Is this a miracle?

MrCynical said:
MobBoss, read what I have actually posted. I have not "struck" at "religionists", or Christianity specifically. I have commented that a hypothetical God that would give miracles of this type would be of dubious morality, and hence unworthy of worship. It is not an attack on any religion and I am sick of you putting words into my mouth to say that it is. Not all discussion of religion is a specific attack on your beliefs MobBoss.
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I humbly beg to differ....I am not taking words "out of your mouth" when I quote you thusly: that no-one in their right mind would worship them. So please enlighten me how you define someone not "in their right mind". Do you mean crazy perhaps?
 
MobBoss said:
Once more, I dont claim to personally know that the fire that protected the hebrews was either natural or unnatural. Thus, in turn, I have no idea if God ordered 20k people to die in a mudslide in Chile. Neither do I propose to know the "Why's and wherefor" of how God works and acts. All I can say is that it is in his character to save his people like he did, but it is not in his character to wipe out 20k people without a reason to do so.
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How the heck can you presume to know what's in His character and what isn't, and then claim not to know the 'Why's and wherefor' of how He works and acts? :crazyeye: I know faith requires a suspension of logic, but this is ridiculous.

Anyway, I care equally little for your caring for my contempt. Believe me, I'm not wasting time typing this purely for your sake. :rolleyes:
 
MobBoss said:
From websters: Belief:
1. The state of believing, conviction or acceptance that certain things are true or real.
2. Faith, esp religious faith.
3. Trust or confidence.
4. Anything believed or accepted as true (creed, doctrine, tenet).
5. An opinion, expectation, judgement.

Even websters says that....but opinion is also part of belief.
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It is, and it isn't. Its not a black and white answer.

"It is" in the sense that you would believe in math. How do you know 2 + 2 is 4? Math seems to meet definitions 1, 3, 4 and 5.

"It isn't" in that the way this argument is typically framed is that people try to argue that atheism vs. religious "belief" are parallel.

They are not. The distinguishing thing being #2. So, I think in the context of the atheism vs. religion debate, I don't consider it a belief. That said, I'll grant you that for some people atheism is a religion, in terms of how they elevate the argument, their fervency, etc...

NOTE: I'm posting as more of an observer, I'm not atheist or religious in this context... meaning I don't have a rooting interest.

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As to the original question. If a person believes in miracles then this would qualify. To me its just statistical deviation. Its an understandable, though extremely rare thing, just like the converse where 1 person in 1 million gets some odd/rare disease. Is that, likewise, a miracle? lol, I'm thinking no. :)
 
IglooDude said:
How the heck can you presume to know what's in His character and what isn't, and then claim not to know the 'Why's and wherefor' of how He works and acts? :crazyeye: I know faith requires a suspension of logic, but this is ridiculous.
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Not in the least. Say for example, in chess I can play three moves ahead. Grandmasters can play 10 moves ahead or more....the same with todays computers....now envision God as a chess player who can see infinitly the moves ahead. I dont claim to know the specifics of why God does or does a specific move - I cant see that far ahead....however, I know generally his character, as shown in the bible.
 
I humbly beg to differ....I am not taking words "out of your mouth" when I quote you thusly: that no-one in their right mind would worship them. So please enlighten me how you define someone not "in their right mind". Do you mean crazy perhaps?
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OK, let's go one step at a time through this.

1. We are considering the case of a God (a hypothetical god, not the Christian God, or of any other religion) who would cause this particular event, making it a miracle.

2. As I have argued before a God who was omnipotent/extremely powerful, and of superb moral excellence would not do this. If they have the ability they are morally obliged to help all that are needed, not just one or two miraculous cases. Hence I do not think that a God who wold perform miracles like this is morally sound.

3. For a God to be worthy of worship they must be be of supreme moral excellence. To worship something that was not of perfect moral excellence would be worrying, and yes, I would regard as a sign of a mental problem.

4. Hence the hypothetical God which would perform this miracle (and I state for the umpteenth time is not the Christian God), is not worthy of worship.

As a corollary a God worthy of worship would not perform miracles for one or two individuals. Since, as I have said before, I have seen no miracles, and no reliable documentation of miracles performed by the Christian God (or indeed any other), this does not imply the Christian God (or any other) is unworthy of worship.

I am unable to simplify this explanantion any further MobBoss, and repeating it is getting dull. Possibly you are having trouble with the concept of a hypothetical God who isn't the Christian God? My point is that I do not think any genuine God would perform these kind of miracles. Got the idea yet?
 
Atheisim is not belief. It is defined by lack of belief. It is a neautral or automatic state. Everyone is born an atheist. That is peoples nataural state.
 
silver 2039 said:
Atheisim is not belief. It is defined by lack of belief. It is a neautral or automatic state. Everyone is born an atheist. That is peoples nataural state.
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If that were the case religion would have never occurred.
 
