Miracle

1) You are avoiding the real issue.2) You have again and again given references to incredible miracles. Isn't it time you give some rea references to these miracles so we could discuss about them?3) How do you know what's unexplanable "miracles" and what's explanable-in-due-time "miracles"?Reattaching a finger might have seemed like a miracle to people 100 years ago, but now it happens all the time.You see, so far you have been very vague in what you refer to as unexplanable miracles. Please be more specific otherwise this thread is not going to go anywhere.By the way, I'd becareful calling jar ignorant if I were you. Let just say that he's being easy on you right now.

And that is? And just as today, much of it will be false.The Bible is not GOD.The Map is not the Territory.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

wow.....well let's see. You could explain the process of how cars were invented and how the machines that build them work and Marco Polo could understand it. How could you explain a severed hand crawling across a table, YOU CAN'T, unless you realize that some supernatural power is moving that hand. Jar, I'm sorry but this is where I realize how truly blind you choose to be, I don't want you to be like this. I pray that God will reveal himself to you and his eternal purpose for your life by salvation in Jesus Christ.

You ignored my question. How would we know that happened? The laws of the universe aren't written in a book for us to read; we have to discover them, and sometimes we come up with laws that don't actually exist.If it happens, it can't be breaking natural law. If something is against the physical laws of the universe, then it can't happen. If it did, then we know that wasn't actually a law in the first place.The laws of the universe aren't negotiable; that's what "physical law" means. If something happens that appears to contradict them, all that means is that our understanding of the law was incomplete.

Have you seen the Adams Family?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

The quotes in Message 8 aren't mine, but am responding to the rest of the post and Message 9.Just as a miracle is nothing more than a remarkable thing or event that apparently contradicts known scientific laws, supernatural describes what exists outside a man's normal experiences or the known laws of nature.My experiences and knowledge will be different from those of someone from an isolated tribe or from those of a scientist. What I consider miraculous, a scientist may not because they know more about the laws of nature etc.As Jar mentioned, resusitating someone from death or near death with CPR would probably have been considered a miracle to early Christians if not demonic.

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I don't think it's necessary to have a medical background to realize that what just happened can't be medically explained.

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Considering that your OP only said a cripple, I have no way of knowing if the healing can be medically explained. Obviously, it could not be medically explained by me, so as I said, initially my repsonse is that it is miraculous, but I wouldn't instantly advertise it as a supernatural miracle by a divine power.It would be better to deal with a real situation, than hypothetical sci-fi type of situations.

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A group of people prayed with and for the man and his glass eyeball miraculously changed into a real one.

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Now this situation is supposedly a real one, correct? Was it ever investigated?Have you ever read of an instance in the Bible where God took a manmade substance and transformed it into something natural?

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A gentle answer turns away wrath, But a harsh word stirs up anger.

just as an aside - I'm a bit confused, some christians take against spirit healing and say it's the work of Satan.Is it a "good" thing or a "bad" thing?

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Is it a "good" thing or a "bad" thing?

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Apparently the source of the healing is what is important.If the healing is done by someone not considered to be Christian, then the healing is not from God; and if it isn't from God, then the only thing left is Satan.Personally, I figure any healing is good.

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A gentle answer turns away wrath, But a harsh word stirs up anger.

Which, if you think about it, is even more confusing.Many christians can't seem to decide who a "true" christian is, how us disbelivers are suppose to work it out is beyond me!

