Lack of Divine Intervention

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Comas have to do with the brain.

Because they are new chemicals; things we haven't ever seen before (and certainly not in nature). We know what all the old chemicals do, but we are trying to expand our knowledge by playing with new things. You might give it a try sometime.

Actually, there are a number of guaranteed sterilizers, but most of them would be quite harmful to the humans in the area as well. The real problem that leads to there being no universal sterilizer is that there are so many different kinds of bacteria that one method or chemical will work on some kinds but won't work on others. That means that you need more than one method of sterilization to guarantee actual sterility.

If this is in regard to my comments about your grandmother's doctor, remember that I did say "almost no chance". But the odds (without knowing for sure what went on in the OR) are that either the doctor or one of the nurses screwed up the sterilization procedures. All harmful bacteria should have been eliminated before they operated, and clearly that didn't happen. And then there's more than just the instruments; if a nurse was too slow with the sponge and let a drop of sweat fall from the doctor's brow into the incision...you don't want to know what it might have picked up from his skin.

 

No, there isn't. That Christ was crucified for being a rabble rouser and that the Roman Government didn't actually want to crucify him is a matter of history. It is recorded in both the (only) Roman record and the Bible. However, that Christ was impaled with a spear or that he was resurected from the dead are only mentioned in the bible. The (only) Roman historian that (ever) made mention of Jesus made no mention of this. Given that this would be really big news, the abence of such a detail is rather conspicuous.

 

If billions and billions of perfectly sane people over 2000 years would report this to happen to all of them and be very sincere about it, I would definitely think there was some truth in the story

 

Yes, but the Christ account was only witnessed by the handful of people who were there at the time, whose faith and devotion would have had an obvious bias on what they interpreted. I'm not suggesting that Jesus died billions of times in front of billions and billions of people over the last 2000 years - only once in front of a few. Billions and billions of people over the last 2000 years simply believed what their parents, clergy and communites told them to believe, though none of whom actually bore witness to the crucifiction themselves. It's easy to see why someone would believe without question a story like that if they were told it from birth on up. Hell, I was almost one of them.

 

Hell as defined by many Christians is not used in the Bible. Rally can explain this much better than I can but here goes:

Several words are used to denote places of punishment and possibly cleansing. Nor to the best of my recollection does the Bible say that anyone is going to be sent to eternal punishment. In fact the Bible states that the "wages of sin are death".

So don't worry Aldeth or DR, the worse that will happen is you'll be dead along with a few million of the rest of us. Just didn't want you losing any sleep over this. We just won't get to frolic with the angels.

On prayer being answer or God talking to people; the most I can say if He says anything to me it is: NO.

 

@DR:
Well, there was the time a friend of mine, James Klindeinst, got in a major accident late at night. He was found 2 hours later with massive internal injuries. All the doctors said he was going to die, one of them had even seen similar injuries in Vietnam from grenades and mines (at a small distance) and had never seen anyone live. James was up and walking by dawn the next morning. All he has now is a scar from where they took out his spleen. Interestingly, while the newspaper covered the accident (he was a HS football star), they made no mention of the miraculous recovery or the fact that all the doctors were flabbergasted.
There's also the time I was on a missions trip and a massive thunderstorm brewed up. The sky was pitch black as far as the eye could see (in Tennesse, it was a ways) and rain was falling about half the size of golf balls everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except for a circle about 20 ft in radius around the ministry, where delecate electronics were being used. This area was bone dry and remained so untill the last of the electronics were put away about 1/2 an hour later, at which point it started to rain there the same way.
No doubt you'll come up with 'swamp gas' quality explanations of how this is physicially possible, but by M-theory, just about anything is possible, including ressurection of the dead and spontanious healing, so that doesn't make it any less of a miracle in my book.

@Drew:
Notice I said extensive evidence for the biblical account of the death of Jesus, and are you discounting all non-roman sources? There are Jewish scholars that witnessed the crucifiction and commented on things like the quick death, the spear, etc. Most of them make various claims to try and explaint the ressurection, or only mention the Christian claims in passing, but they're still historic evidence of His death.

@DR again:
Jesus was witnessed after the ressurection by several hundred people, all of whom were apparently busily talking about it, from the contexts of a number of texts, biblical and non, so I wouldn't call it 'a few'.

