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Post by EvenThen on Oct 7, 2004 22:24:26 GMT -5
Hey guys-
I just wanted to share with you some of the experiences that have lead me to believe that there is a God. I am in no way stretching the truth or lying to you about these experiences, and have nothing to gain from lying. I suppose that it is up to you whether or not to believe me, but I swear that I’m not making any of this up. I have had countless experiences that have confirmed in my heart the existence of something more.
Here’s the first of many…
At summer camp two years ago, we had a time of prayer and worship. We had gathered in a circle to pray for the healing of two deaf girls. As we were praying, the guy standing beside me suddenly stopped, took off his glasses and began to read the lettering on the t-shirts of those around him- he all of a sudden could see without his glasses. A checkup later in the year showed that his vision had been restored to 20/20, which it had never been before. Also, the two deaf girls, by the end of the night, went from being able to hear nothing at all to being able to hear noises.
Here’s another: I went to Mexico on a missions trip with my youth group. A friend of mine on the team had been having severe pains in her ankle, which would prevent her from going out to minister that day. I told her that day before lunch that I believed that God would heal her ankle for the day. Later, she came up to report that the pain was gone. Also, on the same trip, a nasty case of the flu went around. Someone in my room became violently ill and had to stay in bed for 2 days. One morning I woke up feeling sick, and prayed that it would go away. It didn’t. But later, as I sat down to eat breakfast, felt a sudden urge to pray for it again. In that instant, it was gone. I felt nothing.
Now tell me- what do you think of that? I swear to God I’m not lying- these things happened. Its not logical to think that the people that were healed were simply lying- why would anyone lie and said that they were healed? Wouldn’t that simply aggravate their condition? Why would you want to walk around with your glasses off if you really needed them? Why would you lie about your foot feeling better and than have to walk in pain all day?
What do you guys think?
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Post by droskey on Oct 8, 2004 12:36:48 GMT -5
First off, welcome to the board, EvenThen. I look forward to more posts from you.
Now on to this post.
EvenThen I won't assume that anyone is lying here. However, there are many reasons why people might stretch the truth. Often times during religious retreats, people are run down. They go on very little sleep and are in an environment that is constantly playing on their emotions, telling them to expect great things from God. They are told, that if God is in their life, they will see miracles. I think that many of the "miracles" that occur in these environments are more psychological than metaphysical. People talk themselves into believing that "something" will happen and then their mind fills in the blank. Your friend with the glasses could probably see tolerably without them. In this environment he decides that he is seeing better when he really isn't. He's just looking at it a different way now. The same thing with the deaf girls. You said that they could hear noises. I trust that their hearing wasn't perfect after the "miracle". Many deaf people (indeed most of them) are not completely, 100% deaf. Most of them can hear noises of some kind. Again, in the emotionally charged environment, it is highly likely that they came to believe that they were hearing "more noises" than they normally do.
As far as you being sick for a day and your friends ankle, all that I can say is those kinds of things come and go all the time. I've been sick and throwing up in the morning and then, all of a sudden, in the afternoon I was feeling almost 100% again.
In my opinion, you don't need to invoke God to explain these events. Now, mind you, I'm not telling to abandon your faith. All I'm trying to say is that on the grounds of reason, your stories don't proove anything, even if we give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you aren't stretching the truth or remembering incorrectly. You need to understand that these events might be meaningful to you, but they are not going to be very meaningful to somebody that you tell. Especially if that somebody doesn't just take your word as Gospel truth.
Now I don't believe that you will take anything that I say that seriously, but just in case you do, I don't think that there is anything wrong with your version of faith. You are going off of personal experiences and that's great. As long as you respect other people's beliefs then I think that you shouldn't make any changes if you don't feel compelled to do so. None of us know Truth with a capital T. So none of us has the right to tell others what and what not to believe.
Cheers.
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Post by vertigo on Oct 8, 2004 22:32:34 GMT -5
It's nice to think that God is there to intervene and help people. However, think now where he hasn't intervened.
He didn't intervene in World War 2 where two cities in Japan were struck by nuclear bombs.
He didn't intervene when two planes flew into the World Trade center.
He didn't intervene when Chechnyan rebels lay siege to a theatre and a school.
There are so many cases where he didn't intervene. Should we believe that God doesn't care about these people? Had they known the message and believed it, would they have been spared?
Before you get excitied about where God provides a service, you must come to terms with the vast majority of times that he doesn't.
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Post by Superhappyjen on Oct 9, 2004 11:01:06 GMT -5
Assuming for the moment a) There is no God b) These people were not lying c) These people were not imagining things Perhaps the simple act of praying (or wishing really hard) does something to strengthen the bond between people and thus helps in the healing process.
I'm not saying I believe that, in fact I'm more inclined to agree with jacopo. However if prayer did have healing properties, I don't think that would prove the existance of a deity.
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Post by Theodore Doxford on Oct 9, 2004 16:52:55 GMT -5
Nah ...I don't believe it.... If what you have posted is true...I am sure the press would of made the story front page headlines...
unless you want it to be kept secret..........................but then you would not of informed us......
Why should we believe what you have said.....?
ANY WAY WELCOME TO THE BOARD EVEN THEN I hope you stick around and give us some good debates..
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Post by Superhappyjen on Oct 10, 2004 0:32:01 GMT -5
Nah ...I don't believe it.... If what you have posted is true...I am sure the press would of made the story front page headlines... I think I might have read something about it in the Weekly World News
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Post by vertigo on Oct 10, 2004 13:50:05 GMT -5
Although positivists dismiss this out of hand, I think this is premature.
That is not to say that such faculties, if they exist, are supernatural in origin. There might be a natural explanation.