MobBoss said:
If that were the case religion would have never occurred.
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And people are born nekkid, so God only knows why we're wearing clothing... ;)
 
If that were the case religion would have never occurred.
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MobBoss, this comment really doesn't make any sense if you believe God exists. If God exists then he can instill religion in the first people (for the Christian viewpoint Adam and Eve). Religion can therefore occur perfectly well if God exists, as he can initiate it.

If God doesn't exist then religion can still occur, since while a human may exist in an atheistic (or as a more neutral term, non-theistic) state, they may still be gullible and/or capable of misunderstanding. For example a religion could be deliberately founded by a human who had no belief in it for personal gain with the gullible as true believers which then perptuate it. Or more likely, religion could simply be an effort to explain the many things which were inexplicable (most of which have been explained). It would only take one person to kickstart a religion, and they wouldn't necessarily have to believe in it themselves.

So whether God exists or not a religion could appear even if all humans start out atheistic.

DISCLAIMER: The God referred to above is not the Christian God or the God of any religion. It is a hypothetical being and no comment above should be taken as condemnation/criticism/intolerance/striking or any other derogatory action towards a specific faith, or faiths in general.

That cover everything MobBoss, or do you still have the false impression that this is a bitter attack on your personal beliefs? ;)
 
MobBoss said:
Not in the least. Say for example, in chess I can play three moves ahead. Grandmasters can play 10 moves ahead or more....the same with todays computers....now envision God as a chess player who can see infinitly the moves ahead. I dont claim to know the specifics of why God does or does a specific move - I cant see that far ahead....however, I know generally his character, as shown in the bible.
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Which, of course, was written by His hand. Which puts us nicely into that little circular loop called 'faith'; one has faith that God doesn't lie, because He said He doesn't, in the book that He wrote, and the book is infallible because He said it was, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

Fortunately, He already knows that seeing an infinite number of moves ahead means that His actions will be inscrutable within recorded-human-history timelines, and thus my own worship of Him or belief in Him won't matter a whit to this particular cosmic chess match, because statistically I'm personally more likely to be a sacrificial pawn than doing any checkmating of kings either way.
 
IglooDude said:
Fortunately, He already knows that seeing an infinite number of moves ahead means that His actions will be inscrutable within recorded-human-history timelines, and thus my own worship of Him or belief in Him won't matter a whit to this particular cosmic chess match, because statistically I'm personally more likely to be a sacrificial pawn than doing any checkmating of kings either way.
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Or so you think. Remember, even David only started out as a shepard boy.:)
 
silver 2039 said:
Atheisim is not belief. It is defined by lack of belief. It is a neautral or automatic state. Everyone is born an atheist. That is peoples nataural state.
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Well, I don't know about that. I just see it as a rejection of belief. I guess it would be best characterized as a "disbelief".
 
Disbelief as a philosophy and a way to live your life, it's close to being a religion, but it's anti-religion. In it's purest sense, knowing absolutely that God does not exist is faith.
 
MobBoss said:
Or so you think. Remember, even David only started out as a shepard boy.:)
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Right, that's why I said statistically likely. Anecdotal evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, there has been one or two Davids for every several million inscrutably-nasty disaster victims through history.
 
I think it is a great and wonderful thing to happen to this man.

A miracle? Sure. But not verifiably the work of a God or anything of that sort. A miracle because it is a great thing that happened to someone in need.
 
MobBoss, can you explain to us that in your view, what exactly constitutes a miracle?
 
It is a miracle in the sense that something unexpected and awesome just happened, but not a miracle in a religious way.

A man was in a coma while his nerves were being repaired by his body. The repair is complete. He woke up. But of course proving divine intervention is impossible, so this debate will go on forever.
 
What do nerves have to do with a god? You do realise i hope that in the future we will have knowledge of even smaller microcosms, and their parts, and so then we would have already been familiar with nerve-regenaration, much like we can already cure so many illnesses which in past times reached epidemic scale and killed half of Europe.

Back then those illnesses were seen as the act of god, and nothing was known of bacteria or viruses. Today anyone claiming that he would need god to help with combating a virus is pretty much seen as a backward sad person, and the same will be so in the future hopefully in regards with nerve therapy/regenaration.

This is no miracle, like anything else is not either. Any person can become locked up in his own world of unlikely concepts of god or miracle-making.

What one thinks of a god is just the overall result of his own views of such a thing, and can be traced back to a great deal of its origins. The very idea of a religion, on the other hand, is even older than that, and it is an issue studied by anthropology.
 
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