Miracles On the Way to Truth

Jesus talked about sending a “spirit of truth” and said it would “guide you into all the truth.”

A reliable indicator that you are not following the spirit of truth is: you have no need for miracles.

You might “believe” in miracles. You might even experience a miracle now and then. But you steer clear of situations where you would need one. When situations like that occur, you wish they hadn’t.

There might be some argument about those statements, but anyone who argues with them probably does not expect miracles to happen. Hope? Yes. Pray? Yes. Expect? No.

If we don’t expect miracles to happen, no wonder they rarely do.

How many “Christians” do you know who live lives daring enough that they expect miracles to happen, so that they risk “following Jesus” in ways that make miracles necessary?

Not many, I’d bet. Not hardly a single one. Hear about them? Yes. Read about them? Yes. Know one? No.

I’m going to change that.

Proof of the Scientific Possibility of Miracles

Someone disprove this logic, please! I can’t believe that it was this easy. I must have gotten something wrong.

This is a proof of possibility, not a proof of occurrence in fact.

1. Does science explain phenomena before they occur or after they occur?
   1. If before they occur, explain how (Hint: prediction is not explanation)
   2. If after they occur, go to 2
2. Is science required before a feat can be performed?
   1. If Yes, explain most athletic feats, which are performed by non-scientists without a scientific understanding of the feat
   2. If No, go to 3
3. Is it possible that science will figure out a way to walk on water sometime in the future?
   1. If No, what’s your proof?
   2. If Yes, go to 4
4. Would walking on water be considered a miracle by today’s standards?
   1. If No, describe non-miraculous walking on water
   2. If Yes, go to 5

5. If walking on water is possible, might other feats considered miracles by today’s standards also be possible?
   1. If No, explain why walking on water is an exception
   2. If Yes, go to 6
6. So, to recap:
   1. Yes, feats can be performed before science can explain them.
   2. Yes, feats be performed without explaining them scientifically.
   3. Yes, feats be performed by people without scientific understanding of the feat.
   4. Yes, walking on water could someday be scientifically possible.
   5. Yes, walking on water is considered a miracle by today’s standards.
   6. Yes, if walking on water is possible, other feats considered miracles by today’s standards are also possible.

7. Therefore, feats considered miraculous by today’s standards are scientifically possible.

Prove me wrong, I dare ya!

Children

We Are Not Helpless, Stephen Stills 1970 (click it!)

This is now my personal theme song. It’s a declaration of fealty to children and war on adult stupidity.

When adults learn how to treat children, all the wars will die.

We were all taught in many ways–and most of us believed it–that the first thing adults must do to children is control them.

FUCKING, DEMENTED, SATANIC BULLSHIT!

The first thing that adults need to do for children is create safe, loving, supportive spaces in which they are free to learn and be themselves.

The fears driving adult repression of children are lies, and the repression is abusive.

When adults get a clue and stop abusing children–NOT just stop abusing their bodies, but stop abusing their dignity, their souls–in short order, probably less than two generations, wars will cease, crime will cease, addiction will cease, (especially our death-grip addiction to money,) health will skyrocket, and this world will become unrecognizable to us oldsters, if we are honored and graced so that we live to see it.

I’d say, “Damn the naysayers and everyone who willingly settles for this disgrace!” but they have damned themselves already by obstinately believing, “Thus shall it always be.” They are in for a surprise, but they can still repent: change their minds, turn around, and head in the opposite direction.

We adults were abused. We abuse each other. And we abuse our children. IT MUST STOP.

In not too long it will stop, with or without adult cooperation.

The only question is whether the change will be our vehicle or mow us down.

One Day

One day, I will die. You will die.
We will all die.

One day, there will be no time left.

We will see life pass before us, or a long, white bright tunnel,
Or darkness.

One day, I will matter only in memory,
But not just yours.

I will be remembered in every place
Where my foot disturbed the dust;
Where the air I breathed returned, warmer;
By the body memories of those who met my gaze
Or averted theirs; none were untouched.

No kindness was too faint
Or harshness went unnoticed;
All felt me and carry me, however slightly,
Rippling wider, shallower as I blend–

Disappearing or uniting?

Choose; it changes nothing.

I remain. You remain.
We all remain.

The Rock

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”

– Matthew 7:24-27

How do we know when we’ve dug down far enough? How do we know if we’re building on rock or sand?

This is a great example of how much teaching goes on in Churchianity without teaching a blessed thing!

It’s simple:

• If you can still dig and decide to stop, you’re building on sand.
• If you dig and dig and hit stuff that’s so hard that you can’t dig any deeper, you’re building on rock, at least at this point.

Proof of the Futility of Worry

And the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word, and the worry of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.
– Matthew 13:22

Test

1. Make a list of things that you have worried about in the last day or week or month. This is your “worry list.”
2. Make a list of painful, damaging, and tragic things that actually happened during that time period. The is your list of things that were worth worrying about.
3. Calculate the probability of something you worry about actually happening.¹

The War on Christians

The February 13, 2012 issue of Newsweek was brought to my attention by a friend over the weekend. Its cover story, written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World. (The image is clickable, too.)

Ms. Hirsi Ali presents a series of cases that shows a disturbing trend: Christian minority populations are increasingly being brutalized throughout the Muslim world. She summarizes:

It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem. No, the violence isn’t centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. In that sense the global war on Christians isn’t a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.

In other words, this trend goes beyond politics, deeper than ideology. Rage does that. She suggests:

The Church

I’ve been loving NakedPastor.com lately. Here’s the cartoon I got today. Click on the image to go to the full-size version on David Hayward’s site www.nakedpastor.com:

  © www.nakedpastor.com

 

The comments there are interesting. Today’s offering gave pause even to some of David’s regular followers, who are not your typical mainstream church advocates. How quickly we run to the defense of our long-standing institutions because… well… they’ve been standing there for so long. I guess we assume that counts for something.

“The Church” as we know it exists solely to provide a buffer between individuals and God. People join churches not to find God, but looking for a way to reap the benefits of association with God while avoiding the risks of direct confrontation.

The Location of God

In my life, when I felt that God left me, I was right. He went somewhere, and I was unable or unwilling to follow.

As I look back, the reasons I was unable or unwilling boiled down to fears based on lies. Many of the lies were taught to me by adults in authority as I grew up. Many are ingrained into our societal norms and assumptions. Others seem to occur to me naturally, spontaneously, simply because I’m human.

As I work through the lies and discard them, I see over and over that I could have followed, and there was no reason for my fear. When the smoke clears, I see that God wasn’t so very far away, and I also see how to get there, where he is. The freedom to move feels good.

The Bible

The belief that the Bible is the word of God suffers from gross negligence of chronological sequence.

Biblical writings were all penned centuries or more before the Bible was canonized. Canonization came after the fact and was not authorized by any writer of Scripture. No one responsible for canonizing the Bible wrote a single word of the Bible.

In other words, even if the writings of the Bible were God’s Word, canonization of the Bible centuries later could not possibly have been authorized by any of those writings, since it had not yet occurred.

The belief that writings in the Bible are God’s word is open to debate, but a logically valid possibility.

The belief that the canonization of the Bible was sanctioned by any writing of Scripture contradicts basic principles of time and causality.