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Post by EvenThen on Oct 12, 2004 11:38:41 GMT -5
vertigo:
I need to start a new thread dealing with this. This is a really big question that I hear a lot, and the answer is definitely complicated and I don't have time to sit down and write a novel. I will though, eventually.
jacopoc7531:
I doubt it. What are the chances of your vision going from less than 20/20 in moments, the little hairs in your ears growing back at random, that little bacteria in my stomach deciding just not to plague me anymore, all because of an act of will or the power of suggestion? That doesn't add up for me at least.
Theodore Doxford:
Not really. Our news media is completely and utterly biased. Do you think that would get that kind of attention? They can't even report accurately on Iraq, much less God. Just recently there was a 17 year old girl in my area that went missing for 8 days. Her parents gave her up for dead, and the police thought she had run away. A friend of the family prayed about it and had a vivid dream that the girl was in a wooded area. She went looking for her, and sure enough, she found her in the back of a car down an embankment, severely dehydrated with many broken bones. The paramedics were amazed that she was even alive. Of course that didn't make the headlines.
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Post by droskey on Oct 12, 2004 15:08:52 GMT -5
EvenThen The chances aren't very good that these things happened in moments. That is why I don't think that they did happen in moments. Is it possible that the person with the glasses could see without them but thought that he couldn't? Is it possible that his vision wasn't that bad to begin with and that his prescription changed over a period of time? How bad was his vision to begin with? Are we talking about going from being legally blind (20/500) to 20/20 or are we talking about going from 20/30 to 20/20? Also, have the two girls seen their doctors to confirm that their ears have in fact been restored. My point was that as far as these infermities go, things can change over time. It is possible that the infermity was perceived to change at this event but in fact had gradually changed over time.
Anyway, your question was originally, how would I explain these events. I would explain them as I just did. That's the best I can with data that really just amounts to hearsay.
EvenThen Actually, this story did make headlines. So much so that it is even in my college newspaper today. The events described took place in Seattle, WA. I quote from the article:
This was indeed a surprising event. But not unexplainable in my mind. The girl is very lucky that she is alive, especially because she apparently didn't have anything to drink in 8 days. Down here in Tucson she would be dead. I'm less impressed with her rescuer's dreams. It seems to me that most of the Seattle area is heavily wooded. It doesn't surprise me at all that one of the searchers would have dreams about a "heavily wooded" area, since they would be spending quite a bit of time hiking around in the woods conducting the search.
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Post by vertigo on Oct 12, 2004 15:10:50 GMT -5
Please do.
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Post by EvenThen on Oct 12, 2004 17:55:16 GMT -5
I live in Seattle, and I find it interesting that I have neither heard it in the news or on tv, and hardly on the radio. Strange that it is in the news in Tucson and hardly heard of where it actually occured.
And also, you're right. Seattle is a heavily wooded area. What strikes me as interesting is that out of the many, many (and believe me, there are many) wooded areas in the area, that they would happen to pick the right one.
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Post by droskey on Oct 12, 2004 18:37:18 GMT -5
I was mistaken in my last comment about the girl in WA. The article did mention that the person that found her was a family and friend, Sha Nohr. The article also stated that the friend claimed that she and her daughter
Nohr also claimed that in her dream she heard the message "Keep going, keep going."
Again, unlikely events do happen. And based on hearsay the best that we can say about this event was that it was quite unique. It is an incredible story. However, I am reluctant to read anything metaphysical or paranormal in it. Why? First, I'm not sure how much territory would have to be searched to find the girl. Apparently, the had an idea about her whereabouts just before she disappeared. They also knew what route she would have most likely taken home. Was she found along that route? I don't know. The article didn't say. Nohr reported that something drew her to stop. What was that? A feeling? Did she see something? Again, the article doesn't say. So I have to assume that she was going along the route that she thought the girl must have taken. She probably noticed something along the road as she was driving. This isn't surprising because a car going into a ravine is bound to leave some kind of physical evidence that it had been there. She stopped at this location and found the car.
It is an incredible story, but I'm not sure that I would call it miraculous.
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Post by EvenThen on Oct 12, 2004 18:48:56 GMT -5
My bad... maybe I should actually start reading headlines. But our media still is incredibly biased.
It is an incredible story.
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Snowman
Maverick's Chew Toy
Posts: 12
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Post by Snowman on Nov 18, 2004 22:43:02 GMT -5
You are right. It is an incredible story. It is something that doesn't happen every day and so it stands out as somehow being significant.
In order to understand the atheist perspective about how little the odds of this happening have to do with the supernatural, consider how many people prayed about the missing girl and did not find her. How many people had dreams of her being tied up in a brick building (or more probably) being found in the woods who didn't find her?
We don't hear about the misses, only the hits. The misses are quickly dismissed and forgotten, but the hits are viewed as something more important than they really are.
This is why shows like 'Crossing Over' or others where people purport to talk with the dead work. The audience remembers only the hits in a constant barrage of vague suggestions, and never actually takes the time to gather statistics on how accurate the guesses really are.
Our brains are geared to look for patterns in our environment. We have an overwhelming need to make sense of the world around us. This has helped us get to where we are today as a species.
However, in all that pattern recognition, you have to expect that we sometimes are going to draw some inferences when in fact there is no underlying pattern or connection at all. To see this played out to the extreme, read or watch 'A Beautiful Mind' about Nobel-prize winner John Nash. He saw lots of patterns that no one else did; unfortunately only a small number of them had a basis in reality.
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Post by vertigo on Nov 19, 2004 9:05:07 GMT -5
I disagree with this. How do you know they 'never take the time'?
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