The mere existence of religion in our modern world baffles me so much that i cannot even begin to describe.

anyone who doesn’t think the way i do is wrong? where do i say that? i say anyone who believes in anything… which is not supported by proof, and accepts it as fact is wrong, and that is not a stretch.

read this back: “you are clearly a very angry young man, which is evidenced by your discussion here of late, and you have been deeply hurt in life to have had to narrow your mind to the point of making rash judgements.”

me not being religious, or not having a relationship with god, and expressing that i strongly disagree with everything requiring faith is evidence that i’m deeply hurt? nope. my mind as i’ve said is totally open, but only for sensible arguments, devoid of any subjectivity. also, no rash judgements have been made on my part, but feel free to give an example of any judgements that i did not support with facts.

your cat: so if you take both the before and after diagnostics into the hospital and ask a non-religious medical professional, he will happily sign a paper that says “it is 100% sure that the cat was healed through a miracle by god, there is no other humanly possible explanation”? i highly doubt that. not having an explanation for something is not the same as having ready-made miracles. see, it is not enough to say “aha! you don’t know! it must be a miracle!”, but YOU are the one who should be able to prove it, because you’re making the claims. it’s called burden of proof.

example: (a widely-used example i might add) i believe that a teapot is orbiting the sun. will my belief become automatically validated if people cannot disprove it? of course not. it is me who should be able to prove it, because i’m the one making the claim. (needless to say, if i got many people to believe that the teapot was orbiting the sun, it would be called not delusion, but religion.)

bottom line: even if the doctors can’t tell why the cat’s kidney healed, it doesn’t automatically mean that it was a miracle. it should be proved that it was a miracle beyond the shadow of a doubt, because it is you who is saying that it is so.

limbs growing out: you couldn’t find medical evidence, because if it existed, medicine would be investigating those cases, and would finally come to some conclusion, which, yes, could be “miracle!”, but i have yet to see any of that, so the logical conclusion is that none of those cases you might find are sure to have been miracles, because they lack the needed objectivity for science to conclude that they were indeed that.

sorry for confusing religion with you relationship with god. still, it is you who makes arbitrary claims here. “[these deeds] were done by men under the influence of not God, even though they called it God…it was NOT of God” how. do. you. know? who told you? where is the evidence? anything of god bears good fruit? who told you that? it was either the bible, or you can feel it in yourself. neither of those are objective enough. it was the christian church, *the very representation of god on earth*, that did those things. you’re saying that the christian church is not following the true god, that it acted on behalf of some false one? so the christian church was simply wrong? elaborate on that please.

islam is a false religion. wow. just wow. millions believe in it, just as millions believe in christianity, or other religions. muslims think the same things about you as you think about them. they’re saying that people are turning away from other religions, and are starting to find the true one in allah. mohammed appears to christians in their dreams and commands them to follow him, for it is islam which is the true religion.
now i suppose you believe in the ten commandments of christianity. one of them is: you’re not supposed to have any gods other than me. you know what christians are supposed to do with people who don’t believe in god, according to the bible? oh yes, kill them. not even just kill, but STONE them to death. so christianity also has the “infidels must die” slogan, it just doesn’t call them infidels, and christians are not as keen on practicing it, but it is there.

now please pay close attention to the following bit:
i asked you the following question before, but i’ll ask it again, and if you stand by what you claim, you should have one hell of an answer in order not to contradict yourself.
can you name one experiment devoid of any subjectivity that will conclusively and objectively show that your religion is the true one, and the other ones are just lies and fabrications? a criteria: make it so that the experiment can be used towards proving the christian god and Jesus, but cannot be used towards proving other gods or prophets.

you can’t see it, can you. there is no such experiment. if there was, there would be no multiple religions. the very existence of multiple religions is the evidence (that’s the word i’m looking for in your arguments as well) that you simply cannot argue with religious people even with simple logic. believers will always, always come up with rationalizations to assure themselves that what they believe in is true, because if they didn’t, their decision of believing their own religion and not another one would make. no. sense. read that last sentence again, the logic is infallible. and that is not a selfish claim, it is *objectively* infallible.