From the perspective of this Christian, helping someone is always good, unless it's bad. AbE:re:You gotta know the secret handshake before I can tell you and even then, without the 'Captain Midnight Glow-in-the-dark secret decoder ring' you won't understand.But I'dlove for you to start a thread on it. This message has been edited by jar, 02-16-2005 11:32 AM

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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Many christians can't seem to decide who a "true" christian is

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I'm not sure if it deals with who is "true" or not.Like Jar, I think it would be a good discussion.Since spirituality is within us and invisible to onlookers, how does one discern the veracity of someone else's inner spirituality?From the various posts in these forums, you can tell that Christians don't really know how to tell either.I've asked a few preachers and they don't really know either, then they won't discuss it anymore.Example: If I said that God showed me that Jesus was not born of a virgin (by our terms today), a preacher would say that it was not God that showed me this because it disagrees with the NT.Same if someone is healed using a Native American prayer, or a new age techique, or someone with no religion has a gift we don't understand; is that person any less healed? Personally, I don't think so. Healed is healed.That is why I like this forum. I can ask the questions the preachers don't want to talk about.

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A gentle answer turns away wrath, But a harsh word stirs up anger.

Lol.The miracle of delusion.
Miracles happen every day with modern medicine. Jesus cured one leper. Today, if diagnosed soon enough, medicine cures most lepers. Hallelujah, more miracles.

The hypothesis is that there is a God who sets up the world to operate in a certain way, which might be described by natural laws, but that He also sometimes over rides those laws, in a miracle.You could, of course, simply say that this means the laws need to be revised to account for descriptions of God as part of the natural world; but I think that misses the point.The very fact that we can, apparently, describe the world using simple relations or equations that we call "laws" is a feature of the world, which some have found surprising. Einstein in particular was struck by this: "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." This is a contrast to a view of the world as involving a long series of actions by capricious gods, who act on unpredictable whims.In the example given... where a glass eye was replaced with a real one after a prayer session... would, if substantiated, be a miracle. I would have no way to account for such a thing, other than the intervention of a divinity of some kind. It would drastically change my whole world view with respect to Gods.If I happened along at a prayer meeting where such an event occured, I would frankly be completely confident it was a fraud or hoax. There is certainly no shortage of such hoaxes in history, or dupes who fall for them.However, I can image a hypothetical situation in which I would consider fraud unlikely. For example... if I knew the person involved, and had seen the accident in which the eye was lost, and seen the doctor replace it with a glass eye. In that case, I would have no qualm in calling this a suspension of natural law, and an indication of some supernatural intervention into the normal operations of the world.But I don't expect any such evidence to be given. The story given here is, I am quite positive, either horribly confused, or a mixup of fiction and fact, or a case of gullible marks of a con.Cheers -- Sylas

I've had a couple of students that described to me experiences very similar to this one. In my country, we call it bangungut, and it's a nocturnal phenomenon that's usually observed in young asian males from different countries (Japan - "pokkuri", Thailand - "lai-tai"). It's most noticed when the phenomenon results in death: hence, it's proper term is Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS).Although the term is a misnomer, because it's already at least partly explained. It's a cardiologic condition, linked to a mutation in a cardiac sodium channel gene (SCN5A), which results in myocardial infractions in sleeping young men. SUNDS is I think similar to other cardiologic conditions, such as QT syndrome and SIDS. SUNDS has also been shown to be the same as the Brugada Syndrome, which has been observed in Europeans. Genetic and biophysical basis of sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome (SUNDS), a disease allelic to Brugada syndrome. Human Molecular Genetics, 2002, Vol. 11, No. 3 337-345The only difference that I see between your scenario and what my students described to me is "a dark disfigured human that is sitting on your chest." But I wouldn't trust anyone experiencing a sudden nocturnal myocardial infraction in the dark to sense things clearly.So no, I wouldn't consider this supernatural.[Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor or an expert on this topic, nor have I experienced SUNDS; I'm not positive that a SUNDS patient would experience exactly what Jacen or my students described. This is just how I understand the disease based on what I've read and heard. (I had to write a paper on it before, you see.) Perhaps a qualifed doctor might be able to verify what I've said, or explain it better.]

I just don't understand how we would tell the difference between God overriding his own natural laws and the natural laws already allowing this to happen, unbeknownst to us and our flawed understanding of those laws.You have kind of a seat-of-the-pants method, I guess; I was hoping that we could come up with something a little more rigourous.