Do you want me to ppreach to you or let you be?
your choice.
If it is let you be then do not provoke or insult my faith.
Richard
So God answers prayers about lawnmowers (but not very effectively), but doesn’t answer prayers about plane crashes and earthquakes?
I want you to demonstrate the ineffectiveness, incompetence, ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy of your arguments in favour of religion and against evolution.
No you do not.
You want to try and belittle my faith and God.
If God and the supernatural exist then so do mirracles
If God does not exist then neither do mirracles.
My views on evolution are intertwined with my belief in God.
As long as you refuse the existence of God you will not see my views as valid.
So make up your mind.
God or no?
Richard
PS
I do not normally engage with people who are rude and insulting to me. You have demonstrated your superiority more than enough, Go and sit in your own glory, I prefer God’s, it is real.
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are you suggesting that answering prayer through miracles is just a numbers game? If that were true, sin would have exited this world a long time ago on the end of a very large boot worn by our Creator…however, we are all still here…and so is sin!
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I have seen miracles / miraculous answers to prayers, so cannot deny that miracles happen. Yet, I have seen more cases where a seriously sick person dies despite the prayers, or recovers to partial health, instead of complete healing. My interpretation about that tension is that miracles are God’s acts, they happen when God decides, not when preachers or other believers decide. And the miracles never happen like the outcome of slots machines where you put in a coin/prayer and always get the hoped answer. Miracles are miracles, not natural laws.
I remember one friend who prayed for sick almost every week. Very few got healed immediately. When we traveled to India and there was a meeting in predominantly hindu area, he prayed for the sick there. The first few persons that came for prayer, all were healed. There were physical damage, deaf and others. For me, that was a demonstration that God has His times and places. The same person prayed in two environments, in a similar way, but the results were different. At the frontier of gospel God showed what He can do, in a (post-)Christian society there were less signs - and probably less need for the miracles.
As we all have to die, there will come the final health problem, accident or other problem that kills, no matter how much we pray.
Claims that the miracles do not happen because you do not have sufficient faith or have a secret sin or whatever else condition that prevents miracles are often indirect demands that you have to earn the miracles. That is not the gospel of grace, it may be a subconscious attempt to transfer the credit from God to a human.
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Christ invariably linked miracles to faith.
It is also a “get out of jail free card” excuse for things not going as we want them to.
Christ suggested that if we have enough faith we could ove mountains. Probably hyperbola but…
The deeper you get into prayer and miracles the more it confuses and contradicts. We pray for God’s will not ours and then complain when His will does not match ours. We ask for something selfish and wonder why it is refused. Is asking for healing selfish? Yes, if you want that person to still be around.
When my father first had strokes I prayed over him with my sister. She expected a full recovery, I did not. The “healing” was the strength and courage to keep living with the slowly debilitating illness which made communication almost impossible. WE had to work at it to understand him and you could see his frustrations. But, he lived for another 15 years.
Was there a miracle? You tell me. Superficially the answer would be no, but i know/knew my father, and i know different. My father was “Healed” within his own beliefs and acceptance. He would have taken a full recovery as nepotism for a clergy.
Some miracles are more obvious, some are coincidence or circumstance beyond normal belief, Often there is a “logical” explanation for the doubters to hold onto. Like i said, I do not need God to prove Himself so I am free to “believe” what I want You can call it delusion if you wish. It is my faith not yours.
Richard
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No, just pointing out the implications of your tale.
I do. Some of the best arguments against religion are the trivially flawed arguments advanced for it.
Ones like this:
How are you going to get a miracle without God?
Unless you are going to assign fluke as a worker of miracles, perhaps. But, I would argue that fluke or chance has no allegiance and therefore the “miracle” has no meaning
This thread is not about evolution.
Your criticisms of religion are irrelevant. I do not have to prove God or my faith to to you, in fact, neither is possible. It is a well known fact that you cannot argue into faith. You either have it or you don’t. Clearly you don’t.
However, i do not hold that against you, and neither, I believe, does God, You will get a difference of opinion about the last bit, but that is the nature of belief and faith, it is individual.
Richard
Apparently you’ve never heard of any of the various other supernatural creatures and entities capable of producing miraculous effects via magic:
Angels, Athena, Bast, brownies, cockatrices, Cthulhu, Dagda, demons, efreeti, Erlang Shen, fairies, Freya, goblins, Gorgon, Hephaestus, house-elves, imps, Isis, jinn, Janus, kelpies, Ki, Loki, …
If you are going to buy into any of them, why not God?
“Magic” is usually deception.
You are just tying (unsuccessfully) to ridicule my faith. Go ahead, it will do no good.
