John A. Broussard

I'm not much interested in the other miracles you refer to, but the one about the tip of a finger that grew back absolutely fascinates me.

Please give me more information. The name of the pastor, of the doctor, of the boy? What prayers were said? How many? By whom? How long before the finger grew back? What was the denomination of the church?

This is truly amazing!

If we can find out the full circumstances of this miraculous event, then we should start a mass praying for all those dismembered Iraqi veterans. Not only will they be ever so pleased to have their limbs growing back but the taxpayers will save millions in prosthetic devices.

So. Please, please, please. Give me more info. Date, time, place. Photos would be nice. Anything at all would be helpful. This is a religious break trough. Soon the miracle sites will have artificial limbs hanging there along with all the crutches.

I'm very much looking forward to your answer.

Jack the Bodiless

So, you believe because of some sort of personal revelation: "...since I believe that this is what God has said". Your belief that further research would reveal God is secondary: you believe this "because God has said so", not because you're an expert yourself.

...But this is simply not the case. Those who DO the research keep discovering that the Bible is false: utterly wrong about many, many things.

I get the impression that you don't want to know this. This is why you're still not posting the (imaginary) evidence for the Flood in The Flood, again, and you're not supporting your claim that "the fact that the Bible has been established as God's inerrant word from other evidences" in the thread Inerrantists: please demonstrate that ANY part of the Bible is "divinely inspired".

...But this does raise the question of why you're still posting in THIS thread, trying to tell us things that just ain't so. How can WE convince YOU that YOU will never convince US that further research will reveal what you HOPE it will reveal?

Antlerman

I would challenge that everyone is familiar with the concept of sin. If memory servers well, most cultures that were brought the "good news" of salvation were unaware of the concept of sin until the Christian sales people told them they had a problem, and then offered the cure for it. Sales and Marketing 101. I think the concepts of Christianity are only clear to people who grew up in a Christian culture. These concepts are not universally understood across the globe.

When you say above that as you read references to the resurrection, "they appear impossible to support from scripture" I respect your putting it that way. It states it as your perception, which it is, and not an "irrefutable truth". I understand how you see this. I agree it is difficult to read it with a different mindset, but I also acknowledge that the idea of a physical resurrection is the concept we have always known and have always approached it with that understanding.

Paul's writings were penned before the Gospel accounts, yet they appear in the order of the canon afterwards. As we read what Paul says, it is difficult to divorce our way of interpreting what he says from what was already established in the Gospel writings in the preceding books. Its order, lends a sense of established historical chronology, whereas in reality, they were written before the Gospels were written. Many scholars (in fact most I believe) refer to "Paul's Gospel". If someone can do the exercise of divorcing any understanding from the Gospels, look at the various religious concepts floating about during Paul's lifetime regarding spiritual resurrections and heavenly events with parallels in the temporal, then read Paul's writings as an entity unto itself, the references to a physical resurrection become considerably less obvious, and even entirely possible it was something quite unfamiliar to what was later codified in church councils.

Personally, I'm open to either possibility of how Paul understood it to be. The point is, if God is offering evidence to prove to us his truth, then using higher criticism and all available tools at our disposal would be being prudent and honor to God to investigate the "real" meaning of what the original authors intended, even if that meant abandoning all our accepted understandings, tainted through traditional mindsets.

The point is we need to be honest to possibilities, no matter the outcome. Wouldn't you agree?

Johnny Skeptic

Regarding physical healings, the only kind of credible evidence would be documented clinical research from doctors of unusual healings that indicate divine intervention as opposed to random chance. Historically, it is obvious that God has always gone out of his way to make certain that controversies over miracle healings will continue. He has accomplished this for instance by NEVER restoring lost arms and legs in front of thousands of eyewitnesses.

John A. Broussard

Please don't be such a wet blanket.

aChristian is going to produce irrefutable evidence of a knuckle growing back as a result of prayer. I think we should settle for that for now and not go scaring him away by demanding a new arm or leg.

Let's be grateful for this remarkable evidence that a loving god exists, that aChristian's god can restore missing body parts at will, and that we have found the proper prayers to bring about this truly remarkable miracle.

Just imagine what this discovery will do at veterans' hospitals!

Equinox

aChristian - first sedimentary rock proving the flood, and now a miraculously healed finger? You outdo yourself. Did you miss my earlier post or are you just ignoring it?


Thanks-

-Equinox

aChristian

If you had studied physics you would have understood my answer when I used the words 'reference frame'. However, the concept is really pretty simple and you don't have to take physics to understand it. When you say the sun is setting, you are describing what is happening from your point of view. If you were standing on the sun (with a glass of ice water) you would say the earth rotated enough to where a point of interest on the earth was now in the dark. Both explanations correctly describe the event from different points of view. So when Joshua says the sun stood still, from his point of view it did.
The way you determine whether a miracle occurred is not by your ability to figure out how it could have been done (you probably wouldn't call it a miracle then anyway), but by whether you have reliable evidence that it happened (reliable eyewitnesses for example). If your Buddhist friend has reliable testimony, (which I doubt and I would want good evidence for such a claim, but it could be true since Satan can do miracles as well) then you why would you not believe it unless you have decided ahead of time that you won't believe it no matter what the evidence.

aChristian

Jesus doesn't do miracles for you like a circus performer. Herod was excited to see Jesus to see a miracle performed and Jesus wouldn't do anything for him. If you really want to know if miracles exist, go to the websites of the organizations I recommended earlier, (the Jesus Film of Campus Crusade for Christ and Gospel for Asia.) After you have done an honest inquiry there, come back and I'll give you more information.

aChristian

Everyone is aware of sin all across the globe.

The problem with your position is that you are ignoring the fact that the evidence is one sided. Higher criticism is a joke. Read my earlier comments about Peanuts and Ernest Hemmingway. Your answers indicate to me that you are just playing word games to avoid the obvious. If I am mistaken (and I hope I am) and you are seeking the truth, you will become a Christian.

John A. Broussard

Shucks. When you said:

I actually believed you.

I can now see that you just made it all up to poke fun at us.

I was certainly fooled.

Thank you for the retraction. It makes me feel much better knowing that your god isn't a circus performer.

Incidentally, you're the second Christian that I know of in this forum who claimed to know of this kind of miracle happening and later admitted he couldn't (wouldn't?) back up the claim.

Is it typical of Christians to make phony claims and then back pedal when asked for evidence, or are you and this other Christian I just mentioned aberrations?

I look forward to your answer.