 

Is that really being debated? From a historical standpoint, there was definitely a dude named Jesus who was crucified by the Romans around 2000 years ago. You don't even have to be Chirstian to believe that. Now, one can argue about the spear (I honestly don't know why you would spear him to see if he was dead - he's hanging on a freakin' cross - you could always just wait a few days) but there is no doubt of the existence of a historical Jesus and the manner in which he died.

 

Drew was wondering about the spear. As for why, well, people usually hung on a cross for about 3 days before they died, but the Jewish celebration of the passover was beginning and the Jews couldn't work (i.e. prepare the body) on the Passover Sabbath, so when they saw He was dead, Jesus's followers wanted to burry him before the sabbath began (at sundown). The Romans were surprised He died so quickly so, to make sure He was dead, they stabbed Him in the side, probably between the ribs, piercing a lung. This would pretty much guatantee if He wasn't dead already, He would be.

 

The bible says that happened, NOG. The bible says a lot of things. It is certainly not irrefutably true. We already know of a great things which never were in the initial drafts of the Bible. We know that the source is already somewhat compromised. The story of the adultress where Jesus gave the now famous "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" line, for example, was added hundreds of years later and is now footnoted as such in any responsible translation of the bible. In the initial drafts, Jesus did not eat after returning from the dead. The part where Jesus ate a fish was added later because there was a growing belief that Christ didn't actually return physically in the early Christian church. Showing christ eating was a good way for the early church to combat that belief. My point is that we are (still) finding areas in which the translation of the Bible was compromised, so using it as an example of exactly what happened in any given circumstance is irresponsible at best. By the way, outside of biblical accounts, the only place you find Jesus of Nazareth written about is in the writings of a single Roman historian. The Jews at that time simply wrote him off as a(nother) false messiah.

 

"Another false messiah." People claming to be messiahs came and disappeared. Yet the followers of Jesus spread the word and faced persecution and many people today call themselves Christian because of this. Because of this I have always thought there had to be some truth to the story of the resurrection. We can agrue until the end but strange things happen in this world of ours.

Of course the orthodox Jews of that time wrote him off as a(nother) false messiah. If they hadn't they would have had to become followers.

IMO this has become a circular agrument.

I believe that BELIEF is a personal matter. Religion fills a human need or there would not be so many religious people whether christian or non-christian.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the common description of hell is from Dante.

Actually there will be some that will be sent to eternal punishment. The only one specifically names (as T2Bruno has pointed out more than once) was Cain. There will be some who have sinned so great that their sins will not be forgiven, and they will be subjected directly to Satan. From my understanding, that number will actually be very small compared to the number with other eternal destinies. But then again, not everyone who avoids total damnation will come into the presense of God either. But that part is way off topic...

 

@ Nog,

Well - in your first example, I can tell you two things I'm certain of from my personal experience (as my mother's an ER nurse and I've hung around doctors and hospitals my whole life): one, even the best doctors misdiagnose, for good or ill, on a regular basis, and most doctors have at least a couple stories like that of your friend (going both ways, where they can't explain at the time why someone lived or died); two, as someone who used to work in an ER myself, I've seen over 20 people die before my eyes (most well before their time), and probably half a dozen survive accidents unscathed that should have killed them. I've seen nothing that makes me believe God had anything to do with what happened to any of them. Or rather, nothing has compelled me to choose to believe they were miracles as you have (I'll elaborate on this point in a minute). I've just observed that the human body has the ability to be both incredibly risiliant (in the case of your friend, or the extremely lucky folks I've seen survive terrible traumas) and incredibly frail (in the case of a perfectly fit and healthy 18-year-old I knew who dropped dead in the middle of a game of Horse with absolutely no warning). We learn more everyday about what the human body is capable of.

For your second example, you yourself provide a plausible scientific explanation for how this could have been possible without God's help. Fields of static electricity could be another. Yet you assume, or choose to believe, that this is a miracle and dismiss other more reasonable explanations. That interpretation is your assumption only, and not what necessarily happened. This is the point I was trying to make when I brought up the sun and moon as Gods earlier. Throughout our history, man has declared as "the work of the God(s)" phenomena they lacked the intellectual capacity to reasonably explain and verify. When the Mayans or Egyptians had bad weather, they assumed the Gods were pissed off at them, and vice versa when they were blessed with good fortune. But today humanity has evolved enough to realize that there isn't a deity in a room somewhere flipping the "rain" and "sun" switches on a whim.

