Amputees

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GEddie said:
There’s nothing to tackle, FLX. There is no recognized case of human limb regeneration, no artificial limbs left at Lourdes or Fatima, and never have been.

Your question will in all likelihood be answered only in the next life.

God Bless and ICXC NIKA.
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What about the miracle of Calanda?
 
GEddie said:
There’s nothing to tackle, FLX. There is no recognized case of human limb regeneration, no artificial limbs left at Lourdes or Fatima, and never have been.

Your question will in all likelihood be answered only in the next life.

God Bless and ICXC NIKA.
Click to expand...
But Scripture says God answers prayer ( which ties in with my other thread about the STEP study.in the Spirituality forum) . So why no cures for amputees? Why no people who have their permanent teeth pulled regrow teeth? The list goes on and on.
It seems that God only answers prayers of medical problems that can go into remission or can be healed.
 
Faith1960 said:
But Scripture says God answers prayer ( which ties in with my other thread about the STEP study.in the Spirituality forum) . So why no cures for amputees? Why no people who have their permanent teeth pulled regrow teeth? The list goes on and on.
It seems that God only answers prayers of medical problems that can go into remission or can be healed.
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Or that are necessary. Is an amputation a terminal illness?
 
Maybe in cases where God has restored limbs for amputees, he instructs them to tell no one, just like he did in some cases when he walked the earth?
 
mikekle said:
Maybe in cases where God has restored limbs for amputees, he instructs them to tell no one, just like he did in some cases when he walked the earth?
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I don’t think that would work, just as it never worked in the NT.

Someone like Tony Melendez, say, waving a beautiful new pair of hands; or Joni Eareckson Tada leaping out of her wheelchair (okay, she’s not an amputee, she has a broken neck), would be an indubitable miracle and 10,000,000 times as big as someone cured of leprosy by our LORD. They couldn’t keep it quiet if they wanted to.

ICXC NIKA.
 
GEddie said:
I don’t think that would work, just as it never worked in the NT.

Someone like Tony Melendez, say, waving a beautiful new pair of hands; or Joni Eareckson Tada leaping out of her wheelchair (okay, she’s not an amputee, she has a broken neck), would be an indubitable miracle and 10,000,000 times as big as someone cured of leprosy by our LORD. They couldn’t keep it quiet if they wanted to.

ICXC NIKA.
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So, what is your theory as to why God won’t help amputees?

This and the STEP Study thing is really affecting my faith so I’m going to confession tonight about it.
 
Faith1960 said:
So, what is your theory as to why God won’t help amputees?

This and the STEP Study thing is really affecting my faith so I’m going to confession tonight about it.
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That’s a good course of action.

I don’t have an answer to your question, except that these dear old human bodies are provisional, and in a sense improvised, and never had life everlasting in their design specifications.

GOD Bless and ICXC NIKA
 
GEddie said:
That’s a good course of action.

I don’t have an answer to your question, except that these dear old human bodies are provisional, and in a sense improvised, and never had life everlasting in their design specifications.

GOD Bless and ICXC NIKA
Click to expand...
Well, restoring a limb would not increase the lifespan at all, that persons body would still be human flesh and blood.

Just thinking about this has me questioning my faith as well, its a bit strange if God only chooses to heal things that CAN be healed or go into remission, when we are told he brought people back from the dead.

Im trying think if I can remember ever hearing about anyone ever being healed of serious disease, like cancer…and it being proven the disease was totally gone, the only things I can come up with are not catholic, most are evangelical, Pentecostal, type preachers, I believe there was a guy back in the 1980s that claimed he was totally cured of lung cancer after going to some tent event and a preacher laid hands on him, trying to find more details on this story.
 
mikekle said:
Well, restoring a limb would not increase the lifespan at all, that persons body would still be human flesh and blood.

Just thinking about this has me questioning my faith as well, its a bit strange if God only chooses to heal things that CAN be healed or go into remission, when we are told he brought people back from the dead.

Im trying think if I can remember ever hearing about anyone ever being healed of serious disease, like cancer…and it being proven the disease was totally gone, the only things I can come up with are not catholic, most are evangelical, Pentecostal, type preachers, I believe there was a guy back in the 1980s that claimed he was totally cured of lung cancer after going to some tent event and a preacher laid hands on him, trying to find more details on this story.
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Research the medical archives at Lourdes.

Of the thousands of attested “cures” attributed to this miracle locale, only 65, since its inception in the 1800s, have been accepted as miraculous. IMS, they have an army of doctors vetting all such claims.

As to the original question, I don’t know what to think. Evidently there are parameters beyond which healing just does not go. But in a body not designed for everlasting life, to me, that is not a faith issue. Maybe it should be.

