I’ll admit that I didn’t examine the images closely because I’m not an audiologist so they were meaningless to me. It appears they posted the after test twice. That has to be a mistake on the website’s part since they list her before hearing as 117dB, Left 120dB, not what the test shows.
At any rate, I’ll withdraw this case as an example. If documentation from a non-Christian website will satisfy you, I will certainly research and find one.
Except, of course, that they prove a miracle. And not just any miracle, but a verifiable Christian miracle.
As for documentation, if it’s not bullshit you will be able to find thousands upon thousands of doctors all jockeying for a Nobel. Again, PubMed is free to use.
Are you just going to pick the one that pops up from Google first or are you actually going to investigate it?
That is to say, do you just assume that the people claiming that there has been a miracle are telling the truth?
There are countless documented ‘miracles’ in the news daily - neo-natal intensive care units are full of them - so are ICU’s and other places - people survive things daily that would have killed them not that long ago.
You attribute that to ‘God’ and ‘faith’.
I attribute it to modern medicine and science -
I can virtually garuntee that if we relied on ‘faith’ healing, there would be far less miraculous events.
That’s a good point. How come it’s not a “miracle” when someone is killed or mutilated in a freakish, million-to-one accident?
“Bill’s testicles were yanked off in the spokes of his bicycle wheel when he slipped while cornering. Praise God!”
Well a serious study would have gone and taken multiple hearing tests prior to prayer treatment and found a median value for the sensitivity of each ear. Then 4 weeks of intensive prayer followed by an equal number of hearing tests post prayer cycle.
Then you’d check and see if the second set fell within or without the first data sets range of potential values. Then you’d have to repeat this for a large number of people.
But that requires math, repeatability and other godless things.
Yeah, but that quote is from Bill’s wife.
Even if we accept that the whole deal with a miracle is that it’s a singular, extraordinary event*, and not something to which scientific rigors are applicable, we can still look for things in instances of claimed miracles that might differentiate them from the kind of healing we see all the time.
So, for instance, it would be significantly easier to accept a claimed miracle as a miracle if, say, we had video of an angel descending from heaven and shooting beams of light at a Korean lady’s head. Or, less dramatically, if the Korean lady in question had developed superhuman hearing overnight. Or if an amputee suddenly regrew a limb. Or if the woman who lost her face and hands in a chimpanzee attack regenerated her eyeballs.
In other words, even accepting GEEPERS’ definition of a miracle as something that we can’t repeat and monitor, it would be trivial for an omnipotent being to create these miracles in such a manner that made them look like something more than typical biological phenomena. Indeed, the very being that GEEPERS thinks exists purportedly used to create miracles of this sort on a fairly regular basis thousands of years ago.
*And I don’t think that’s what the real claim is. Proponents of the healing power of prayer, for instance, are absolutely making the claim that the benefits of their practice are repeatable, otherwise there would be no point in doing it.
I’d modify that statement: lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. However, the neutral position to take is that a phenomenon or entity has not been demonstrated until evidence emerges that it does.
Science can deal with non-replicable events using forensic data (in support of the descent of man, for instance), but within the framework of a theory that makes falsifiable predictions, where an exception would be need to be evidentially supported.
Not always, but with the kinds of things Geepers is talking about, it certainly is.
If you claim you ate a delicious cake last week, and I can’t find any sign of a cake in your home today, then no, not finding cake crumbs is not a sound basis for doubting your word.
But if you claim that 2 million people lived in the Sinai desert for 40 years some 3300 years ago, and after decades of effort, archaeologists can find no sign of that, then that’s pretty good evidence it didn’t happen.
I would say the same thing about Luke’s census that required everyone in the Roman world to travel to the town where their ancestors lived in 1000 BCE, or the sun standing still for a day, or the invasion of Jerusalem by the zombie saints after the crucifixion. It simply defies belief that only a single person thought them worthy of note.
Post of the year!
It is also often a crutch.
and can also be blind.
Prior to answering these questions, I’ll relate the experience I’ve had with attempting to explain to theists what I actually think.
Theist friends of mine have read what I think in copious dissertations of mine, wherein I took great pains to explain my lack of theistic belief. Despite my best efforts, they still insist on some basic things:
I want to live an easy life, and religion makes life harder.
I want to live without a moral code. (Because I’m depraved and inherently evil)
I want to avoid punishment by claiming God doesn’t exist.
I am in a state of rebellion, knowing in my heart that God exists but doing everything I can to deny Him.
These things they insist on have less to do with me, and more to do with a tendency I call “transferrence,” whereby a person unable to accept that different people think differently insists on placing their OWN motivations into other people’s heads, and then interpreting others’ actions by running their own thoughts through an “effect/cause” machine. I emphasize that I call it “transferrence” because I’m not aware if there’s a more accurate term for this tendency/behavior. I don’t have any training in psychology.
Reality, on the other hand, is that I can’t ‘avoid’ something that isn’t there, nothing about life is ‘easy’ no matter what belief system you are under, and morals come from a combination of instinct and externally imprinted values, are different for different people, and have only a few ‘absolutes’ most sane people agree on, and I hesitate to call anything absolute, as a scientific method kind of guy.
Having said that, and having learned that no amount of explaining this has ever changed a theist’s mind, I’ll go on answering these questions.
"Why are you an atheist?"
