God says this, and God says that

[QUOTE]Yeah if you stimulate the right parts of the brain you can replicate spiritual experiences. Doesn't mean the same parts of the brain are not being stimulated by other things, even possibly supernatural influences. [/B][/QUOTE]Ah, but it doesn't mean that they are, either.How does the supernatural activate the brain, and how do we tell the difference between a supernatural and a natural cause of activation?

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You have to earn your faith through diligence. If you want to walk with God, you've got to find Him first. It isn't hard to start out, it doesn't take long either, but you have to make an effort first, with at least enough faith that you won't immediately reject whatever the result is. You're going to have suspend your disbelief and you're going to have be humble. I don't think that's unreasonable for anyone, I managed just fine. If you refuse to do these things, why should God do your work for you? You earn what you work for just as the believers do. God has done a lot for you already, but you have to make a conscious decision and stick with it to get the best results.

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I've done all of those things, Gene, but I still don't have faith.

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Something is causing those experiences to happen, either way. If I'm not smoking hashish or massaging my brain with a surgical pick on Sunday mornings, I have to wonder, what causes that sensation? How is it, that people new to a religion, "discover" it and know exactly what the missionaries were talking about when they ask about it?

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Because you can train yourself to feel all sorts of things in all sorts of situations. Group or cultural pressure can play a big part, as well. Look at how people carry on at concerts and sporting events, and we can't forget the snake handlers in Southern churches.The missionaries probably talk in vague terms, and everyone's experience is entirely subjective, also. You essentially self-evaluate, which is always subject to bias. [QUOTE]And, even if it is entirely biological, is there anything even slightly harmful about it, to justify atheism? [/B][/QUOTE]Well, religious extacy and the belief that one is "filled with the spirit" in and of itself is fine if one remains peaceful, but what if one decides to go on a tear?

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I see open rebellion and a war against God.

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In fact, you seem one step away from being an enemy of God.

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Holy Crapola, do you THINK you could be any more self-righteous?You are starting to sound like a wacko Fundie. With your definite war-monger tendencies, you would fit in quite nicely with some of the folks from the Michigan Militia.

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Originally posted by gene90:

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As I said, faith is something you go looking for. It is usually not something you were born with.

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I most definitely disagree.I think we are very much born with the capacity to believe in magic and the supernatural. Otherwise, we wouldn't swallow all of that bunk about the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Boogey Man.The belief in God is just much, much more socially reinforced.

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the point i (and i believe gene) was making is that in a materialistic universe, one in which all things that exist do so because of accident, nothing can possibly exist but that which is natural, ie. material... atheists (for the most part, there may be exceptions) cannot explain the powers of reason they use to argue with christians, they can't explain where this logic/reason comes from...

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Actually, evolutionary psychology is investigating these ideas... [QUOTE]christians can explain these things.../QUOTENo, they can't, at least not by using faith or belief or whatever you are claiming."Godidit" isn't an explanation.I could say that invisible pink unicorns gave us logic and reason.There. Understand now?...see the problem?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by David unfamous:
[B]

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Originally posted by funkmasterfreaky:
When I go to the Rocky Mountains (so oftenly thought of around here as just folding rock) I can see God's craftsmanship, folded rock should not cause this sort of awe.

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Do you feel the same awe when looking at an anus or ear wax? I'm sure there are many of your Gods creations that don't have quite the same affect on you.

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ROTFLMAO!!! [QUOTE]Personally, the reason I feel awe at such wonders as mountains is because of their sheer size and scale. But, if they were cuboid, I'd be more inclined to think they were supernaturally created...[/B][/QUOTE]The funny thing is, mountains were widely considered quite ugly by many good Christian people:http://www.pitt.edu/~ulin/lit&env/Sublime.pdf"James Howell (1645) saw the Pyrenees as "uncouth huge monstrous excrescences of Nature", another writer called the Alps "the rubbish of the earth"

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the christian doesn't deny the existence of transcendent entities, therefore there is no inconsistency...

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Technically, this is not true.Christians deny the existence of all transcendent entities except the Judeo/Christian concept of God.You all flatly reject the notion that any other gods or supernatural entities exist.

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investigating what? how to explain a transcendental entity from within a worldview that denies such entities?

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No. YOu said that athiests couldn't explain where logic and reason came from, and that Christians could.I pointed out that Evolutionary Psychology is investigating the origins of logic and reasoning ability.

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schraf, you have misread the posts, i believe... it doesn't matter whether or not one says God or pink unicorns, the materialist denies *all* metaphysical entities while utilizing those same entities in her arguments... the christian doesn't... so you are mistaken, christians can constently utilize transcendental entities, there is no problem from their worldview... materialists (i've taken to using that word since not all atheists subscribe to materialism) can't.. i hope that clears it up for you

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The problem is your use of the word "explain.""Explain" means something different to the materialist than it does to the mystic.

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It is evidence that I have for my beliefs that is being ignored and explained away. Miracle healings through prayer, (not gradual but immediate painless and complete healings),

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How many times have you (or others) prayed for pain to go away and it hadn't compared to the times you prayed and it has? Haven't been keeping records? Then you are likely subject to a fallacy called confirmation bias, where you remember the "hits" and forget or excuse the misses.What kind of pain? Pain caused by what illness? What did the doctors say about these miracle healings?

