Okay, a bit for everybody, so this is a long post. my appologies if i forgot anybody, there is a lot to process. And thanks again for taking the time to talk to me. please try to answer my previous post also.
Miri, about your miracles, I have to respond with a story on my own:
I had an accident while spearfishing a few years back, a barracuda almost ripped my left arm off, he ate a big chunk including nerves, tendons, muscle and artery. The bone was apparent and I had to rip the fish off my arm because he was gnawing at my bones. I was spouting blood for hours. after much delay and a very incomfortable trip in a fishing boat, i made it to a small clinic. the doctor attending me gave me for dead. Needless to say I am not resurected, I survived. You would probably think it was a miracle. I never prayed for it though, I am un unbeliever. I was not in a position to think much about it anyway, I was in incredible pain. Nobody at the time understood how I could have survived such a wound. The pilot of the boat was a cuban veteran who fought in many wars, he told at the time to my girlfriend that in his experience, people do not survive wounds so severe. And apparently he had seen a few.
According to your way of thinking, this was a miracle. If I was a believer, I would have taken it as a miracle, like you do. Only I don't beleive, so what did I do ? I asked around, I tried to understand, I used my brain. Turns out that people who are born in high altitude areas, such as myself, have a higher red cell count than people living at sea level. A higher red cell count means you can lose more blood and still have enough to carry oxygen around and keep your vital functions. Sure enough, my blood tests at the time and to this day reveal a higher than normal red cell count. The doctor agreed with me that no miracle occured, there was a very simple and natural explanation for my seemingly miraculous survival which included such factors as my red cell count, the effectiveness of the friend who perform first aid on me, my strength of will, the efficiency of the various doctors taking care of me, sheer luck, etc etc. The local sea level people had no experience with people like me who could bleed a lot before dying, so they called it a miracle.
So maybe miracles happen, but after my experience I must wonder if at least some of the miracles reported, by you and others, are not of the same vein(sorry for the pun) as mine? I must wonder if I hadn't looked deeper into the matter, whether my story could be repeated by people like you as proof that a miracle occured. Maybe that cuban skipper , to this day, uses my story as proof he saw a miracle. I think it is very possible it reinforced his faith. You will probably think, like one of you did earlier, that Jesus used me to reinforce the faith of this man. Allelluiah ! If he did, well, let me say I'm not grateful and I think the guy is a cruel sadist and it will take a lot for me to believe he actually loves me. But I don't think it was a miracle so I don't need to think that.
That personal experience of mine makes me skeptical of miracles in general, I think each should be fully investigated before being accepted as miracles. Your few examples do not strike me as fully investigated, I can imagine plenty of natural explanation for them. It doesn't mean they were not miracles but it is a possibility. At the very least I can not just take your word for it that they were miracles. Given the lack of critical thinking skills demonstrated by the crowd on this forum, I would think most of you accept those were miracles without checking too much into it. A mere anecdote is not proof enough for something as world chattering as the veracity of a miracle. an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.
And I'm affraid that notion applies to the resurection of Jesus as well. Was the tomb really empty? we only have the scritpure as evidence for it. there is a raging debate among scholars right now about whether the gospels are adequate evidence for the resurrection. the matter is far from settled and i don't understand how you can claim to know better than all those very smart and very educated people. you praise my reading the bible and i appreciate it, you praise my choice of appologists and i'm glad i picked good ones, but i must ask, which of the atheists have you read with an open mind? Have you considered their arguments or, as many of your comments reflect, have you discounted them out of hand because you just know, in your heart, that they are wrong ? you mention not even wanting to read Ehrman because he is not a "true christian". is that really an open minded attitude? if you only study one side, how can you form an educated opinion about something? Ehrman is a very reknown bible scholar, shouldln't you at least listen to what he says ? What is the harm in challenging your views if you are correct anyway? Beside what i said about the bible is not disputed among even the most devout christian biblical scholars. the gospels were really written long after the events by people who where not there at the time. this is not an atheist notion, this is the conscensus among biblical scholars.
Garee
thanks for sharing but you can not seriously be telling me that circular arguments are valid.
This is an insult to my intelligence.
crossnote on prophecies,
i don't find it a good evidence, since both the prophecies and the fulfillement of those profecies are found in the same document. It is a bit circular. The bible also has been edited and re edited by countless people along the ages, and all of those people had an incentive to make the bible more convincing, by doctoring the text to give the impression prophecies were fulfilled. I have read the appologists on that and i think the arguments are extremely weak. Let me know for example which account of a prophecie is the most potent, the most convincing, and i'll look into it. The ones that i think are the most potent i probably encountered before since i did look into this. I think it is incorrect to think that there is ANY evidence of fulfiled prophecies in the bible. Or the quran for that matter.
magenta
on being delusional and needing meds,
i do not know or advocate that you are all delusional and even less that you need meds. I am simply trying to figure out whether you have considered the option that you are delusional about your pretty bold claims, because it is a possibility, i mean some people are delusional right ? Why not you ? How would i know ? and so i ask how you have acertained that you are not delusional about your belief. Isn't that a legitimate thing to ask ?
