We didn't pray

Zhimbo and I recently moved all of our stuff, and two cats over 700 miles to live in a new town.We moved ourselves, so that meant packing for a couple of months, loading up a truck (with the help of two very dear friends) the day before the first leg of the trip, driving the truck and our car for many hours over two days, and staying in a motel overnight with two cats, then unpacking the truck, then driving for over an hour over a two lane, twisty mountain highway a couple of days after arrival to return the truck.What I haven't mentioned is that we were driving from SE Michigan to New England in the middle of February. You know, all along I90, just south and east of the Great Lakes, and right smack in the middle of the snow belt. Not to mention the difficulty of doing all of this in the bitter cold and wind that is typical for this time of year."Crazy" is what everybody thought we were.Well, it turned out to be an incredibly smooth operation.We were able to pack almost everything into the boxes that I brought home from work over a couple of months, so it wasn't so much last minute drudgery, and sold or purged a great deal of stuff too.We got tranquilizers for the cats, so they basically slept the entire trip.During the loading phase, it was chilly but dry, and our friends were extremely helpful.During the two days of driving along one of the snowiest routes in the country, during February, we had beautiful mostly sunny skies, calm winds, and high temperatures in the lower forties! In February! In New England!The two days we spent unloading the truck were also very unseasonably warm and dry, and it didn't get cold, windy, or offer to snow until the day we had dropped off the truck, and even then it was just a little dusting overnight which was salted and gone by noon.Remember, we picked the dates of this move over a month before it actually took place. We had no way at all of knowing what the weather was going to be.The reason I relate this story is because I have heard theists relate similar stories of seamless travel, or of fortuitous unusual events happening to them and they tend to attribute their good fortune to their prayers having been answered to or faith in a higher power watching out for them because they are a faithful believer.Well, neither Zhimbo nor I are believers, and we didn't pray at all for great weather. We hoped of course, for safe conditions, and I was dreading having to drive for 15 hours in ice and snow with two yowling cats in the back seat. Not only did we get safe weather, we got extremely comfortable, unseasonably balmy, ideal weather.What I find fascinating is that, if a believer had been in our shoes and had the same experience of this unseasonably balmy weather and quite seamless moving experience, I am quite positive that they would have attributed it to God, even though the experiences would have been exactly the same.Comments?Faith and Belief?

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Who is to say that God was not with you....despite your unbelief?

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Well, that's just my point.Who is to say that when a believer claims that God did this or that for them, that god WAS with them?

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Your Faith and Belief are not in God as I see Him. Tell me a bit more about what you have faith in and what you believe about
predetermination, predestination, fate, and/or luck?

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I have no religious faith.I do not believe in predetermination, predestination, nor fate.Luck, and chance, are goverened by the laws of probability.

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Glad to hear your trip went nicely!

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Thanks, and thanks also to everybody else's well-wishes.

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I believe God works in ways we cant imagine...i think everbody wants an explaination for everything and in reality you'r not going to get it... its like saying God is mean because he pushed the bath water up into new orleans and we're comfortable putting blame on something or somebody.. isnt that the american way?

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Well, that's sort of my point.If we can't say when God helped with X or not, then how can believers ever claim to know when he did?

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In my experience, only my none-selfish or necessity-based prayers, are abundantly answered.

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You must not ever pray for world peace or an end to hunger, or rape, or general misery, then, eh?

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but if there are enough valid "hits" of sufficient unlikeliness, then the misses don't have to be counted.

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Unless you know the total number of "trials", though, you don't have any way to calculate if the number of "hits" are greater or lesser than chance would predict.100 positive his out of 120 trials is different than 100 hits out of 200 million trials.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-11-2006 03:53 PM

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you can have it.

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Without confusion and doubt there can be no learning or personal growth.There can be only self-satisfaction and stagnation of the mind.This message has been edited by AdminJar, 03-11-2006 03:21 PM

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Well, number one, you can always calculate a maximum # of trials for any life. One person can only pray so many prayers.

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Can you, though?I have my doubts about the accuracy of documentation here.

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Number two, and possibly as a result of number one, there comes a point where calculating percentages becomes irrelevant.

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I strongly disagree, considering I was replying to this claim of yours: The misses ALWAYS have to be counted, otherwise we have no way of knowing how likely or unlikely any of the hits were.Otherwise, falling victim to confirmation bias is very nearly a sure thing.Unlikely things happen to people all the time.

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I watched a guy once step on a very large needle and rub it around on the floor. He then pushed the pin through his bicep and pull it out the other side. The wound healed in front of our eyes in about thirty seconds.

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Percentages of hits to misses are irrelevant here.

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Not true.

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Something other than normal was happening. Someone could investigate to see whether it was a magic trick (illusion), whether the guy had an amazing immune system, or some other situation I can't think of, but it certainly wasn't a normal occurrence, even if that's the only time it happened.