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the way God has provided for my family in miraculous ways, in answer to prayer.

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How many times have you prayed for something specific and had it not come true compared to having it come true?Not keeping track like that, I'll bet. I'll bet if you were, you would find that the instances of specific prayers being anwered/not anwered would be no better than chance would predict.Of course, if you aren't being specific, and you just pray for general blessings or something, then you can always discount the bad things that happen and remember the good things, and then say after the fact that the reason the good things happen is because of answered prayers.This is called post hoc reasoning.These are exactly the kinds of very human tendencies for faulty reasoning that the scientific method is good at avoiding. Read more about them:confirmation bias - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com"Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs."post hoc fallacy - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com"The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event."

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These are just 2 pieces of evidence, but of course there is another explanation.

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BUt these aren't really pieces of evidence. They are just unsupported assertions that you have made.

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All of these are possibilities. I do not spend my time trying to convince the local Muslims that Allah is not the true God. Nor would I try to convince followers of any Greek or Egyptian gods.

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But one of your churche's main activities is sending missionaries all over the world to try to convince people of other religions to convert to Mormonism!

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From my perspective, your outright dismissal of anything you don't have direct sensory experience with is unreasonable

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Huh?Is my dismissal of giant pink invisible unicorns unreasonable because I hanven't had any direct sensory experience of them?If I HAD had direct sensory experience of said unicorns and STILL dismissed them, then THAT would be unreasonable.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by gene90:
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The comment was a response to gene's insinuations that athiesm is the easy way out.

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It is. It makes moral values optional.

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Bull. (Strawman)Besides, moral values prescribed by religions change with the wind.Slavery used to be morally OK. Owning women as chattel used to be morally OK. Burning people at the stake used to be morally OK. Having multiple wives used to be morally OK. Killing homosexuals used to be morally OK.Some of these things are still considered morally OK in certain parts of the world. It all depends upon what religion one follows.Religiously-based morality seems much more dangerous to me than humanistically-based morality because of this ability to dictate to large groups of people who will accept a moral code in it's entirety.Think "crusades."[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 12-16-2002]

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...and you wrote an article entitled "The emancipation proclamation for pedophiles in which you advocate that the House is wrong in opposing a lowering of the age of consent. It's there for the analysis of anyone who would like, let them decide if you are a religious bigot and if you write articles that try to pass off pedophilia as tolerable.

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Gene, you misrepresented what John wrote about in this article.His point is that the US Congress denounced the results of a scientific study. They had no business doing that just because the results of that study touched a nerve.Do you agree that this IS an inappropriate and bizzare thing for Congress to do, and do you agree that scientists should be able to study what they want to (within ethical limits) and that scientists should be free of censure by our government just because their results are unpopular?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by funkmasterfreaky:
[B]

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Why would God not leave physical evidence? This you've asserted but never explained? God heals the sick? hmm.... there ought to be evidence. You reduce your God to no more than a phantom.

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I have your evidence though you will deny it and explain it away. A friend of mine shattered his hip snowboarding, this was the second season in a row he had done so. So he was back in traction in the hospital to have the same hip repaired again. The elders of the church came in to pray for him and the very next day when the doctors took more x-rays the hip was completely healed. Not even traces of the fractures, completely and painlessly healed.

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I don't believe you.Where is the JAMA paper that undoubtedly would have been front page news in every paper and news program in the world?Surely such an amazing thing would have been shouted from the rooftops, right?Could it be that the hip wasn't broken at all?

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I was a counsellor at a bible camp one year, and our counsellors suddenly began to fall ill. Before we knew it we barely had enough staff to continue. We all got together for a prayer meeting, within an hour of this meeting counsellors who had been extremely sick started coming out of the cabins in perfect health.

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Again, I don't believe you.Whaere are the doctor's records? What illness did they have? (food poisoning can act like that) How many people were ill for how long, and did they all REALLY get well at the same time, and were they all REALLY in "perfect" health? Who evaluated their healt to determine if it was "perfect? How many times have people prayed and people's health haven't improved that quickly, or at all?

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One winter when I was young I remember we had a propane furnace in the little trailer our family was living in. At the beggining of the winter when my dad checked the guage on the propane tank he found that it was nearly empty. My parents were in financial trouble at the time barely finding enough money to keep a few groceries in the cupboards. So unable to afford to fill the propane tank my father just didn't bother looking at the rest of the winter. It was one of the more brutal winters I recall being -40* celcius most of the winter. Our furnace kept on going and going. There is no way that the propane should even have lasted a month let alone the whole winter. Well like the woman and the oil that propane just kept flowing and our furnace kept running, ran all winter. Didn't run out until dad made enough money in the spring to buy some propane.

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Um, maybe the gague was faulty. Maybe your dad or someone else got it filled and didn't tell anybody.

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This is God caring for his faithful. Healing the sick, performing modern day miracles. I got lots more johnny if you want pages and pages of miraculous things I have seen God do.

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Note these are not second hand stories, all personal experience.

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Sorry, but none of these examples are convincing. They are all just personal anecdotes and are riddled with all kinds of bias.You wanted to believe God did these things so you found reasons to believe and ignored all the other possibilities.