A Little Practice in Faith

It seems like almost every day things happen in which I see the hand of God. I know atheists tend to chalk them up to coincidences, and I always wish they could see our life here in Rose Creek Village, as our village is called. It's hard not to believe here.So I thought I'd start a thread for those that would like to detail some of the "coincidences" (miracles in which God remains anonymous) they've experienced.Today, I was completing an ebay transaction, and I didn't realize that I was on my "personal" hotmail account, which is set at exclusive, so that only those in my address book can email me (ends spam). I have a "business" account that I'll change if it starts getting spammed, though I've been careful with it so far.Anyway, it wasn't until I sent the message and got the "your account is set to exclusive" note that I realized I sent the message from the wrong account. Oh, well. I had to add the recipient to my address book in case he emailed me back.I was happy to find that the email didn't get there. I left an "s" out of the address, so it didn't arrive. I switched to the correct account and resent the email. Just as I sent it, I realized I didn't save it. Rats! I like to keep my ebay correspondence.This time I accidentally used "hotmail.com" for the recipients address, instead of his real domain. Hotmail caught that there was no such hotmail address, so it sent me back to the email with everything saved. I simply clicked the "save to sent folder" and resent the email.Everything wonderful because of two mistakes.I once had the same thing happen when in anger I sent an email to one of the most awful people I have ever met. It had a real underhanded blow in it, and I felt awful for sending it. I could hardly live with myself.That email came back undelivered the next day for no known reason. I can't tell you the relief it brought me.Coincidence? Sure. I have a lot of them, though.

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If God is going to intervene for... no offense intended... your piddling crap, and not for people who really need it, wouldn't that paint God in a rather unflattering light?

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Any twentieth century American would definitely have to ask themselves exactly this question. Not all of us come up with the same answer you did, that this paints God in an rather unflattering light.Since I don't get to decree how things are, I'm stuck with the way they are, whether I like it or don't like it. I would hardly use my original post as a basis for believing in God, and I didn't start this topic to provide evidence for God. However, I find the evidence for God too overwhelming to deny, yet I have no explanation for suffering in the world, whether it be three million people in the Congo, a kidnapped/molested child, or the monkey I saw on video being torn apart while alive, then eaten by chimpanzees. I can't change it; I can't make God change it; nor can I make the experience of God go away.Sometimes being consumed with a big picture you can do nothing about makes you miss the little pictures you can do something about every day.For the rest of those who responded, the above was not written as an apologetic or proof for God. I have started a thread before on that topic, and no one really picked it up, not even y'all. Thus, I wasn't asking for, nor am I really interested in your arguments against it as a proof for God.I do apologize for adding the note about coincidences at the end of my OP. It did sound like a challenge. It wasn't meant to be.

Crash,Like I said, I wasn't trying to prove something with my original post, and there are things I call coincidence. Other things I feel are reminders from God. I thought today was one.If someone really wanted to get on me for using the incident in my OP, they could have gone to my lists of posts (I'm not saying it would have been worth it) and found out that just today I posted to Schrafinator in another post telling her that the Dvorak keyboard has ctrl-v (the "paste" shortcut in windows) right next to ctrl-w, which I found out recently is the "close window" shortcut, and a miskey caused me to lose about four or five paragraphs I'd typed to her.Of course, I just figure there was something wrong with the post, so I wrote it completely differently. I take almost nothing as an accident.

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But your post does suggest to me that the "God hypothesis" is the kind of thing that informs one's entire worldview. That's a little scary, to me. Like a weird kind of cognitive dissonance. I mean, how can any of that god stuff actually make sense to you? That's more of a rhetorical question, by the way. I suspect the answer has something to do with the ineffability of god, perhaps?

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Gee, Crash, I don't understand what you're asking me at all. I understand all the words, but you must be thinking some way I just don't think.Why does something that informs one's entire worldview scare you? Why is what I said cognitive dissonance? Is it that I took both the good and the bad as the intervention of God? Is it that I think God is intervening, but I can't explain why he doesn't stop starvation in Africa? I just don't know what you're getting at.

I didn't know who to hit the reply button to. I just chose the last one.

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However, if you think about it, the second sentence is more what was meant. TL can correct me if I'm wrong.