And education and inteligence has nothing to do with it. I mean i consider myself inteligent enough and educated enough, yet I accept that i could be delusional about some things. how would i know if i did not take the trouble to check and challenge my views? I knew a guy who was thinking clearly about many thing but still did not believe NASA put people on the moon. He was completely delusional about this. Yet he was a smart educated person. So there is no correlation and no stigma to it. I'm not attacking people, i'm challenging ideas. I think it is a healthy positive thing to do, don't you ? I'm sure you consider the muslims are wrong. Some of them are very smart and educated. You still think they are wrong. Why would christians get a special treatment ? Why would christians have a special status that would make them impervious to delusion ? christians need to be as critical about their beliefs as they are about the beliefs of muslims, don't you think?
On spirituality :
i am a skeptic. I do not take things for granted. You might disagree with that way of looking at things, but i find it works better than any other way to look at things. You are advocating to me to stop thinking critically. For the life of me i can't see how that would help me see the truth. The esoterica you describe have been investigated and shown, conclusively to me anyway, to be the mere effect of cognitive biases and logical falacies. Prophetic dreams ? How many dreams do you have a year ? How many things happen to you ? Put the two together and evaluate how likely it is that sometimes you dream about something that later seem to happen in your life. Add a good helping of confirmation bias and you got a belief in fulfilled dreams. Psychologist who have rigourosly studied this phenomena have shown there is nothing there but delusion. I'm sorry.
josephdreams on personal experiences and bible study
i have not counted the time i have spent on studying the bible. A lot of time though. I estimate i know more about the bible than most people i know. I have also read a lot of apologist literature and counter apologist literature. I read pretty fast so i guess how many hours is irrelevant, suffice to say that I consider i have looked into it in depth. For example, i have also read the skeptic annotated bible and that was enlightening when comparing it to the writing of william lane craig. Have you read the skeptic annotated bible ? If not, what have you read to try to get a balanced view of the subject ? i'll be curious about your bibliography.
As for personal experiences, that there are billions of them doesn't change the fact that they are personal experiences. I do not deny them, i try to assess them critically.
One thing seem evident to me, it is that billions of people can be wrong. Don't you agree ?
I think you do since you consider that every single muslim on earth is mistaken. Yet there are about 1.6 billions of them.
Angela about the solenoid miracle
funny you mention that, i have the same symptoms on my generator right now. I am a diesel mechanic. What you are describing to me is a common thing, a faulty alternator, and probaly an old and worn starter motor. Probably the mechanic didn't fix your car by praying, i would think he re charged your battery and changed your alternator, probably cleaned the bushings on the starter and maybe also cleaned the contact points on the solenoid. When the points get oxyded, you hit the solenoid with anything you have handy, and it comes unstuck and you can restart your car. Sounds to me you are not very good on car maintenance... Anyway, all this to say, is that really what you guys count as miracles ? What about non mundane things like people regrowing limbs or things like that ?
JimmiD on the invisible
please take that sentence in its context. Let's not play with words.
Abcdef on love
i had this talk before and it baffled me the same as what you say.
My simple question is : if God is love, why do we have a word for God and a word for love ?
Is love part of God or is love the exact same thing as God. I find this concept extremely confusing.
The aristocract on the need for god
i agree most humans have what we could call a need for god. I also have read some very convincing analysis on that by psychologists and neurologists, and i think there is a natural evolutionary explanation for this sense of god. So i'm not denying it, on the opposite. But i'm also saying it is not in itself a proof of God, just another quirk of how we humans are complex and amazing.
As an aside, i didn't want to get into this but it seems some people here deny evolution. I can see how some of what i say would be hard to grasp without the concept of evolution as background. I can only urge people to educate themselves about this.
So why was god invented then ? Well, good question my friend .
I think the answer would take a long debate and a lot of background check and here might not be the most appropriate venue for that, but thank you for a very challenging question.
A few hints as to which way i would investigate : the meme concept, how ideas evolve and propagate depending on which is most grabbing of attention. I would think that some ideas are able to evolve in such a way that they in a sense , free themselves of the hosts evolutionary needs and go on an adventure of their own. If you see my meaning. So the god concept, as i see it, could have evolved on its own in the mind of early humans as the most potent explanation for what they were seeing arond them. To an uneducated early human, the argument from design must have been very powerful indeed. I think daniel dennett make a fairly good case in this direction. Have you read his book « breaking the spell » ?Anyway, if you want to hang on to that thought, maybe we can have a private talk about it sometime, what do you say ?
and there you go, you dragged me into debating my views... please go back to my previous post about my little poll and let stick to that for now...
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