My point is - these events can indeed be explained by means other than divine intervention. That you feel the need to declare them miracles says more about your own need for validation of your faith than it does about the wonders of God's power. I'm willing to bet your friend was a fellow Baptist, right? I suppose if he were a Jew or a Catholic and still survived in the same extraordinary manner, that that must mean he's just damn lucky, right?

And another thing - this has nothing to do with what's possible, but rather what's more likely. Sure, as you say, anything's possible. Alice Cooper could "possibly" have been holding a giant invisible umbrella over your church that day, and your friend could "possibly" be Steve Austin. But it's much more likely that the doctors misdiagnosed his injury and an electrical disturbance diverted the precipitation (I'm no meteorologist, mind you). You might not like those explanations, but they're certainly more likely than God deciding to give you a hand that day, and certainly easier to prove. That you chose to interpret these phenomena as miraculous does not make them so.

@ BTA

It was SIX feet tall, he sang "FULL House," and it was a COLD sore on my LIP. You can't be my desciple if you're gonna go and screw up my gospel, buddy. Sheesh. No bread for you.

 

@Drew:
But my point was that there ARE other sources. There were more than one jewish historian that wrote about the early church and some were even alive and writing at the time of the crucifiction. Please read my posts in the context of the other posts on the board. My post was an explanation to Aldeth about why the Romans would stab a crucified man with a spear.

@Gnarff:
Well, hell as concretely defined as most christians concider it doesn't occur in the Bible, but there are some pretty close bits. Jesus repeatedly says unbelievers and the unrepentant will be 'thrown into the fires', though this is usually around a parable that compares them to weeds, which would be thrown into a fire and burned. He also makes several references to them being thrown out of the Kingdom of Heaven, 'where there will be weaping and gnashing of teeth.' And then there's the end of Revelation, where Satan and all his fallen angels get thrown into the lake of fire with the condemned. Very few places say anything about how long, but those that do say for eternity, so we're not making much of a stretch.
I'm guessing your understanding is part of Mormon docrtine, since I've never heard anything like it. Does the Book of Mormon say anything specific about that, or is this also elaboration on implied events?

@DR:
Weren't you the one a little while ago saying if the person died, it was the doctor's fault? That may have been another thread, but now you're saying we don't really know why some live and some die? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but make up your mind.

Unless you're talking about M-theory, you've lost me. And static electricity would not effect the formation of rain drops and only minorly effect their courses. Trust me, I spent a whole semester talking about the factors that influence condensation. And even if they could, the fact that such a strong EM field developed around us at just the right time and for just the right durration would be a miracle itself, not to mention the fact that such a field would fry all our electronics.
We've figured out how the Red Sea could be parted, what one thing may have caused 9 of the 10 plagues of Egypt, and even what may have felled the walls of Jerico, but the miracle is that the Red Sea was parted when Moses struck it with his staff, that the plagues of Egypt came after Moses warned Pharaoh, and that the walls of Jerico fell with the Israeli army marching around it. If electronic equipment routinely repelled rain, or if this had happened for the 1/2 hour before we got there, then I would not call them miracles.
As for probability, the odds are astronomically high (seriously, like 2.3 to the 258th power here) that even a single planet would exist anywhere in the universe capable of supporting life as we know it, but here we are. Which is simpler, that hundreds of millions of coincidences happened in just the right way for us to exist, or that there's a plan, that something greater may just be behind it all? Which is simpler, to say that complex and incredibly rare meteorological events coincided to protect our ministry, or that there was something else in control? Science has stumbled across 'coincidences' more impossible than humans could imagine and utterly failed to explain why they are the way they are. Science doesn't hold the answer to these things, and likely never will.
Please don't misunderstand me, I love science. I strongly encourage everyone who's interested in how the universe was formed and what makes stars die to do all (safe and ethical) experiments you can imagine, and if you can figure it out I want to be the first to know, but every scientist that totally discounts the idea of some kind of supreme being simply because they don't want to believe themselves has lost all respect in my book. Every scientist should be open to every possible explanation of any event. They may think one more likely than another, they may not try to test the untestable, but they should always be willing to admit it is possible.
Your own refusal to even admit it is possible sounds to me like a deep-seated fear that it is true (sorry, that's the psychologist in me coming through).