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Here, everybody is taught to look for the hand of God. We had a lice breakout at the end of May. It was only three or four kids, but we assailed the problem with every weapon available. Our nurse and I researched lice on the internet. She then got together with several ladies and developed a plan for the whole community. We banned children sleeping over in the village, completely cleaned and treated the affected homes, washed all the clothes except some that we bagged and put away for 14 days, and had groups of ladies checking people's hair pretty much daily for over a week.Yeah, we said, "God sent us lice." We learned to be closer, and we got into each others' lives more. There are houses with mom's getting housekeeping assistance that we didn't recognize the need for before this.So, if that was your point, John, then we recommend that way of thinking to everyone; it's not just me, or even just us.We'd recommend that way of thinking even to those folks in the Congo we've been discussing.

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Fair enough. Personally, I don't see how the suffering of the world can lead a person to anything other than one of three conclusions.

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How about, I don't really know what the hell's going on with the really awful things I know about, or how things got this way, but things don't seem all that random and unguided from my perspective, so now I have to deal with that?Addendum: I'm not talking about evolution here; I already know natural selection is not a random process.

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Come on...you're descended from Adam who ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and thus "became as gods, knowing good from evil." Surely you, too, understand the grand design there is in the deaths of millions of people.

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First of all, I don't believe the Adam story is a literal story.Second of all, if the issue is only deaths, then the question is whether I understand the deaths of billions of people, because everyone dies, and people in the United States often suffer deaths every bit as bad as starving (at least I think a long, drawn-out battle with cancer or heart disease is as bad as starving--I've done neither).The issue is lives, because what really bothers us, me included, is that their life is miserable, not that they died in their misery.I guess people would be offended if I suggested that a relationship with God has allowed some people in pretty bad suffering to endure that suffering with joy. It's a little offensive for me to suggest that, because I haven't been through all that. The suffering exists nonetheless, and those who have endured it with trust in God and with joy would say what I just said.I remember Amy Carmichael's story, spending a lot of her life weeping over the children she was unable to rescue from India's "temple children" system (child prostitution), but she rescued, by whatever means were at hand, any she could, and it never touched her faith in God, nor that of those she resuced. In fact, one of the girls she was unable to rescue escaped as an adult from that system and joined her, also as a believer in God, despite her childhood. (Her name was Mimosa or something close to that.)I was an atheist once, for about a month, when I was 21. I had been moving in the direction of becoming an atheist for several years, and I remember finally saying to myself, "I need to admit it; there is no god."One of the reasons it only lasted a month was the movie "In the Presence of Mine Enemies." It's about a guy who was a POW in Vietnam for seven years. At the end of the seven years, they were let out into a yard with all the other prisoners, and the prisoners gathered in a circle, sang the National Anthem or some patriotic song, and then knelt and gave thanks to God.I was stunned that those prisoners could do that. Why didn't they stop believing in God after seven years of ill treatment and torture? My conclusion was that despite their suffering, in some way they were aware of God or his help during that time, and thus they didn't lose faith.I don't know what to say about suffering in the world. I haven't been there, not anything like some others have. But I don't think even all the sufferers agree with those of you who say it proves God is non-existent or heartless.

You missed the point by a few inches is my guess. Now why didn't I get these kind of responses when I was suggesting evidence for God's hand in my life?I did not interpret it as evidence of God's hand in my life (and I am male, btw). I have interpreted other things, including some of what I mentioned in post 28, the post after yours, as evidence of God's hand in my life. The lice incident was an example of our way of thinking, interpreting things as the hand of God, because that's the way we already believe. (It seemed pertinent to the discussion at the time, because people were commenting on our way of thinking, not just that we believe in God.)There are some reasons I believe, but the lice incident is not one of them. I guess we don't really pray the way other people pray--at least not much--so I didn't mention prayer. In fact, the reason, in my eyes, that God enters into any of this is because God enters into everything for us. Yes, I could have. However, this thread wasn't on evidence for God. I did go ahead and slip into some of that in post 28 if you want to address any of those. Since we seem to have chased all the believers off by winning evolution debates with them, I guess I'll switch and talk to you guys, since you seem to want to, anyway.

I read that. Fascinating how people are willing to live.