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Well, yes, I'm not saying it was a "normal" occurence. But if you are trying to tell me that this was some kind of supernatural occurence, there is a LOT more in the way of controls and testing I would want to put the guy through before I bought that something other than a freakshow act was going on.I watched a man chew up and eat a lightbulb without harm once, too.Like I said, unlikely things happen to people all the time.For example, isn't it incredibly unlikely for the temperature to be in the 40's in New England in mid-February on the exact days that I would want it to be during my move?

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My point, from the beginning, has been that many situations are complicated enough to warrant investigation, and that there's no simple formula for how to investigate such things.

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Actually, there is a pretty straightforward way to investigate much of this.

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There was a faith healer who wrote a book with a number of amazing healings described. If those had all happened, it wouldn't have mattered if this woman hadn't healed anyone else, it would have been proof of some sort of power, whether that power was natural of supernatural.

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Correct.

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Someone else investigated her, though, and found the stories impossible to validate, except for three of them (out of 72 total he looked into). So the answer was pretty simple. The things she described didn't all happen.

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Right.

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I'm not saying that "hits" vs. "misses" is an invalid thing to look at. Admittedly, if everyone in California prayed to win the lottery, hits vs. misses would matter when a person claimed to win the lottery by prayer. I'm just saying it's not a universal answer, and I didn't think it was very applicable to the things I described earlier in this thread.

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It was applicable to the claim you made: This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-13-2006 11:07 AM

fair enough

Sorry, Ned, I don't understand. Please explain.

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*gasps at Shraff silence*
(a first time for everything eh).

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See what happens when you start giving well-reasoned answers?

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There's some guy, a magician himself, who wrote a book exposing Uri Geller's "psychic" powers, as well as the guy on That's Incredible who could move pages in a phone book by supposed mental power. He was pretty creative about finding out how people did things like that.

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James Randi?

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As far as Earthquakes, Tornados, Bee stings, trip and falls, quicksand, and other such mishaps, I am wondering if people expect that God placing a protective bubble around every human would solve the problem?

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That's a false dichotomy, phat.Nobody is saying that God should stop all bad things from happening to people.BUT, some of you say that God does stop some bad things from happening to some people.Sometimes God saves Christians because they are devout and pray to him. Sometimes God saves non-Christians because the Christians pray for the non-Christians. Sometimes the Christians pray but are not saved, which the Christians often interpret as their own fault for not being devout enough. Or they blame it on the Devil.Do you see how dodgy this begins to look?

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(Did anyone see that movie about the Bubbleboy?)

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Yes, with John Travolta!

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In another thread, I just realized that even though you did not pray, I have been praying for you, and the people in my church have been praying for all those who visit this forum.

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So now what?

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It means nothing, really, which is my point.What if we had had to drive through a terrible snowstorm? Then you could have considered your prayers answered because we got here safely.What if we had had to drive through a terrible snowstorm and had a wreck that injured us both, but not seriously? Then you could have considered your prayers answered because neither of us were seriously hurt.What if we had had to drive through a terrible snowstorm and we had a wreck that hurt both of us seriously but not fatally? Then you could have considered your prayers answered because neither of us lost our lives.etc., etc., etc.

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Damnit, someone should be! If a God exists, she should be doing all in her power to stop all bad things from happening to people. If I thought it would be productive, I'd pray for that.

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Maybe She is doing all in her power to stop bad things from happening, but She isn't all-powerful.

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The more important question raised by your post is: how does John Travolta rate an exclamation mark?

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Coz that was a long, long time ago before he was a big star.I'm NOT into him, don't worry.I'm into Matthew MacFadyen. Now THERE'S a gorgeous man and an incredible actor.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-31-2006 09:23 AM

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The only thing I've seen him in was Pride and Predudice, but my attention was mostly focused elsewhere on the screen.

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That's coz you're a boy.I'm a girl, so...

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However, I think I can approve. At least he seems to be able to act.

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Yes, at least. He has many, many other charms, I can assure you. That voice. Those eyes. His emotions worn on his sleeve but without any femininity at all...Quite swoonworthy.Keep an eye out for a movie that is going to be released in the US this May called In My Father's Den. It will only be in limited release, so you may need to hunt for it a bit.Matthew stars as a celebrated war photographer who comes home to the small town in New Zealand for his father's funeral after leaving as a young teenager (AbE: I should amke it clear that he's returning many years later). It is part family drama and part thriller/mystery and won a bunch of awards at the New Zealand film festival and also (IIRC) made a good showing at Cannes.I haven't seen it, of course, but I'm certainly going to.Oh, and he was in the first three seasons of a BBC spy show called Spooks (MI 5 in the US) that I am currently getting through Netflix.A really fun and gripping show. Plenty of exciting "spies saving the world" stuff but also with plenty of human drama.Matthew is great in it and so is the rest of the cast.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-31-2006 08:09 PMThis message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-31-2006 09:03 PM