ICXC NIKA
 
GEddie said:
Research the medical archives at Lourdes.

Of the thousands of attested “cures” attributed to this miracle locale, only 65, since its inception in the 1800s, have been accepted as miraculous. IMS, they have an army of doctors vetting all such claims.

As to the original question, I don’t know what to think. Evidently there are parameters beyond which healing just does not go. But in a body not designed for everlasting life, to me, that is not a faith issue. Maybe it should be.

ICXC NIKA
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My SD explained it by saying that He can but he doesn’t. He doesn’t go against the laws of nature.
 
Man, nobody in this whole thread knows about St. Cosmas and St. Damian? And how they appeared to a man and replaced his amputated leg with the leg of a recently deceased corpse that had just buried? And how it was easily proved not to be the same guy’s leg, because the amputee was white and the corpse was of a black man? And the white guy’s bad leg was found in the coffin with the corpse???

This was one of the most popular miracle stories ever, guys. It’s like never having heard of Lourdes. I don’t know why the story has largely disappeared from common hagiography knowledge, unless people are weirded out by the diverse racial composition of Byzantine Empire graveyards. (Or the idea of saints appearing at night and sawing off your nasty gangrenous or cancerous leg, even if they give you a replacement.)

It was also one of the big inspirations for doctors to try to do limb grafts, skin grafts, etc., and may have inspired some of Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein.

Anyway, Ss. Cosmas and Damian were two of the many “free doctor” saints who ran free clinics for the poor. (Hence the surgical nature of the miracle listed above.) They were brothers, some say twins, and some say they were from Arabia. They were extremely popular in both East and West, and they are mentioned in Eucharistic Prayer I in the Latin Rite.

There are actually a fair number of similar miracles in the literature, or miracles where the person grew a new limb (some very weird descriptions), or where there was just suddenly a new leg or foot or hand or arm or tongue or eye or set of teeth, or what have you. For example, a large number of Belgian village saints were responsible for such miracles, including some saints who otherwise just were associated with wells and beer.

However, it is true that the vast majority of limb-replacement miracles took place in rural locations and past times, in areas where there wasn’t much ability or income to support people who were severely crippled.

I would suspect that we don’t see much of this today because we have better conditions and better doctors, and hence the need for this kind of sign is much less acute.

But, claiming that new-limb miracles don’t happen at all, or that they don’t appear in the literature, is a claim not supported by any sufficiently wide reading of hagiography and historical chronicles.

PS. - Of course there is a genetic mechanism for triggering all sorts of limb growth, since we grow 'em as babies. So if you were the Designer of the whole system, no doubt you would have the knowledge and ability to trigger only a specific limb’s growth; and if you were God, you could order the body to do it at supernatural speed or simply alter time in a very small piece of space. So it’s not against the laws of nature; it would only require God to do some weird tinkering with the expression of the laws of nature.

Here’s a post with Renaissance pictures of the miracle. It was a very common, popular subject for Renaissance painters, probably because the leg thing is so visual.

(Sadly, that post mingles good art history with abysmal history history. For example, it says that early Christians believed that slaves didn’t have souls, which is difficult to reconcile with the Gospels, St. Paul, early Christianity having slaves as the majority of its membership, the many slave-martyrs, etc.)
 
Interesting sidelight - when people grow back a limb or one suddenly appears, the limb is usually described in medieval chronicles and hagiography as having very soft, untanned skin, or having skin like a baby’s.

Obviously this isn’t proof of anything in particular, but it’s an interesting detail.
 
Mintaka said:
Man, nobody in this whole thread knows about St. Cosmas and St. Damian? And how they appeared to a man and replaced his amputated leg with the leg of a recently deceased corpse that had just buried? And how it was easily proved not to be the same guy’s leg, because the amputee was white and the corpse was of a black man? And the white guy’s bad leg was found in the coffin with the corpse???

This was one of the most popular miracle stories ever, guys. It’s like never having heard of Lourdes. I don’t know why the story has largely disappeared from common hagiography knowledge, unless people are weirded out by the diverse racial composition of Byzantine Empire graveyards. (Or the idea of saints appearing at night and sawing off your nasty gangrenous or cancerous leg, even if they give you a replacement.)

It was also one of the big inspirations for doctors to try to do limb grafts, skin grafts, etc., and may have inspired some of Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein.

Anyway, Ss. Cosmas and Damian were two of the many “free doctor” saints who ran free clinics for the poor. (Hence the surgical nature of the miracle listed above.) They were brothers, some say twins, and some say they were from Arabia. They were extremely popular in both East and West, and they are mentioned in Eucharistic Prayer I in the Latin Rite.

