Ok, addressing this: 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 m…iracle 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.

You say that miracles have to be “proven”….why? You see, you have your very, very limited perspective on life. Everything has to fit into your small-minded boxed thinking. The very definition of a miracle is that it cannot be explained using scientific measures. That is a reality you refuse to accept because that’s outside your box. Whether you accept it or not, you have built a limited box that you can control and feel comfortable in, and anything that challenges that and doesn’t fit into YOUR definitions and YOUR parameters is wrong, stupid, foolish and those who live outside of your boxed-in way of thinking are too. You ask how you have judged…nearly everything you said in the most recent exchanges about others is a rash judgement. You, bottom line, call me stupid. That is making a judgement. You say I am foolish to believe in anything I cannot see. That is a judgement. A judgement says that this is right and this is wrong. You say belief in god is wrong, foolish and stupid. So, you have entered into the judgement room based on your reality which is anything that is not scientifically measurable is wrong and stupid. Your standard of truth is science, period. I know you will say that I have judged the muslim faith, now. You are right, I have. Does this mean I hate the people who adhere to this faith? Absolutely not. Do I believe they are stupid or foolish? Absolutely not. Do I believe you are stupid or foolish? Absolutely not. My deepest heart’s desire is to see them, you, and everyone through the eyes of the faith that my God put in my heart by His grace, and that is the eyes of love and mercy, seeing them as He sees them and loving them with the love of Jesus. I don’t judge you, Bence. I am looking at you objectively…this is what you think and believe and it is the man-centered, atheistic, naturalistic mind-set of so many who have shut-down the spiritual part of their beings. Personally, I love science and am completely fascinated by findings and discoveries…sometimes I wish I would have pursued medicine…and I’m excited when there are new discoveries because of MY starting point. I see it as the beautiful unfolding of God’s creation and creativity. You, on the other hand, are confronted with someone like me, who thinks a bit differently than you, and you judge me, calling me foolish and stupid for believing something that you don’t. I think it is fabulous that you have such a keen, astute mind; do I wish your spirit-man was more alive and awake and open to that which may never be scientifically explained? Sure, but I don’t call you foolish or stupid because you are not there.

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.

Another thing just popped into my mind. according to you, miracles do happen (a myriad of them actually), and i am supposed to believe in them solely by giving credit to subjective experiences.

my question then: how is it that through hum…an history, no non-believer was ever able to document a single incident, which had no other explanation but to be a miracle? you might say that god is “hidden” in some way, and would only like to help people “undercover” so to say, and not in an obvious way (otherwise someone somewhere sometime could have been able to witness and document such a thing).

so my question becomes: then why did Jesus go around healing people? that does seem like direct miracle-doing to me, which is not something a god wanting to remain hidden would do. also, there were countless deeds in the bible which would have no explanation today, so if someone parted a sea for example, scientists would have no choice but to admit that it was indeed a miracle. how come these things don’t happen today, and god’s/Jesus’ power is reduced to “appearing on toast”?

god only performing miracles which are undetectable by science, and healing people who belong in african tribes, out of reach of modern “miracle-detecting equipment” are just rationalizations. there is no sensible explanation as to why we have not detected one single miracle to date. oh, there is one: they do not happen.

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.