I’ve come to see the religion I happened to be exposed to as a child as no different than religions from other times, regions and cultures. They all sought to explain our origins and things which weren’t understood. When I examined my own religion more closely, as well as these other religions I had discovered, I realized they were all the same, all insisting theirs was the right one, all with just as many reasons and justifications as to how and why the others were wrong and theirs was right. When I confronted my religious leaders about this similarity and how to reconcile the differences between my religion and others (if it were even possible), I was told that I was “chosen,” that I was somehow blessed and special to have been born in the region I was born, from the parents who had me, and even the country in which I was born, because my religion taught that my country was the future seat of Zion, and that people being born “during this dispensation” were “Latter Day Saints.” Guessed my religion yet? I owe this status to the ‘fact’ that during the ‘War in Heaven,’ I was a particularly valiant soldier on the side of Christ, who had a plan for us that I bought into wholeheartedly, before ‘the veil’ was pulled over my memory of such events and I was thrust into this cold world as a squalling infant. Yay, me, I guess. I’m reminded of the movie, Defending Your Life, in which people in Heaven waiting for their trials were able to visit a place where they could see their past lives-- had I done this, I might have had a glimpse into my War in Heaven heroics. Pity.
Aaaanyway, having come to this realization, the next step was to look for alternatives. Science (the process, not the thing) was there as a tool for finding out what reality actually IS. I’d been primed as a religious child to see science as an adversary that was in the business of coming up with things to tear me away from God. That was its purpose-- on the outside, it seemed to be about simply gathering evidence and going where the evidence takes one, but nooooo, in reality it was placed in the world by Satan to attract the sharpest minds and draw them in the wrong direction. So as I started reading all these evil science books, I remember feeling guilty and rebellious, as if I was doing something wrong and dirty. Church leaders tried to dissuade me from this view, pretending to be perfectly fine with science and technology in all areas where it did not threaten their worldview. Where it DID, however, said leaders offered me alternatives like creation ‘science.’ I quickly saw these things as anything BUT science. The damage was done, and the more I read and investigated and learned, the farther I found myself from feeling at home in any church.
"People across all kinds of cultures and throughout histories have religions, and many of them are pretty similar. Doesn’t that suggest they’re on to something?"
It suggests they are all human, with the human need for explanations, parental figures, moral codes, and assurances that this life isn’t all there is, with the promise of eternal life and even rewards if you behave yourself. The difference arose because of variances between cultures, but the basic premise is the same. A super-being created everything and should be worshipped.
My skeptical nature demands that I be suspicious of religion BECAUSE it is so popular. I don’t just jump on the wagon. I ask WHY so many have jumped on it.
"Did something happen to you to make you an atheist?"
I read a lot. I’m honest with myself about myself. I know what my fears and weaknesses are, and make no excuse for them. I see religion for what it is. I had to be all of these things to overcome indoctrination from childhood. I wish everyone else could stop choosing what to believe based on what feels good and accept things based on evidence and reason, and NOT because the alternative (that there’s “nothing to believe in,” or that “this is all we have”) is so abhorrent to them. To me, truth is more important than “What I want.”
"Are you angry at god?"
Nothing to be angry at, here.
"Do you hate religion?"
I’m angry at men who use the idea of god (and the knowledge that most people need to believe there is one) and the basic tenets of religions to commit terrible acts-- against humanity, against children, against fearful people who need a life coach. I’m angry that they take people’s money. I’m angry that the hope they give to people is false.
"Do you think religion is evil?"
No, not in the sense that a person can be evil. I think religion is a phenomenon that arises from needs we have, and that it can be understood and countered instead of followed.
"Do you think religious people are stupid?"
No, and this is one of the most frustrating aspects of religion for me. I think many religious people are ignorant, NOT stupid. I just wish they would read more. I wish they would educate themselves.
It frustrates me to think that people rely on evidence and courts of law to determine most things that are difficult to determine (as in the realm of justice), but are able to suspend that disbelief when it comes to religious claims. I think there’s no evidence for miracles or dieties, but these same people have somehow loosened their critical thinking rigor when it comes to accepting certain wild claims as evidence for things they WANT to believe.
"Do you think religion should be stamped out or banned?"
No. I would rather people CHOOSE not to be religious.
I think it could be called “projection”, which was one of the ego’s defence mechanisms as outlined by Freud. I’m not a big fan of Freud’s theories, but they are very handy as a heuristic when describing behaviour (unless one has to be super rigorous). Perhaps because they’ve entered the collective unconscious…
In a sense, all humans in receipt of empathy project in order to better understand the behaviour of others. We know that we’d want a cookie, so we’d understand why someone else would steal a cookie. It requires more higher order thinking to understand that other people’s motivations and sets of premises may be different from our own though. Thus, when people insist that the only reason one would want to be an atheist is because one wants to act immorally, one understands the unspoken desire of such people (along with, perhaps, their inability to fully empathise - unless they’re being disingenuous when using such arguments). It’s the same case with preachers that talk about the allure of the gay lifestyle.
I thought it would be fun to compile some of the answers to the question, “Are you angry at god?”.
Here’s the rundown of people we also cannot be angry with (if you’re keeping score at home, first place is a three-way tie between Lord Voldemort, the Easter Bunny, and Baʿal):
Baal (2)
Easter Bunny (2)
Lord Voldemort (2)
Cthulhu
Cupid
Darth Vader
Dracula
fairies
Frodo
gnomes
Great Pumpkin
leprechauns
Lex Luthor
Mickey Mouse
Terminator
Zeuss (sic)
mmm
If atheists weren’t angry at God, they would not be so fevert in their campaigns to attack and destroy Christianity even going as far as to create an atheist Bible mocking scripture vs by verse. Seriously, wouldn’t your time be better spent doing something else to benefit humanity?
Disgusting to say the least.
We’re not. You can’t be angry at something you don’t believe exists. Did you have any luck in finding a better miracle cite?
In my last campaign against christians I crucified 30 of 'em.
They weren’t so uppity then anymore.
I recon 5 more campaigns should do it. We’ll wipe them off the face of the earth.