TWO  EXAMPLES  OF

"PARADIGM"

For example, within the current prevailing paradigm,

If the culture we inhabit recognizes "power" as that which is epitomized in destructive capacities, and in the power to control and limit other people, then the absence of use or recourse to such force will be regarded as the lack of power.

Diane Arbus "Child With Toy Hand Grenade In Central Park"   Photograph 1962
http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/imagebank.html

Patience will be regarded as a weakness crying out for intervention by a "man of action." A refusal to regard violence as a form of problem-solving will provoke sneers and be characterized in terms of cowardice, impotence or indecision: weakness rather than power. One who is more studious than intimidating is probably a "nerd" but definitely not a hero.

Of course, we are ready to note some exceptions, Gandhi, perhaps Einstein, or Christ. But by regarding such examples as "exceptions" to our notions of what power "really" is, we actually reinforce the paradigm of power as exercise of a dominating coercion of one kind or another.

Thus, instead of contradicting or correcting our underlying notion of power, such exceptions are "rolled over" and absorbed by the paradigm into confirmations of it. The exception "proves" the rule.

Or, for example, within the current, prevailing paradigm,

If we assimilate uncritically most of the assumptions of Western technologies of medicine, we will be subject to the view that the human body is a closed physiological causal system.

Healing in response to prayer will have to be interpreted, within that system, as merely coincidental to processes that are material, specifically biochemical and bio-mechanical, self-contained and unaffected by anything outside it. Divine interaction will be determined to be "miraculous," meaning either impossible and therefore fiction, or an unacceptable arbitrary and capricious abrogation of laws of the natural world and of its causal machinery.

Robert Bateman  "The Pool of Bethesda"   1876-7
http://www.artmagick.com

Interpretations which do not fit this paradigm, this view of the workings of the human body, cannot be plausibly entertained. In this way, the prevailing paradigm manages either to rule out God, or at least to bar God from involvement with the world.    

The paradigm steers the conclusions and limits the options of what can be considered a rational conclusion.   It would seem that in order to make any claims for a spiritual source of healing, one must deny the science which has provided so many, and such deeply desired, empirical and practical dividends which warrant its validity.