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That’s about as good a summation as I’ve read anywhere.

Thanks

Thanks, a great scripture.

In the 1960 movie, The Alamo, as the men are sitting around talking on the last night, there is a discussion on religion. One man doesn't believe in God and life after death. I don't remember the exact words, but another contradicts him and says something to the affect of "a man has to believe in something." I have often found myself wondering about the existence of God. The people who tell us that we were not created, but evolved, often put up a compelling argument. But.....all one has to do is just stop and take a very close look at nature, and see just how perfect it is, and how everything has a purpose, and a place. It just didn't happen that way, someone made it that way. A higher being, God.

I've never seen God, can't take a non-believer and prove to him that God exists, as least not in the strict sense of the word. But, I know God is real, and I choose to follow the path that I believed has been laid out by Him for mankind. If someone else doesn't see it that way, it is their loss.

As far as I know my body and brain could do everything it does without me being in it, yet I am aware I exist. That is all the proof I need that our physical world ain't all there is.

Demons, evil spirits and hauntings, whatever you want to call them, as the years go by and encounters or word of encounters from trusted sources accumulate, these too I take as additional evidence that the Bible is true.

Others' MMV

Birdwatcher

When i first talked to God:
I never mention the following for many many years, years before i saw books and others talking about the very same experience.
age 15 i was envoved in a motorcycle accident that should have killed me.
with an illegal immigrant.
net result was my right lower leg was broken in three places, ankle crushed, i tried to stand up and pushed my crushed ankle up to where your knee normally is, cracked my skull, and tore a lot of skin off my face.
what saved me was a nurse, and in the hospital within minutes, and my doctor happened to be there when i arrived. He was a WWII trauma surgeon that knew what he was doing.
I remember floating around above my body while they were working on me, and I remember going down along this tunnel trying to get to this warm happy place on the other side. A voice said to me, ronald, you have to go back, it is not your time, you have unfinished business. And I remember getting sucked back into my body. There was a guy in the room, in for a hernia operation, I saw him dieing. Got my father to get them to move me. Next day this guy dies on the operating table.
Now i have heard all kinds of explanations, oxygen starvation, drugs, and so on, but it was very real and i never talked about the experience for years. I now like to say I was arguing with God, as I wanted to cross over, but was unhappy when i was sent back.
A lot of things that happened later i think back to that unfinished business part, it was true.
I am a small c Catholic, but I do believe there is a guiding light for lack of better words. An i have had to deal with death for many years in family, clients, and so on. You either believe or don't, matters not to me. But go through what I did, it would be hard to be a unbeliever.

Like i said in my post, i am a small c catholic. Meaning i believe in the universality of christianity, but also believe there is more than one path to follow to the same thing.
But i am a firm believer also in that evil and the devil walk the earth, and some are touched or marked by evil.
But then what do I know?
People look at me funny sometimes when I explain the bright colors painted around openings to the house. Particularly when i say that is a holdover from the old country, done to prevent evil spirits from entering the house.
In the last years of my mothers life, she was seeing things, long dead relatives, and so on. I asked the Mayo trained doctor about it, he said there were all kinds of medical thought explaining it, but if you asked him personally, remembering he had seen 100's of people die, he said some people are able to see through the thin vail that separates us from the hereafter. My mother and grandmother both had this ability.

As always, you, the individual reader, be the judge. This was my first life and death miracle experience. I've seen several others since.

My Mom had been sliding down hill in the cognition department. That mostly means she was slipping into dementia. She's also been complaining about digestive issues which at 86, her doc and I more or less understood and expected, but we went through all manner of tests to see if anything could be helped by them. I say "we" because I got involved as she would not remember much about her appointment after it was over, so thought I better help out and attend with her, so I did. The last procedure was a colonoscopy. The prep is never fun and that was certainly magnified in multiples given her mental soundness. I'll leave that at that. But as a result of that procedure a small bit of seemingly early cancer was discovered and a portion of her colon removed. On that day she was being released to the nursing home to convalesce and hopefully return to her home, and as she was being wheeled out to the ambulance for transport, she had a massive stroke. I was called and of course went directly to her bedside to find her in a fetal position, eyes rolled back in her head, and without the ability to talk. She was surrounded by relatives and when they filtered out the doctors took me to view an X-ray that showed a spot about the size of a quarter on her left lung. They told me it was fluid that she had taken back into her lung as a result of the violent bodily reactions that typically happen with a major stroke. They said unless was put on a ventilator, her lungs would fill with fluid and she would pass in that night. She had a living will defining her wishes as not to be resuscitated, so I signed the required documents and went back in to be with her. I had a Bible with me, and decided to read to her from Psalms, so I started with the first. As I read I was reminded of the dreariness of those first Psalms as David was where my Mom was at the lowest point in his life. But I missed the fact that every one of them ended with a declaration that David also had faith that God would see him through those wretched times. It seems my Mom heard what I had missed. Slowly she began to respond and by midnight we were having conversations. I walked out of that hospital to go sleep in my own bed, knowing she would live. What I was to find out in a few hours would even more tell me Who was involved in her healing. When I started down a long hallway the next morning her doctor came around the far end. He yelled all the down it, "It's a Miracle". I agreed. We visited, with him as excited as I, and I went on to join her in her room only to find that not only was her death delayed, but she had also been restored to right mind and was her typical sharp as a tack self, until her death over 6 years later.

Thanks for "proving" my statement

When people bring up proof God exists I ask them if atoms exist because we're taught atoms exist but we can't see them. We all choose what we believe. YMMV

So where is your evidence, or do you simply offer a bag of no hope or as Bristoe said, "you're gonna make nice dirt"? Where the heck did all this organized material and energy stuff come from? Hitchens law is, in fact, an ad ignorantiam. Indeed it is entirely possible for assertions without evidence to be later proven true, and cannot be soundly rejected without evidence. You beat this to death, but all it amounts to is sniping from the weeds without offering any real substance.

I would hope, there much more you good folks can agree on than to disagree.

Yeah, I hope so too.

You could assert that Ronald Regan killed JFK. If you are unable to offer any evidence, such as method means and motive, I would be totally justified in not believing your claim. There is not need or me to prove Joe McCarthy actually poisoned JFK for me to reject your totally unsupported claim JFK was strangled by Ronald Reagan.


As for what evidence is there supporting the current scientific consensus? Just the total body of current scientific knowledge for Astrophysics, Quantum Mechanics, Palentology, Geology, Biology, Genetics, Cosmology, Astronomy, and Physics.

Christians are known to cite the Resurrection as a form of irrefutable proof.

but ask them to then prove the resurrection actually took place and they quickly abandon
the idea of objective proof in favor of subjective faith.

Shroud of Turin? Not proof but we can't duplicate it. Gets you thinking: Maybe that leap of faith isn't so far after all. link

Or if you like YouTube link
Runs about 52 minutes but lots to be said.

Carbon dates to the 14th century..

If the Turin cloth was genuine, you would have the DNA of Jesus.

Galatians 4:4

"but when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law"

Being 'made of a woman' would include the mitochondrial DNA required from his mortal mother.

My thinking at one time and also of the physicist in the links.

Lots of evidence to the contrary. The samples were taken contrary to protocol from what on close inspection turned out to be a repaired corner, so it was repaired in the14th century. See the links. Just as reliable tests following protocol date to the 1st century.

BTW, DNA deteriorated not to mention MASSIVE contamination. They did get blood type.

Even if DNA had not deteriorated, there would be no way to establish it as being the DNA of Jesus.