There are actually a fair number of similar miracles in the literature, or miracles where the person grew a new limb (some very weird descriptions), or where there was just suddenly a new leg or foot or hand or arm or tongue or eye or set of teeth, or what have you. For example, a large number of Belgian village saints were responsible for such miracles, including some saints who otherwise just were associated with wells and beer.

However, it is true that the vast majority of limb-replacement miracles took place in rural locations and past times, in areas where there wasn’t much ability or income to support people who were severely crippled.

I would suspect that we don’t see much of this today because we have better conditions and better doctors, and hence the need for this kind of sign is much less acute.

But, claiming that new-limb miracles don’t happen at all, or that they don’t appear in the literature, is a claim not supported by any sufficiently wide reading of hagiography and historical chronicles.

PS. - Of course there is a genetic mechanism for triggering all sorts of limb growth, since we grow 'em as babies. So if you were the Designer of the whole system, no doubt you would have the knowledge and ability to trigger only a specific limb’s growth; and if you were God, you could order the body to do it at supernatural speed or simply alter time in a very small piece of space. So it’s not against the laws of nature; it would only require God to do some weird tinkering with the expression of the laws of nature.

Here’s a post with Renaissance pictures of the miracle. It was a very common, popular subject for Renaissance painters, probably because the leg thing is so visual.

(Sadly, that post mingles good art history with abysmal history history. For example, it says that early Christians believed that slaves didn’t have souls, which is difficult to reconcile with the Gospels, St. Paul, early Christianity having slaves as the majority of its membership, the many slave-martyrs, etc.)
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Thanks for your post. 🙂
 
Mintaka said:
Man, nobody in this whole thread knows about St. Cosmas and St. Damian? And how they appeared to a man and replaced his amputated leg with the leg of a recently deceased corpse that had just buried? And how it was easily proved not to be the same guy’s leg, because the amputee was white and the corpse was of a black man? And the white guy’s bad leg was found in the coffin with the corpse???

This was one of the most popular miracle stories ever, guys. It’s like never having heard of Lourdes. I don’t know why the story has largely disappeared from common hagiography knowledge, unless people are weirded out by the diverse racial composition of Byzantine Empire graveyards. (Or the idea of saints appearing at night and sawing off your nasty gangrenous or cancerous leg, even if they give you a replacement.)

It was also one of the big inspirations for doctors to try to do limb grafts, skin grafts, etc., and may have inspired some of Mary Shelley’s book Frankens

tein.

Anyway, Ss. Cosmas and Damian were two of the many “free doctor” saints who ran free clinics for the poor. (Hence the surgical nature of the miracle listed above.) They were brothers, some say twins, and some say they were from Arabia. They were extremely popular in both East and West, and they are mentioned in Eucharistic Prayer I in the Latin Rite.

There are actually a fair number of similar miracles in the literature, or miracles where the person grew a new limb (some very weird descriptions), or where there was just suddenly a new leg or foot or hand or arm or tongue or eye or set of teeth, or what have you. For example, a large number of Belgian village saints were responsible for such miracles, including some saints who otherwise just were associated with wells and beer.

However, it is true that the vast majority of limb-replacement miracles took place in rural locations and past times, in areas where there wasn’t much ability or income to support people who were severely crippled.

I would suspect that we don’t see much of this today because we have better conditions and better doctors, and hence the need for this kind of sign is much less acute.

But, claiming that new-limb miracles don’t happen at all, or that they don’t appear in the literature, is a claim not supported by any sufficiently wide reading of hagiography and historical chronicles.

PS. - Of course there is a genetic mechanism for triggering all sorts of limb growth, since we grow 'em as babies. So if you were the Designer of the whole system, no doubt you would have the knowledge and ability to trigger only a specific limb’s growth; and if you were God, you could order the body to do it at supernatural speed or simply alter time in a very small piece of space. So it’s not against the laws of nature; it would only require God to do some weird tinkering with the expression of the laws of nature.

Here’s a post with Renaissance pictures of the miracle. It was a very common, popular subject for Renaissance painters, probably because the leg thing is so visual.

(Sadly, that post mingles good art history with abysmal history history. For example, it says that early Christians believed that slaves didn’t have souls, which is difficult to reconcile with the Gospels, St. Paul, early Christianity having slaves as the majority of its membership, the many slave-martyrs, etc.)
Click to expand...
Did St. Cosmos and St. Damian reattach the leg or did they cause it to grow? Your link uses the words legendary and embellished.

And the rest of your post was about limbs, teeth etc that regrew, right?
 
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