I hear much, much deep-seated anger in you in these last two posts. I’m sorry about that because it seems you have moved from having an open discussion with the willingness to consider other ideas to battening down the hatches, g…oing on the attack, judging others, making sweeping generalizations, making unfounded accusations against “ALL people who believe in God” just because you yourself don’t share their revelation of the living God, and therefore anyone who doesn’t think in the exact same way that you do is utterly wrong, stupid, delusional, ignorant, and is holding you and the rest of the “intelligent” world back. You have proven, through your arguments, to be one of the most closed-minded individuals, hard-core, “I am my own god and to hell with the rest of the world” kind of individuals. This makes me sad….not because I want you to change but because you are clearly a very angry young man, which is evidenced by your discussion here of late, and you have been deeply hurt in life to have had to narrow your mind to the point of making rash judgements. That said, let me address some of your personal accusations toward the things that have happened in my life.

i stand by …my claim: there has never been scientifically proven miraculous healings, let alone examples of spontaneous regrowth of severed limbs, LET ALONE resurrections. the keywords here are “scientifically proven”, so there is no faith, nor “you don’t believe it only because…” involved. if i don’t believe something, it is because it’s not supported by fact(s). there isn’t anything i don’t believe which is factual.

your cat: you first say that his kidney didn’t function, then that it was dead. i think it was the former. probably something blocked it from functioning, and something, anything, such as falling from a chair, even medication if he had any, pushed or dissolved that “plug” that kept it from functioning. if it was dead for real, then, well, first of all, we will never know (enter subjectivity), second, then it was a miracle, but you can understand me being sceptical, because of the FACT that there has never been a scientifically proven miraculous healing in recorded history.

your friend: if she never found the pellet, it probably left through the same hole as remnants of food usually does, or is still sitting in her system, waiting for an x-ray scan so that it can be revealed. matter does not simply disappear, we have yet to see any verifiable example of that.

Africa: in other words, you’re saying that there has been instances of scientifically proven resurrection, but today’s medicine just ignores them? also, limbs have grown back? not like half a finger, but like whole arms? medicine ignores these too? these are, wow, ridiculous claims. sorry but i need to ask for a couple of sources here, which you won’t be able to provide (surprise), because ALL of this is just hearsay, none of them are well-documented medical cases.

of course i have a bias against miraculous healing! i am biased because a mountain of empirical evidence shows that these things do not happen at all; while its supporters also have a mountain of… hearsay. um, stories. um, personal testimonies. i’m not giving credit to those, because they are subjective. facts > subjectivity. if a medical professional (even better: with no religious affiliation) declared that he has devised an experiment during which miracles can be observed, then you could be sure it would be a worldwide sensation, and that the plausibility of miracles would be accepted by medicine. we have yet to devise such an experiment. again, facts by definition can be verified using experiments. “facts” that cannot are not facts, just assumptions. and i can’t give credit to those, nor to stories of primitive african tribesmen who believe that monkey dung is good for curing headaches.

yes, i am a bit upset about the idea of religion, and that there are people today (hell, half the world) who still believe in it, but let me tell you why. it. holds. back. humanity’s. progress. let’s take evolution for example. it is supported by overwhelming quantity of tangible, measurable, verifiable evidence, yet, christians instead believe in an idea which doesn’t have a single shred of empirical evidence to it. (now, let me elaborate a bit here on evoluion. is often called “only a theory”, and that is true, but let me clarify the word “theory” for you: in scientific terms, this word means that an idea is a well-supported explanation for our observations. “but if a theory turns out to be correct, it’s supposed to become a law!” no.