I answered the question before you ever repeated it. I was satisfied with the answer, and Dan Carroll may not have agreed with it or even thought it was a good answer, but I think he considered it an answer.In case you missed it, the answer was, "I don't think it's conclusive that those are the only three options."I think the discussion has gone on long enough to show reasons I don't think those are the only options. Others have disagreed with my reasons, but none of them have continued demanding I pick one of their three options. Your demand that I do so is what made you miss my answer.

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What are other options that I'm missing?

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I don't want to be more specific. There are reasons I don't think any of the options work, and I don't have a good fourth one.I think I've seen God be good to those who acknowledge him. On the other hand, I've had two "friends of a friend" who had horrible circumstances strike them. One was a lady abducted from a pizza place who was carried out to the desert and murdered. The other was killed by a mountain lion on a jog in the Sierra Nevadas around 1992.It is possible that means he is just capricious about who he's good to and who he's bad to. It is possible that means he doesn't exist, or maybe even doesn't care. However, it's also possible that there's a lot more to life than we know or understand, that our physical lifespan is very short compared to our spiritual lifespan, etc.My later posts were to suggest that even those who have been through some pretty awful suffering in this world have not concluded that God must necessarily have been evil towards them, that their temporary suffering worked for their long term good.

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I know what you mean, and I am not claiming that this biblical god causes evil (although on the other hand the bible states he does; will provide chapt/verses if requested)

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I don't remember the exact verse, but I know it says that. I was a charismatic most of the time that I was in mainline Christianity, and I had to notice verses like that, because everyone around me was claiming they didn't exist or didn't mean what they said.

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what possible purpose can there be when a child is raped?

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Well, I have to admit that I don't even have a desire to attempt an answer to that one. I, too, just wish it didn't happen.I have thoughts, about judgments on the perpetrator and the like. Tertullian, who lived in North Africa (Carthage) in the late 2nd and early 3rd century said that he'd seen rape used as a form of persecution to the Christians there, because nothing else seemed to bother them. I mentioned Mimosa earlier, who told her own story about the temple prostitution she was put into, wishing she could have been rescued like the others Amy Carmichael rescued. She didn't hold it against Amy's God, but waited years until she could escape and joined Amy at Dohnavur.I don't have good answers here, because I hate that stuff as much as anyone does, but I'm just pointing out that even those who experienced such suffering didn't conclude that God must not exist or must be bad, capricious, or cruel.

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I know, I am now guilty of arguing from my emotions

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There's nothing wrong with arguing from emotion, in my opinion, as long as the emotion is based on something that really happened.

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I can agree in part, but couldn't this line of thinking be used to prove the opposite as well?

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It *is* being used to prove the opposite. I'm not trying to prove anything, but simply suggesting that the proof is not conclusive.On this subject, I totally understand the argument, and I'm arguing on the defensive side, because even I realize the argument is pretty strong and backed by all our emotions, including mine. However, on my side, I believe the suffering is not the whole story, that perspectives change (some) when our lifespans are not limited to this physical life, and that there are positive evidences of supernatural aid to those who seek it that are not so easily dismissed as coincidence or hallucination, or so easily dismissed just because they are not repeatable and thus not testable. There's scientific evidence and there's legal evidence, and testimony carries some weight, too.

Why don't you try seeing if you can come up with a more general question, so that I can address all of life in one post? :-0I have ideas, Rrhain, but people have been writing books and talking about this since at least the time of the Greek philosophers. This is way too general a question for me to answer. I don't really know, but I do know that some things just aren't learned without pain.

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I don't think so. I think we've got our answer:

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C: God is arbitrary and capricious.

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That is what many conclude. Obviously I'm among those that don't, and you're among those that do.

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No, some things are learned more quickly with pain.

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I agree that some things are learned more quickly with pain. Others can be learned just as quickly without pain. Some things, at least for some people, are only learned through pain. Surely you have given advice to someone, had them reject it, then watched them pay for their decision, then thought, "I told you so."Those things are things learned only by pain.

Been addressed, and I didn't say a child would learn something from being raped and murdered.I've not been raped. It sounds horrible. I do know a couple people who have been raped, and they both love God. I do not believe evil occurrences on earth demands or proves that a good God cannot exist.