jackrabbit

What is the official biblebanger explanation for the fact that miracles were performed thousands of years ago, making them impossible to verify, and not today? And no, I'm not talking about people seeing Jeebus in their cornflakes or the Virgin Mary on the walls of a freeway underpass. I mean real testable miracles, defying the natural laws of the universe, as opposed to simple self-delusion. Such as someone turning water into wine with an independent chemical analysis before and after.

I confronted my dad with this when I was in my teens and the best he could come up with was "they just don't do it any more". Kinda lame, Dad.

What is the official banger party line on this?

To me, it illustrates just one more illogical facet of the jeebus gag. We are expected to believe all this stuff based on "faith", with no proof whatsoever. However, the people who lived at the time of the alleged jeebus, and supposedly witnessed the "miracles", got proof of his magical powers. Why were they so much better than us that they were allowed to witness proof? All we get is hearsay evidence. If faith is all that is required, why do miracles at all?

Doug Shaver

The official party line is that there is nothing to explain: Miracles do still happen. We skeptics are just too pigheaded to believe it.

jackrabbit

Not all denominations believe that miracles still happen, at least not the kind I am talking about. The one I grew up in didn't. I guess they believed that praying for somebody who was sick would accomplish something, otherwise why do it? But tangible, provable miracles with physical manifestations, no.

In hindsight, I guess "official party line" was kind of silly, since there are so many different forms of xianity, with diametrically opposing beliefs. There are probably hundreds of official party lines. The catholic church is the only one I am familiar with where miracles are part of the dogma, i.e. required for canonization.

Aside from visions and seeing jeebus and mary in various inanimate objects, which are totally within someone's head, and supposed "healings" via prayer and such, equally unprovable, what other kinds of "miracles" are claimed nowadays? I mean, besides statues that conveniently "cry blood" at times where there's nobody around to see the guys with paint cans or buckets of pig blood.

John A. Broussard

Where have you been fella?

There are spectacular ones happening all the time. Someone recently reported on one of these threads about the miracle place in Serbia (whose name starts with an M and I can't spell and am too lazy to look up) where thousands of people saw the sun shiver and shake.

And the miracle places are full of crutches and wheelchairs and hearing aids and dark glasses tossed aside by the cured (no artificial legs, though).

And an acquaintance told me about going to a gathering with a guru where it started to rain and a local hill rose and covered the crowd so they wouldn't get wet. (I realize that's a non-Christian miracle and may not count)

Anyway, I'm sure if you look around you'll find some remarkable miracles to match those of the olden days.

jackrabbit

You're kidding, right? That one's hard to even visualize.

In order to block rain, wouldn't the hill have to be above them? Did it reform itself into a canopy or something? Or was it completely suspended in the air?

Or was the rain coming down at an angle and the hill just made itself taller?

Did the hill move back to it's original position afterward? Exactly as before without a single grain of earth in a different place from before? Otherwise the residents of the area could testify that the landscape was permanently changed from what it was, even if they were not involved with the guru.

No pictures of this occurence, I assume? Even if nobody had a camera at the time, pictures could be taken of the hill after the fact and compared with before pictures.

And no banned substances were involved in all this?

jackrabbit

And you believe that it actually did this, but visible only in a single area of the globe? And not in the rest of the hemisphere where the sun was visible at the same time? If the sun was having a epileptic seizure in Serbia, wouldn't the people in London, Madrid, Cairo, and Johannesburg see the shaking as well?

Why would somebody be looking directly at the sun anyway? It hurts my eyes when I do this. Are you claiming that this "shiver and shake" was severe enough to be noticable even when not looking at the sun? Like a flicker of the entire sky?

A clear-air atmospheric disturbance could theoretically make the sun appear to shiver and shake if it was directly between the sun and the observer. I am not scientist enough to know of any atmospheric conditions that could do this. I assume not, or we would hear about it all the time. Not that anybody looks directly at the sun anyway, but scientists do with special equipment.

As far as people claiming to see things in the sky, what about all the people who claimed to have seen UFOs? Are you saying all of those reports represent actual events as well?

Assuming everyone is telling the truth about it.

I am curious about the health of the local economy in this "magic place". Seems like a large influx of people hot to see miracles would be a big boost to commerce. Look at how many people converge on the humdrum miracles like the face of jeebus in a tree trunk.

John A. Broussard

Aw, c'mon. Why do you need pictures?

Do believers need a photo of Jesus walking on water to believe that he did?

No way.

If photos are unnecessary for biblical miracles, why should we demand them for today's miracles.

Just believe, fella.

You do have a point about miracles helpin the local economy, though. The one who told me about M--whatever, brought back a bunch of holy pictures and some rosaries--all manufactured in Mainland China.

jackrabbit

Because we can? The option wasn't there for biblical miracles.

The reason we reject biblical miracles is because there is no proof of them other than the bible, which is not really proof.

We have no real proof of supernatural events at all.

If these current day miracles were actually real, it would be in the participants' best interests to scientifically document them. If it could be proved that real miracles happened today, then perhaps non-believers could be convinced that they were possible back then.

John A. Broussard

Nope. It doesn't work that way.

Believers in miracles want to believe in miracles because those events are miracles.

Evidence to the contrary is not only unnecessary but is downright annoying.

The Shroud of Turin is a good example. No matter what evidence is produced to show it's a forgery, such as carbon dating, the believer will immediately say that there was something wrong with the dating.

Why? Because the Shroud is real, so so the carbon dating must be wrong.

If anything, the believers would prefer that we not believe in miracles, since that demonstrates how superior they are in knowing that a miracle actually happened while you and I are too dense to appreciate that fact.