Religios

Ya boy is a religious scholar 🤓

Question which I must answer regarding the religious devotees belief in miracles: As a Christian or Hindu devotee, who accepts these alleged miracles, how would you respond to suggestions that your religious beliefs were simply superstition? How would you frame them to assert their credibility?

If I we’re a Christian or Hindu devotee, convinced of miraculous occurrences, I would try to explain the miracle, in a way which is conceivable to the scientific mind, and explain it as not simply a superstition.

​I would frame this assertion in a way that encompassed the counter-arguments so to say. Such as, God is manifest in all things, and miracles are happening all the time. Just this very existence, this very breath is a miracle, and for me, a religious devotee, life is proof of God’s intelligence. I would say something like this. The physical, and material realms, have readily been considered the stuff of scientist and materialists, but I’d counter this by saying that the duality of religious and scientific could be transcended. So called spiritualists, or abstract thinkers, can also extend their curiosity into the realm of the material. We see in the textbook, that the material and the linguistic complement one another, that is to say, objects are imbued with meaning, usually depending on the social context in which one finds themselves. This is a bridge between the material, and the mental, and in my experience, the mental is not something which can be so easily pinned down by science. Thinking is a rather irrational phenomenon, of which it has links to the material, rational world.

​Even in the example of Jesus shedding tears, and this being disproven, can it not be a miracle that the pipes leaked in a certain way to create the image of a weeping Jesus? Life operates through laws material laws, and this means material limits, and God, if there is one, makes themselves known through physical miracles, so to say. There’s often this discourse about spirituality vs materiality, but, I do not think these need to be wholly different entities, in fact, if spiritual refers to all that is abstract, or is in the realm of philosophical or religious creation of meaning, so to say, then spirituality, can give rise to a more pronounced materiality. Materiality is literally infused with cultural meaning, subject and object interact, on many levels, to create this realm which we call reality. It’s not simply material nor religious, or spiritual, but something between the two.

​For a Hindu person, the divine is not in the physical statues themselves, but in the divine which the statues symbolizes and points to. Darshan, is seeing the deity, experiencing the deity so to say, incorporeally, it’s not necessarily the statue itself which provides this experience, but the divine which is represented in the statue. Sure, the statue may be of a material quality, but it’s more so, the quality of divinity which it points toward which is the ‘miraculous’ for Hindu peoples. It’s the mind and body connection, so to say, the meaning which is infused into the statue, enlivens it for the believer and makes it nothing short of a divine miracle. In the case of the drinking statues, it’s less so the explanation which matters, the scientific dissection, but the veneration which this supposed miracle ignites in a believer, this is the miracle, at least in my eyes. The process of projection, by which one holds a belief to the elevated degree of the divine, and applies this to a material reality, whereby a relationship is established between the physical body of a persons and the physical manifestation of the incorporeal divine. The miracle is in the ‘darshan’, the ‘seeing’, in and of itself.

​To conclude, the divine and the material need not be mutually exclusive, in fact, if there was a way to access the divine, it would most certainly be using this bodily vehicle. To reiterate, the religious is an exploration of one’s relationship to God made manifest in this very body, incorporeally getting closer to God. Therefore, this is an inherently physical pursuit, which can lead to immaterial realizations. God’s fingerprints, so to say, are in this creation, therefore, it’s in this physical creation that one can get closer to God, it’s through Eros.