Well i dont know thats why im asking.Cessationism seems appealing to me as an alternative way.What i do know is that miracles are not happening today .Not in the US ,not in Europe ,and certainly no here.Only God knows why not.But maybe someone here has a good explanation why they are not happening to this day.
Show me. If being honest is being jaded, if being deluded is being faithful, if being rational is profoundly untrue then I’m a jaded faithless liar, and proud to be so by the grace of God.
Blurring what God did when He was a carpenter with whoever walks the U.S. and Europe now is a bit of a category error.
Neither you nor Klax even remotely know anything of the sort. And the claim that either of you do is irrational.
What you can likely more accurately declare is that you have not been able to observe any convincing-to-you miracles or healings today. And that you have not found any 2nd-hand accounts today convincing either. Those claims would be much more coherent.
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Fair enough.But we are not a few on this .Only a handfull of christians(not atheisst)claim to have seen miracles.Why is that?Are they so rare really?
Pure projection. You know of no supernatural healings whatsoever in your experience.
We know everything of the sort. How do you know otherwise?
I’m not the one making universal claims here. You (and Nick) are. You claim certainty that no such things exist anywhere or for anybody. I’m merely stating that you don’t have grounds for certainty to universalize such claims. My own claim is the much more modest: “I think there have been, and continue to be miracles - even if they are not everyday experiences for most of us - and perhaps even unobserved at all by many.” Even if I can’t present you with a (convincing-to-you) specific account, my claim remains the more coherent one.
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No it doesn’t Mervin. Claiming that God intervenes in nature and obliterates His traces is +1 -1 = 0. It’s that coherent Mervin. Can you put a number on ‘most’? And what has this got to do with faith?
I don’t know why they are rare but miracles happen. More in frontiers where the gospel is spreading among people that have not learned of Jesus earlier but also in Europe and elsewhere.
One problem is the definition of miracle. If someone prays in the name of Jesus and an unlikely healing or event happens, is that a miracle?
The last case I heard was a woman having a massive intracranial hemorrhage causing severe and wide brain damage. She was braindead in hospital bed for about an hour as people were waiting for the last family member to arrive and see the braindead before she was taken away. While waiting, the family went to eat. During this time, the husband prayed and got the certainty that God gives the braindead wife back. He told this certainty to his daughter when they were walking back to hospital. When they returned to the hospital room, they saw confused nurses in the room. The braindead had returned to life. She still had damaged brain but was awake after being braindead for about an hour. Was this a miracle? For the people involved and those who knew the family, it was a miracle.
Personally I’ve never had any miraculous experiences, however small, despite being a theist. It’s not for lack of wanting, I think I can relate to @NickolaosPappas on that.
So you’re saying that’s because we want them, we won’t get them? But once we don’t want it, we’ll get them? Seems a bit cruel to me.
On cessation… Well, until reading this thread I was sure that was the position of Christianity, but then I’m no expert. Surprised that there are completely opposite views on this.
I partly agree with cessation though, it seems like all the big miracles ended, but I do leave possibility of smaller ones.
It’s worth mentioning that with healing, if the doctors find even the smallest, natural explanation, however unlikely then it’s written off as a coincidence. Which shows the attitude were if there are any natural explanation, then it can’t be a miracle. I don’t personally agree with this position.
I’m not making strong claims here. I’m not even all that convinced that “intervention” is really the right or most accurate concept in play when trying to apprehend what God’s ongoing activity in nature looks like. Though I certainly recognize that “intervention” is sure what it looks like from human perspective when we speak of things we call miracles.
The gospel writers certainly didn’t portray Jesus as being all that sympathetic [quite the opposite, in fact] with crowd demands (or religious leader requests) on him to put on a show for them “so that they could then know”.
Maybe its a bit like somebody who wants to know if you’re really a good friend, but they want to be sure. So they approach you with this: “Would you give me $50 because then I can know whether you’re really my friend or not.” You refuse because you don’t like their attitude of using this as an evaluation tool for friendship. Does this mean that you are never ever generous with your friends - even in monetary ways? Certainly not. You would probably do all sort of things with and for them - maybe even generously so on your part. But as soon as somebody wants to make it “all about getting money from you” - you refuse to play that particular game with them. Does that make you cruel, if all you want is to have genuine relationship with people who already love you regardless of what you do with your money?
I’m thinking that might be one of the differences to make here.
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That assumes that the very nature of what we are should be entirely malleable, that being conscious beings with a conscience and choice would not in any way tie a creator’s hands. Only cruel if reality is not only God’s plaything but such that no object or attribute were bound by any other.
I admire that Mervin. And still push back hard. What God’s ongoing activity in nature looks like is grounding its being. The only intervention we ‘know’ about (which we don’t), can believe, can posit and therefore have warrant for God at all, is as, in, to, around, from Jesus in rapid attenuation. To claim, to even countenance statistically invisible intervention now is demeaning in every way.