Laws are used to describe facts, observations, and theories are used to explain them. example: law of gravity: if you drop something, it falls. theory of gravity: Einstein’s theory of relativity, which is an attempt to explain why the law is the way it is. just because it is called “theory of gravity” it doesn’t mean it is just a guess of some sort. now, evolution is totally the same: we have the *fact* of evolution (the genetic change in living beings over generations), and the *theory* of evolution (the theory of evolution by natural selection) is the best way to explain the *fact* of evolution.) they go so far as to teach this ludicrous idea of creationism in public schools. children learn IN SCHOOL that a magical granddaddy created them, and they “haven’t evolved from monkeys, because that’s an outrageous idea”. give me a break. THIS is as outrageous as it gets. people believing in some magical man, thus holding back others’ and humanity’s advancement is outrageous. people drawing morals from thousand-year old scriptures is outrageous. people stoning women to death because of adultery, simply because a book tells them to do so is outrageous. it is astounding how people haven’t realized yet that religion is nothing, but a primitive construct originally devised to explain the world around us. but humanity just can’t let it go, because of the comfort it gives; people will never, ever let it go, because they are insecure.

I quote you here: ” there has never been a *scientifically proven* miraculous healing of someone, or any proven divine intervention for that matter. period.” You are being quite bold to make such a statement. There ARE a plethora of scientifically proven miraculous healings…you just don’t want to believe them because they are outside your grid of the miraculous being scientifically explained.

Let me give you a very odd but personal example: scientific experiments on my cat proved time and time again that only 1/2 of one of his kidneys was functioning. Three months ago, more scientific experiments showed/proved that BOTH of his kidneys are fully functioning and healthy. Now, scientifically speaking, kidneys do not regenerate or heal. Once they are dead they are dead. One of his kidneys was completely dead. Now you are probably thinking I’m totally nutty to say that I believe God healed my cat. I do believe this because I know my God, I asked Him to heal my cat, and I have the scientific evidence of his supernatural healing. There is scientific proof that he has been healed and nothing, no medicine, nothing could have made his dead kidney come alive, nor could there have been a “mind over matter” thing that happened in him cuz he is a cat.

Similarly, my friend here who used to be a cop was shot in the arm. She had a pellet lodged in her arm for 7 years which hurt like CRAZY if you even brushed up against that place on her arm with hardly a feather’s touch. I felt the steel pellet with my own fingers. She has prayed for years that God would remove it. Nothing has happened. Does that discount that God heals? No. You see, we believers are able to live in the ambiguity of life….and there is a LOT of ambiguity in life….so, back to my friend. She was leaving a worship service where she wasn’t even asking the Lord about herself, and somebody brushed up against her arm where the pellet has been lodged for 7 years and it didn’t hurt. so, she pulled back her sleeve and touched her arm. not only was the pellet completely gone, but there was NO pain whatsoever and it is still the same today. I know how you will try to explain this: it flowed into her body and is somewhere else. But it isn’t…it’s gone, gone, and there’s no scientific explanation for it…one minute it was there and the next it was gone and all pain was removed.

You also mentioned that there are not scientifically proven healings where limbs have grown back…yes there are. Plenty of them in Africa. There are also people who have been dead for days who have been raised from the dead, proven by doctors, and are perfectly fine. But, to me, it sounds like you already have a bias against these things….like even if you read a book with doctor’s testimonies of supernatural healings you would still not believe it because it entails the possibility that there is a god who loves to heal his children. I believe we are at this point in this discussion: you want everyone to let go of their beliefs in any sort of god and only adhere to atheistic thinking based on scientific “proof” that can only been seen in the tangible world. You almost appear to be upset a bit and even angry with the idea that people would believe in god.

Well, I am as equally upset with scientists who have “concluded” that the “tissue” in a mother’s womb is not really a living being and can be “disposed” of because this completely contradicts science. Any scientist worth his/her diploma knows full well that there is life in a sperm and an egg and the second those two come together there is life that is real, growing, forming and becoming something incredible, mainly, a human being. However, your same scientists contradict themselves when they say it’s not life, and justify the killing of life. Please know I am setting belief in god completely aside in this argument and dealing soley with the reality of cells and chemicals that come together to form life. Again, I”m still enjoying our discussion and appreciate your responses.