markkur said:

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I don't think Random-Chance could ever create this incredible universe.

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Corribus said:

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markkur said:

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I don't think Random-Chance could ever create this incredible universe.

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Who ever claimed it did?

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"Not designed" and "random" don't mean the same thing.  If he means "not designed", he should say so.

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artu said:

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Actually, according to the dictionary, they kind of do:
1.lacking any definite plan or prearranged order; haphazard

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You've mentioned "random" in the context of evolution and the structure of the universe. Why would we NOT take a scientific approach?

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I don't think Random-Chance could ever create this incredible universe.  Closer to home, Man has made everything from pet-rocks to Rockets and used everything from A to Zinc to do it. It is said we're made in the makers-image and I think & believe I see a glimpse in everyone around me.

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artu said:

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Certainly nothing rational or logical is connected to atheist beliefs.

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Atheism is not a belief just like you not believing in dragons or Allah is not a belief. It is a position of not to assume. In every day talk, you'll say there are no dragons, you can't know with 100% certainty there are no dragons anywhere in the universe but since you have absolutely no logical reason to believe they exist, you ASSUME there are none.

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Saying universe can't come out of nothing by itself (while the people whose job is to study the natural laws of that universe say it can, quite clearly with mathematical formulas) but claiming a creature who has personality can come out of nothing (or he doesn't have to cause he always was etc etc) is rational, yeah right.

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When you say God is beyond nature and reason, you are WILLINGLY throwing rationality out the window.

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Studies show atheists are more prone to mental illness and suicide than religious people.

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We all know about your "studies" and the reliability of your links. They are joke material among the community, and if people even bother to read them once in a while, what's written usually don't back you up. Hearing voices literally, in today's world, is considered a sign of mental illness, if what you speak of is not hearing voices literally, it can be easily explained with psychology anyway.

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....There’s an old joke: When you talk to God, we call it prayer, but when God talks to you, we call it schizophrenia.

Except that usually it’s not.

Hearing a voice when alone, or seeing something no one else can see, is pretty common. At least one in 10 people will say they’ve had such an experience if you ask them bluntly. About four in 10 say they have unusual perceptual experiences between sleep and awareness if you interview them about their sleeping habits.


And if you ask them in a way that allows them to admit they made a mistake, the rate climbs even higher. By contrast, schizophrenia, the most debilitating of all mental disorders, is pretty rare. Only about one in 100 people can be diagnosed with the disorder.

Moreover, the patterns are quite distinct. People with schizophrenia who hear voices hear them frequently. They often hear them throughout the day, sometimes like a rain of sound, or a relentless hammer. They hear not only sentences, but paragraphs: words upon words upon words. What the voices say is horrid—insults, sneers and contemptuous jibes. “Dirty. You’re dirty.” “Stupid snow.” “You should’ve gone under the bus, not into it.”

That was not what Abraham, Moses and Job experienced, even when God was at his most fierce.

For the last 10 years, I have been doing anthropological and psychological research among experientially oriented evangelicals, the sort of people who seek a personal relationship with God and who expect that God will talk back. For most of them, most of the time, God talks back in a quiet voice they hear inside their minds, or through images that come to mind during prayer. But many of them also reported sensory experiences of God. They say God touched their shoulder, or that he spoke up from the back seat and said, in a way they heard with their ears, that he loved them. Indeed, in 1999, Gallup reported that 23% of all Americans had heard a voice or seen a vision in response to prayer.

These experiences were brief: at the most, a few words or short sentences. They were rare. Those who reported them reported no more than a few of them, if that. These experiences were not distressing, although they were often disconcerting and always startling. On the contrary, these experiences often made people feel more intimate with God, and more deeply loved.

In fact, my research has found that these unusual sensory experiences are more common among those who pray in a way that uses the imagination—for example, when prayer involves talking to God in your mind. The unusual sensory experiences were not, in general, associated with mental illness (we checked).

They were more common among those who felt comfortable getting caught up in their imaginations. They were also more common among those who prayed for longer periods. Prayer involves paying attention to words and images in the mind, and giving them significance. There is something about the skilled practice of paying attention to the mind in this way that shifts—just a little bit—the way we judge what is real.

Yet even many of these Christians, who wanted so badly to have a back-and-forth relationship with God, were a little hesitant to talk about hearing God speak with their ears. For all the biblical examples of hearing God speak audibly, they doubt. Augustine reports that when he was in extremis, sobbing at the foot of that fig tree, he heard a voice say, “Take it and read.” He picked up the scripture and converted. When the Christians I know heard God speak audibly, it often flitted across their minds that they were crazy.

In his new book, "Hallucinations," the noted neurologist Oliver Sacks tells his own story about a hallucinatory experience that changed his life. He took a hearty dose of methamphetamines as a young doctor, and settled down with a 19th century book on migraines. He loved the book, with its detailed observation and its humanity. He wanted more. As he was casting around in his mind for someone who could write more that he could read, a loud internal voice told him “You silly bugger” that it was he. So he began to write. He never took drugs again.