Stick to science, at least you have some knowledge there.
Richard
For the same reason I don’t buy into any of them.
I note that you haven’t admitted that these alternative options for producing miracles completely skewer your argument that “If God does not exist then neither do mirracles.”
Only a fool believes only God is the supernatural force in the universe.
I neither believe or disbelieve in the existence of specific beings, only that there must be a yang to God’s ying.
IOW it is all part and parcel of believing in God, so your attempt at being smart failed (AGAIN)
Richard
There is an alphabetical list of supernatural creatures from the Collins dictionary:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/word-lists/supernatural-supernatural-creatures#google_vignette
It doeesn’t give names for initial Q, R, X & Y. I suggest yeti.
I used to have panic attacks. One night at a Foursquare church I was prayed for with laying on of hands. I have never had a panic attack since then.
But I do get anxiety attacks (which some people told me is my fault, that I didn’t have enough faith for full healing) and I do have PTSD episodes.
I saw one with a Lutheran missionary in Africa: at a village where he had been invited to come speak with people, he was faced with demonic activity, and without thinking he responded with a command in Jesus’ name for the demon to get out and leave, and it did – but when he heard about demonic activity in another village and went to cast that demon out, nothing happened.
The interesting thing was that while he saw the second instance as a failure, the villagers saw it as a lesson from God, that God makes the appointments to face down demons, don’t make them yourselves. They were asking the right question – “Why did God do it that way?” rather than looking for reasons.
Amen!
A certain scholar once summed up the difference between Martin Luther’s and Rome’s theologies as Luther saying “God cannot be bought”.
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I remember a Methodist pastor using those exact same words in a sermon forty years ago!
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Reading these responses is surprising. The conversation seems to have shifted to whether miracles are possible. This is a ridiculous conversation. If you are a Christian there is no question that miracles are possible.
Likewise a bunch of people here are talking about “claims” of miracles. I would not be so broken up about claims of miracles. These are confirmed miracles. Likewise the miracles I’ve seen are not miracles like turning water into wine or healing, it is other people, online prophets and mystics having knowledge of things about me that they say comes from the Holy Spirit.
The miracles I’m talking about are a prophet speaking truly and and a fundamentalist having a word that they say is from God that precisely speaks to my situation out of the blue with no prompting.
What i’m asking is, if you were in my situation and you saw them saying things that are just not biblically true or objectively false would you ignore them like I have and choose the Bible or would you be swayed by miracles?
Because from where I’m standing fundamentalism is impossible to believe. Genesis 1:6 clearly portrays a flat earth, and while the wisdom of the world maybe foolishness to God (as one of them tells me) the sphericity of the earth isn’t. That’s just one of the issues with them. One I keep asking about biblical theology to test them and they keep getting every detail wrong.
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There are ways of discovering such things without the prompting or even the inclusion of the Holy Spirit.
The usual litmus for genuine faith is the identifying of Christ and confession of His salvation, however, that knowledge is easily found and can be falsely claimed. Commercial Christianity is not a problem on the UK but the Phil Collins “I’ve been talking to Jesus all my life” rhetoric is sadly real. If the thrust of the message is to relieve you of your money then you can be pretty certain its bogus.
The Bible warns of people peddling false gospels and popular messages. Anyone who needs to “prove” they are genuine, probably isn’t.
There is only one Gospel of Jesus. If that is not preached then everything else is just showboating.
The “miracles” you talk of are not the sort of thing found in the Bible other than from Jesus Himself, and apart from Nathaniel, He didn’t use it for recruitment.
The miracles I talk about are healing, duplication, and saving from death, that align with the type of miracles Jesus demonstrated. However, if the person claims the power for themselves rather than as a tool of God they are false. Miracles glorify God alone, not the person through which they are given.
Richard
@RichardG:
The Bible warns of people peddling false gospels and popular messages. Anyone who needs to “prove” they are genuine, probably isn’t.
There is only one Gospel of Jesus. If that is not preached then everything else is just showboating.
The principles are simple, applying them is not always as easy.
Miracles may be a real blessing, help and gamechanger, but they are never sufficient proof of someone proclaiming the truth. Someone may speak information originating from God and be totally wrong in another claim.
Bible is the accepted measure in questions of faith but the practical caveat is that the interpretations of biblical scriptures are only partial truths. If someone claims to know all the correct interpretations of biblical scriptures, it is wise to avoid that person or group because that person is a blind guide.
The incomplete interpretations of biblical scriptures are a two-edged sword. It is dangerous to swallow all claims without chewing. On the other hand, your own interpretations may be false and apparently false (= against your previous interpretation) claims may be correct. There is a need to pray wisdom and guidance and then study.
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