IamMoose

Really? that's dead disappointing, I was imagining something complex to do with magnets. Still, when I saw it on TV people were watching him from the front and they seemed impressed. You'd have to be fairly dumb to be convinced he was levitating if he was just rising up on his toes.

Stephen T-B

CowboyHeritic's comment: "If we see only the things of this world then we can not know the power of G-d" is a justification for superstitious beliefs.

Mr B and Mr A live on a remote Pacific island and have never encountered any modern technologies. One day, a waterproof radio washes up on the beach. While examining it closely, Mr A accidentally switches it on, and a voice is heard.
Magic! He realises this must be a work of god, so builds a shrine and starts worshipping the radio.
Mr B, who was always a sceptic (English spelling), sneaks in at night when Mr A is asleep and dismantles it (putting it back together again before dawn). He learns, through the repeated processes of taking it apart and rebuilding it, that it is a receiver and that there is nothing magical about it at all.

CowboyHeretic: You are also on the island - do you join Mr A's Radio Cult, or do you let Mr B talk you into believing there are such things as radio waves and batteries which store an invisible form of energy?

ManM

Why assume that miracles are unnatural? I find it far easier to believe that there are flaws with our current knowledge about the world. It may very well be that the scientists 1000 years down the line look back at the arguments against miracles and chuckle at us. Personally, I find miracles exciting. Perhaps someday we will figure out how to walk on water.

Dean Anderson

If we look at Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (the earliest Christian document we have - older than the Gospels), we see this...

Paul is here railing against both the Greeks with their philosophical arguments and against the Jews with their miracles and wonders - claiming that Christianity's lack of either is a strength rather than a weakness.

He is saying that the lack of miracles in Christianity is a "stumbling block" to the potential Jewish converts - in that there are no signs or miracles for them to believe, only the "foolishness" of pure faith-without-evidence. Of course, he spins this by making such pure faith the supreme virtue.

Do you really think that Paul would talk like that about the lack of miracles in Christianity if there had been lots of them performed by Jesus in recent times that were well recorded? It should also be noted that not once in Pauls writings does he ever mention a miracle performed by Jesus.

If the words of Paul aren't good enough for you, how about the alleged words of Jesus himself...

These two passages show Jesus saying the same thing - but are set at different times and have different audiences. They are a classic example of what is known as a "Q" saying. When the authors of Matthew and Luke wrote their Gospels, they both used Mark as a source for the basic story, but also included lots of sayings that appear to come from a second source now lost to us (and which is usually labelled "Q" for "Quelle" - the German equivalent of calling it "S" for "source"). However, this second source appears to have been pretty much only a list of quotations without much context - since the two authors take the same quotes out of it (often word-for-word, indicating that this source was almost certainly a written source rather than an oral tradition) but place them in different contexts.

This in itself is a good indicator that the miracle stories have a literary, rather than a historical purpose - but this particular saying quoted above makes an even stronger case.

In this saying, Jesus is explicitly saying that there will be no miracles to convince his generation - with the possible exception of his resurrection. It looks extremely out of place in those gospels, since it is surrounded by stories of just the type of miracle that it is denying will happen.

However, once we realise the context - that the quote was lifted from an earlier list of sayings - we see that, like Paul's letter, the earlier text explicitly denies miraculous happenings and the miracles listed in the Gospels are a later addition to an existing story.

lpetrich

(Jesus Christ's Sabbath-breaking...)
What's "legalism"? Is that anything more than a dirty word?

Damo

from here

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Eldarion Lathria

As far as walking on water is concerned, a number of insects and the Jesucristo lizard does it now.

Eldarion Lathria

Stephen T-B

Maybe Jesus had huge, very hairy feet which trapped bubbles of air and acted like floats?.
Or he was so light, he didn't break the surface tension?
He might have had nothing inside him at all, being partially a god. Perhaps he had to go around with lots of stones in his pockets so he didn't get blown away by a gust of wind?

IamMoose

Well yes but you wouldn't mistake one of those for a man unless you'd had a few ..

Kassiana

Could be a Malk, or a Toreador with a derangement.

There is no Requiem. White Wolf's decision to destroy their former RP world is not recognized by me.