Now, Sacks does not recommend that anyone take drugs like that. He thinks that what he did was dangerous and he thinks he was lucky to have survived.

What interests me, however, is that he allowed himself to trust the voice because the voice was good. There’s a distinction between voices associated with psychiatric illness (often bad) and those (often good) that are found in the so-called normal population. There’s another distinction between those who choose to listen to a voice, if the advice it gives is good, and those who do not. When people like Sacks hear a voice that gives them good advice, the experience can transform them.

This is important, because often, when voices are discussed in the media or around the kitchen table, the voices are treated unequivocally as symptoms of madness. And of course, voice-hearing is associated with psychiatric illness.

But not all the time. In fact, not most of the time.

About a third of the people I interviewed carefully at the church where I did research reported an unusual sensory experience they associated with God. While they found these experiences startling, they also found them deeply reassuring.

Science cannot tell us whether God generated the voice that Abraham or Augustine heard. But it can tell us that many of these events are normal, part of the fabric of human perception. History tells us that those experiences enable people to choose paths they should choose, but for various reasons they hesitate to choose.

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sat at his kitchen table, in the winter of 1956, terrified by the fear of what might happen to him and his family during the Montgomery bus boycott, he said he heard the voice of Jesus promising, “I will be with you.” He went forward.

Voices may form part of human suffering. They also may inspire human greatness.

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Yes, but if I CAN change my mind anytime, foreknowledge isn't possible. If I can't, there's no free will.

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3- Most people don't believe in contemporary miracles and they certainly don't explain everyday stuff with them, as opposed to 500 years ago where anyone would believe any sort of miracle or ghost or evil witch or whatever crap they are sold. Secularity won.
4- Your link only focuses on extraordinary healing cases which can hardly be defined as true miracles. They can be called weird cases at best. I told you very clearly what I meant by miracle: Divide the Sea or grow a leg.

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Yet it is not just people in the first century who have believed in miracles. Various polls peg U.S. belief in miracles at roughly 80 percent. One survey suggested that 73 percent of U.S. physicians believe in miracles, and 55 percent claim to have personally witnessed treatment results they consider miraculous.

Even more striking than the number of people who believe in miracles is the number who claim to have witnessed or experienced them. For example, a 2006 Pew Forum survey studied charismatic and Pentecostal Christians in 10 countries. From these 10 countries alone, the number of charismatic Christians who claim to have witnessed or experienced divine healing comes out to roughly 200 million people. This estimate was not, however, the most surprising finding of the survey. The same survey showed that more than one-third of Christians in these same countries who do not claim to be charismatic or Pentecostal report witnessing or experiencing divine healing.

And the reports in these countries appear to be merely the tip of the iceberg. The survey did not include China, where one report from the China Christian Council over a decade ago attributed roughly half of all new Christian conversions to "faith healing experiences." Another report from a different source in China suggested an even higher figure. Clearly many people around the world experience what they consider miracles, sometimes in life-changing ways.

Most stunning to me on a personal level were sincere eyewitness claims from people that I or my wife have long known and trusted, including everything from cures of blindness to restoration from apparent death. Sometimes the witnesses include doctors. In one case, the eyewitness was my mother-in-law, who reported that my sister-in-law was not breathing for three hours. During prayer, without available medical resources, my sister-in-law revived, and had fully recovered, without brain damage, by the next day. Similar reports, again sometimes from people I know or have interviewed personally, appear widely in Africa, Asia, Latin America and sometimes even North America. Many of these reports come from highly educated professionals.
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However miracles are defined, Hume's argument against them, which provides the traditional basis for skepticism about them, is now problematic. Hume questioned the possibility of having adequate testimony to affirm miracles, since virtually uniform human experience ruled them out. Today, however, when hundreds of millions of people from diverse cultures claim to have experienced miracles, it seems hardly courteous to presuppose a "uniform" human experience on the subject. If any of these experiences constituted a genuine miracle, Hume's argument against miracles, which in some circles has hardened into an uncontested consensus, would fail. Whatever one thinks about miracles, the long-held argument against them needs to be rethought.

While not everyone will agree regarding the causes of healing experiences, everyone must agree that they often do not happen. Sickness and injustice remain in the world. In the Gospels, miracles did not replace the kingdom that Jesus announced. Nevertheless, they were signs of hope to promise and invite us to work for a better future. This focus suggests the writers' conviction that God cares about people and about their suffering, and welcomes us to care about these also.

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Nothing that ancient is considered eye-witnessed by today's standards

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   Your statements prove you don't know what Biblical faith is because your statements about faith contradict the Biblical definition of faith. Like I've said many times, the atheists who go around constantly attacking religion and religious people don't have a clue about the religions they attack.

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Your definition of "really knowing" the faith can actually be achieved only by believing it so what you're declaring here is a tautology.

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Same can be done in a reversed way: Only non-Christians can truly understand your faith because only they can be objective about it. I read the book, the history and I've seen the people. It's nothing special or beyond grasp. I may express how simple it is with clearer words but then you cry "offensive."

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