 

Ah, I love this bit. NOG, you just brought up what believers everywhere love to bring up, the shady supreme being who might have started it all. Since it is impossible (as you point out) to completely reject this idea then of course the bible and everything therein must be completely true and Jesus died for our sins. Am I the only one who notices the rather big gap between the possibility of a supreme being who put the universe in motion and that same being speaking to one dude in one small tribe, on one tiny planet in one ittsy bittsy solarsystem in one insignificant galaxy about how the supreme being wanted this tribe to live their exceedingly short lives and said race would exist for the tiniest moment of the history of the universe (same with our planet and our solar system, compared to the grand scheme the possible supreme being has devised the existance of oru solarsystem is less than what a millisecond would be for us). Is this what believers mean with a leap of faith? Geez, that is one huge leap.

 

Oh come on now. No "scientist" would even try to pass that number off on someone. 2.3 to the 258th power? So you're saying that someone calculated the probability of a planet supporting life with a base unit of 2.3? Why else would they express the number in those terms? Or a better question, what was the purpose of using 2.3 as the base? Or do you mean 2.3 X 10 to the 258th power? At least that would be in scientific notation, which would make it seem on the surface more credible.

Regardless the 258 has to be wrong. You're talking about a number that starts with 23 and has 257 zeroes after that. What the hell did he use to calculate that? While I will agree that the chance of life occuring is small, there are many in the scientific community today that feel there is a distinct possibility of life existing within our solar system outside of earth. The leading canidates are two moons of Saturn (Cassini and Enceladus) and a moon of Jupiter (Europa). Wow a 1 in 2.3 X 10 to the 258th power chance, and we may have had it happen as many as 4 times in our solar system. What are the f***ing odds of that?

Besides, there are billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars in the universe, and any one of those stars could have planets, and therefore, theoretically, life. Talking odds when speaking of a near infinite concept as the universe doesn't make sense, because no matter how long the odds, when you have a near infinite amount of chances, you're going to get some to pan out.

 

@ Nog,

Just two quick clarifications of things I never said:

No, that definitely was NOT me. I would never make that arguement. I think doctors are blamed far to often for circumstances beyond their control.

Then you haven't been reading what I said and misunderstand me entirely. I never said these events being miracles was impossible. Far from it. I just contend that assuming they are miracles because you can't find an earthly explanation is foolish, and you seem far more desperate to defend them as miracles than I am of calling them otherwise. So of course it's possible that they're miracles, I just find a miraculous explanation far less likely than a rational one. Again - if your friend were Jewish, would you still consider it a miracle? You assume that your ministry being protected from the rain is because of your faith, but what if this had happened to a Mosque? Or let's leave religion out of it entirely...how about a hot-dog stand or an outdoor Marylin Manson concert? How is it "the hand of God" in your particular situation, and something else in another?

I have no deep-seated fear of miracles. In fact, I wish there was stronger evidence that they were in fact miracles, but the evidence just isn't there. "Science can't explain THAT!" doesn't mean that science never will be able to explain it; this assumes scientific knowledge has stopped growing and we won't learn any more about the world than we know right now, which is incredibly short-sighted. And "God must have done it!" can't possibly be the most logical alternative explanation that modern sentient beings can produce. Just because something is strange and phenominal does not make it supernatural. If specific evidence can be found to prove supernatural involvement, then that's a different story.

As for your question of probability regarding the planets and formation of life, Aldeth and jaoquin pretty much hit that already, so I don't want to pile on and divert off topic into another creationism discussion (we already had one recently). All I'd like to say is I don't consider billions of changes in life forms over the course of a few hundred million years to be a series of "coincidences." I call that "evolution," and so would pretty much any scientist worth his salt.

edit:

We have?! DO explain that one, because if ANY biblical story was clearly exaggerated for shock value, it's gotta be Moses and The Ten Commandments.

[ April 14, 2006, 21:11: Message edited by: Death Rabbit ]

 

And I knew what you meant, and was playing off your joke. We should take this show on the road. "Blacky and D-Rab...coming to a comedy club near you." I'm sure our whole "Church of the Waddling Tuxedo" bit will have them rolling in the aisles.

 

The proof of the existance of God is explaned in the Book of Romans Chapter 1 verses 17-23.If you need more proof than what is offered in verse 20
then I see no need for you to concern yourself with the matter of God at all. If life and all that surrounds you does not reveal the existance of God to you then only judgment day can. Some hold the veiw that mankind is here because of a series of unrelated accidents over a massive amount of time. A ridiculous theory, or if you prefer, an event just as likely as man being made in the image of a Loving Creator All Being.
And if everyday life is not proof of Divine Intervention then maybe you need to start a personal relationship with god for yourself and see how it works out. Who knows, You might even like it