine will fix that too.. and then I’ll bet praise goes skyward for that too).
If doctors were surprised, it was because based on probability she had a good chance of being dead in a matter of months (and who could blame them looking at her medical history). That’s assuming of course we can believe that her description of the medical opinion is correct and that she wasn’t receiving any other treatment (the old chemotherapy/intensive care/skilled doctors/multiple operations and therapies that God gets the credit for and doctors get screwed).
Time for some investigative journalism!
Now to tell the Sydney Morning Herald what I they need to do next time to fix their fluff religious “miracle” piece wrapped up as “news”:
- find the doctors involved and talk to them
- find out if there are many similar recoveries recorded
- perhaps include some more grounded, less superstitious reasons for the recovery or talk to someone with a medical/science background about how the body repairs itself
Anyhow, rant over.. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Til next time dear readers..