A demonstrable scientific fact discovered by psychology – belief is a part of the perceptual process.
We are all atheists with respect to all the things we don’t believe. In some ways I am less so because I do not make my experiences the measure of reality itself and believe there is an irreducibly subjective aspect to reality – i.e. reality is not completely the same for everyone.
People see the same light and hear the same sounds, and yet some see miracles while others see nothing but meaningless coincidences.
You go too far… He did exactly that, saying that He was helping people to believe. Say rather that there were limits to this, and people who refused to believe what He did show them would not be given proof. The divine demand that we have faith remains.
I do not expect to see anything that has no scientific explanation – I would expect and look for such an explanation. EXCEPT where science tells us to expect no explanations. I certainly don’t define miracles as violations of the laws of nature, and I see nothing in the Bible to support the claim that any of these were contrary to the laws of nature either. What I see instead is nearly limitless possibilities in the laws of nature themselves which supports the active involvement of God in events.
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Ohh wow.Bold claim huh?Since when you are so sure it was God and you know something else going on?if i sudden;ly drop temperature fter 3 days of me burning with fever would it be God ?It doesnt match up and i dont exceot it too.Your claim is wihout evidence
What atheists did saw miracles?Ive never heard anyone of them.yet in the bible they clearly saw
Mervin get into my shoes a little will ya?I cant accept that miracles happen to only a handfull of Christians that claim they do happen ,and they are “explainable” as well.It doesnt add up .As ive asked above are they so rare?Does God limit so much himself on that one?What about the miracles the apostles did and mere christians today cant do?
ask yourself what you believe in if you admire in a miracle a God that finds it necessary to impress us by acts of magic to make to manipulate matter and give you what you would wish for to satisfy your materialistic thinking, e.g. more alcohol, and creates a fake reality to hide your lack of material wealth, hide your lack of material wealth. Even worse, being told where the water came from, would you think to turn that purest of waters, that which was seen good enough to ritually cleanse you, as to wash away that what made you unclean and prevent you from entering the place of worship, be improved upon by becoming physical wine?
It might be time to look at your value scale and drink some clean water, a water clean enough to wash away that what makes you unclean in the eye of the Lord and you may experience that miracle of Canaan in a profound change of your perception of reality. You can try to do the same with alcohol and ask yourself why a serving a fine wine would make you more presentable and to whom and for what reason.
If we are already lost in the first miracle and think they are about a God changing reality to our wishful thinking, who’s will is it really we want to be done - as that is the God we believe in.
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I always smile about those who see a miracle in the process of speeding up the wine making procedure to create a fake reality in order to make someone look rich, but do not see the miracle in the birth of a child or the love they receive or give to others.
If one sees the power of ones God in that what defies nature which we should think of as an expression of Gods will, it is clear that one thinks he hasn’t done a good enough job 
You addressed your post to me, but I have no idea why nor what you hoped to achieve by posting it.
I should have been third person speak or in a reflective way as in we should ask ourselves how we interpret miracles. I did actually look at them as material events myself until I eventually found their spiritual interpretation much more coherent as part of my Worldview, and coherence is what we should strive for. Your comment
suggests to me that you understand the point of the sign to be a change in physical reality which does not make sense to me, so I hope I might provoke you to rethink.
I am reminded of a potentially unending arm-wrestling match that I had about a year ago with a former Christian convert to Baha’i. Believing himself to be reasonably informed about Christianity and to be more content with Baha’i doctrines, he affirmed the “spiritual” meaning of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension and the ecumenical and syncretic “purpose” of all religions.
Baha’i is “the Dagwood Sandwich” of religion; IMO, a veritable “Tower of Babel” intended to unite all humanity in one enormous “group hug”.
As a consequence of his “enlightened” view of reality, he considered my affirmation of Jesus’ literal death, resurrection, and ascension to be provincial, backward, fundamentalist, and antithetical to everything Baha’ullah, Mohammad, Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, Confucius, and Lao-tze taught.
So, perhaps you’ll understand, whether you approve or not, why I view your “spritual interpretation” with a jaudiced eye.
I’m a big fan of intelligibility. If I write something that you don’t understand, feel free to encourage me to strive harder. But be forewarned, if you think the intelligibility of my words will always result in your agreement with them, I suspect that you’re going to be disappointed, to wit:
- With the conversion of water into wine at the wedding in Canae specifically in mind, I wrote: “'Physical reality” consists of sets of things in their most fundamental form, in different relationships. Change the relationships, change the set’s physical reality.”
- My words seemed “incoherent” (i.e. unintelligible?) to you, and you hoped to provoke me to rethink my claim.
- I took a moment, rethunked the matter, and decided to share a worldview with you that I inherited back in 2004 that was written by now-deceased agnostic atheist. Partial Edited Fragment In that worldview, changing water into wine is possible, albeit uncommon.