Wanderwolf wrote:Lazerus wrote:Okay, tell you what.
The moment god actually harvests grain for farmers, moves things for truckers, and makes soliders who fight in his name bullet-resistant, I'll buy that.
Until then, I'm placing it solidly in the "Stuff the bible says that even christains admit isn't true" catagory.
<cocks head> Well, how about
two Gideon Bibles stopping a rifle bullet? Maybe
a trucker who survived serious brain injury and concussion after six weeks in a coma? Voices that prevent car wrecks? A farner whose house and grandchildren,
100 yards from an explosive plane crash, are completely unharmed?
Or how about someone getting shuffled around downtown Dallas by an unseen presence, redirected, coaxed, and so on... to keep him out of the path of a deadly riot? No link; that one's me.
"The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen." -- G.K. Chesterton
(I suspect Ralph would agree with a different Chesterton quote as well. From the
Illustrated London News of 11 August 1928: "These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.")
Yours truly,
The bemused,
Wanderer
If I could throw a deck of cards over my shoulder, and have them all fall to the ground in a neat grid from lowest to highest, that would be a damn impressive trick woudln't it?
If I throw a deck of cards over my shoulder, and it lands in a jumbled pile. That's less impressive, what happened is exactly what you expect to happen.
Now, lets say I throw six billion packs of cards over my shoulder, one at a time. It would take awhile, to be sure, but it could be done. Out of all of those six billion, say, three actually land in a nice neat ordered grid.
Now, is that a nice trick? Of course not! If you throw enough packs of cards, eventually, though random chance, you'll get every possible configuration. But lets say I started throwing cards day in and day out and I didn't really bother to tell anyone. And then, one day, when they land in that neat grid, I show pictures and go to the media.
Now it looks like a nice trick, because you only see when it works.
Hearing about someone saved by a bible (litteraly) sounds like a miracle. Until you hear about all the people who had bibles on their person and were shot dead as a doorknob.
For it to be a trick, I have to be able to do it consistantly. Throw it over my shoulder and have it fall in that configuration more often then it should.
Llikewise, for it to be a miracle, bibles have to have a better track record as armor then other, similarly sized, bullet-proof objects. And there's no proof of that.
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Why are miracles always unobserveable? A bible blocks the bullet, could have been luck. Someones flu goes away, could have been luck. Someones cancer turns out to be bengin, could have been luck.
You never hear about the regrowing of a severed leg, or about someones bible actually making bullets bounce off them, or about actual fire coming out of the sky to smite the heathens. All of those miracles are confined to an era when the records are so horrible we can't confirm they ever happened at all.
The simple truth is, there are no miracles. There's just people who got lucky, and people who arn't around to contradict them.
