Quote:
Originally Posted by javi
Well I think someone asked once before what it would take to convince an atheist there was a god. For instance, what if the sky literally opened up, the clouds parted, the sky turned green, and an enormous clearly recognizable face emerged and began to speak to us, telling us he is God and so on and so forth. Something well beyond any natural phenomena. The response given was that it would be even MORE likely that it was some hoax, either manmade or alien, trying to convince us that it was God. Afterall, why wouldnt you consider something at least slightly more possible than the supernatural when given the option?
Even if you were to shoot yourself in the head and find yourself in what you imagined would be the afterlife, and then suddenly returned to earth as if nothing had happened, with full recollection of your event, you could surmise that maybe you instead had some sort of schizophrenic episode and none of aforementioned events ever took place, since things like this HAVE happened. Although I suppose the introduction of witnesses could change things considerably.
Basically I just wanted to hear your take on it. I mean, if your story is that you went to buy a soda from the vending machine but didnt have any change in your pocket, hit the button anyway and a coke popped out, then yes I'm going to chastise you for abusing the definition of God's work. Hopefully your 1-outers arent as trivial as this. Regardless, I was just curious what they are. It would be interesting if they were really hard if not impossible to explain.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever thought critically about the events in your life you attribute to god? You said yourself that we could probably discredit them for a variety of reasons, but have YOU ever tried to discredit them yourself?
Ok that is a fair enough response / request, so I will share one of my many stories with you. Again I can`t do anything but give my word that I am not embellishing any of this. Give or take 8 years ago I was in my second year of being a youth pastor at a church here in town. Our Youth group was running probably 30-40 at the time and we had a summer retreat at a local campground. About 20 of our kids came to this 3 day retreat, and the whole focus for the weekend was prayer. On the last day I did a message about praying for others and talked specifically about how God listens and answers prayers, and that God calls on us to pray for things regularly. At the end we discussed the weekend and all the topics and several of the kids raised their hands and talked about how they want to believe in prayer,and try it, but they had never experienced prayer working, wasn`t sure how to pray, etc...
So I talked for a bit about how anything in the bible if you are unsure about it, test it. Do it for a month, see if it makes a difference. You have to try things to see if htey work, the best way to know if prayer works is to well pray. Right after that the phone rang... I didn`t recognize the number and normally I don`t answer when I don`t recognize a number, but because there were kids there and it could be a parent I picked up. On the other end was a county sheriff. He introduced himself to me and explained that one of my kids at the retreat's best friend had written a suicide note, and was missing. This kid had been battling depression for a while, and the cop sounded fairly confident that they were looking for a body, and wanted to talk to this kid to see if they could get any information.
The kid talked to the cop for a few minutes then got off the phone and immediately told the youth group what had happened. The kids immediately said, hey this is it! Now we have a chance to see if God answers prayer. Lets all pray they find the kid.
I`ll be dead honest with you I panicked. Seriously. What happens if they pray for this kid and they find the kid dead, these kids are going to be devastated. The kids immediately with no coaching fell to their knees and started praying aloud with passion and drive for this kid. Me and our leaders followed suit and were praying out of desperation, God PLEASE PLEASE ONE TIME!
About 5 minutes into this the kids all of the sudden stopped praying and started headed out to door for lunch. I was like WTH! WE cant just leave and go to lunch? We have to keep praying. Then one of the kids said, we asked God, he has it under control it's all good, and they walked out the door. I starred at my leaders in disbelief, and was half way out the door to chase the kids back in when my phone rang. It was the officer again. The kid had JUST showed up at the house unharmed.
Our kids went into a frenzy. I talk to some of them almost 9 years later and they still have never forgotten that day. It was a life changing experience for me as I clearly did not have the faith that God would do this at the time in that I was scared about the consequences if they didnt. Our kids had a child like faith, prayed in faith, and got their answer to prayer.
I can`t prove that it`s not a coincidence to anyone. But it definitely was a 1 outer, and it definitely is not my only story. I know lots of people wonder why some prayers are answered and some arent, why there is evil and poverty in the world. Why bad things happen to good people. We could spend years discussing them....
That being said you experience enough of these situations in your life, and you start to see that this world is not pure chance, there is SOME semblence of order.