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So let's say exactly the same thing happened, except that what was written was a violent obscenity (I have seen such)...would that have been a sign from god?
I think she would have felt NO connection to an obscenity, since obscenities were not what had been occupying her mind. It was the connection between her thoughts and the words she saw.
That's a fair question. I don't know the answer. My knee-jerk reaction is that you are just not open to it, or not listening/looking, but I really can't know if that is true.
A well-known and slightly humorous example is provided by Michael Shermer, who makes his living as a professional debunker and sceptic. He described, in Scientific American of all places, a classic After-Death Communication involving his wife and her late grandfather's radio (that Shermer also experienced): [url]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anomalous-events-that-can-shake-one-s-skepticism-to-the-core/[/url].
FWIW, I experienced two similar but even more startling events after the death of my first wife. I shared them with Shermer and we had a friendly exchange. They would exceed the boggle threshold of all but a True Believer, however, so I won't bother with them here.
Anyway, Shermer's article generated such HOWLS of outrage from his faithful non-believing audience that he was forced to do a complete about-face. No, OF COURSE he wasn't actually suggesting there was anything genuinely anomalous about this incident. No, OF COURSE it has some mundane explanation. SURE, it had to be just a weird - really weird - coincidence.
But, of course, these incidents aren't so simple. This wasn't just an "old radio that hadn't worked but suddenly started playing all by itself." READ SHERMER'S ACCOUNT. It is the "eerie conjunctive of deeply evocative events" (his words) that identify this as an ADC. You'd have to be pretty hard-boiled - or perhaps desperate to retain the audience that is the foundation of your career - to dismiss this as a mere coincidence.
There is NO ONE who does not experience anomalous experiences. But there are those, like LearnMe, whose belief systems will not allow them to acknowledge such occurrences and who are, alas, willfully blind. But still they start threads such as this for some purpose that is far from clear to me.
I will never write and share about these things in the future. Never.
I know the feeling, farm108, and am saddened you feel that way. Self-loathing jerks gotta be self-loathing jerks. I hope you realize my post was in support of your experience.
From where does this opinion or understanding about miracle workers come I wonder. Most of what I know about miracle workers is that they are not actually miracle workers at all. Not in terms of the following definition anyway...
Miracle: a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.
Perhaps the definition is inaccurate.
All religions are the right one, except the ones that are wrong.
All religions are based on what some scribe wrote down, but you cannot find the literary agent for God, to fix misprints.
All religions define one’s relationship with that which one understands as a higher power or supernatural state. That some sequential linear time bound, partially furred, variously garbed, electrically powered, water filled, gas processing, food cooking meat bags inhabited by sentient nondimensional consciousness doesn't perceive other dimensions is no reason to denigrate others who do.
Religions generally define the relationship between the individual, society, and that which is beyond his physical senses of the material world, in harmony with the law of love, unless the law of the jungle is preached.
Most civilized beings prefer the law of love, except those that do not.
Ambiguous definity maximus.
That some sequential linear time bound, partially furred, variously garbed, electrically powered, water filled, gas processing, food cooking meat bags inhabited by sentient nondimensional consciousness ....
Must have been nice for your wife to know that's how you felt about her. Is that why you're divorced?
The joy of being an atheist, I guess. Hey, sorry Granny died, but after all she was just a gas processing, food cooking meat bag.
This is, in its own way, quite humorous. It is PRECISELY the atheist version of a "God of the gaps" argument: "There are lots of aspects of reality I can't explain, and some of them are puzzlingly suggestive of a designing or guiding intelligence, but I KNOW the explanation will eventually prove to be a materialistic one and that there is nothing supernatural." Uh-huh.
It reminds me of the famous Dawkins quote that biology students and even practicing biologists have to be constantly reminded that even though nature gives an almost overwhelmingly compelling indication of having been designed, "IT WASN'T DESIGNED!!! GET THAT IDEA OUT OF YOUR HEADS!!!" Uh-huh.
I happen to be reading the recently released second edition of The Design Inference by William Dembski. The first edition, now almost 30 years old, was a pioneering work of probability and information theory with far wider application than just the Intelligent Design movement. The second edition is greatly expanded and refined. Dembski makes the point early on that a favorite but misguided attack on the first edition was that inferring design as the best explanation for a body of evidence is an "argument from ignorance" similar to a "God or the gaps" argument.
In fact, Dembski points out, when it comes to evolution it is the Darwinists themselves who play this game. Their god is natural selection. No matter how unlikely probability analysis may indicate it is that some aspect of biology can ever be explained by natural selection, Darwinists insist it eventually will be. It HAS to be, you see, because natural selection is their god. An inference to the best explanation simply can't be allowed if the best explanation is design.
To return to the topic of this thread, and why I believe "signs" such as I and others have described point away from what Cruithne is saying, it is the overarching INTELLIGENCE and PERSONALITY that I find compelling. These aren't just "weird things that happen" in the abstract. Again and again, whether we're talking about complex sequences of events or what I've called "one off" occurrences, we see COMMUNICATION, PURPOSE and even HUMOR. In short, we see every indication of intelligence and personality behind them.
In my long involvement with anomalous phenomena, both as an experiencer and a serious student, I've always been struck by what I and others have called the "trickster" quality. Again and again, as with the experience I described above with Vicki, these experiences are playful and often humorous. They don't happen on demand - in fact, TRYING to have them is entirely counterproductive (and often dangerous). They happen when they will and on their terms. As I believe is true of God Himself, they provide hints and clues rather than answers.
For all the reasons that have contributed to my belief system, I'm satisfied that materialism is COMPLETELY false - pretty much 180 degrees false - and that the ultimate ontological reality is both supernatural and highly personal: a master consciousness, a designer, a creator, a deity.
Likewise humorous to me is Cruithne's statement, "The universe is more amazing without imagining some being came before it and invented it." Well, YEAH. I fully agree that an eternal universe in which matter and consciousness are simply brute facts, which for some mysterious reason operates according to mathematical principles and uniform laws, which has mysteriously generated life and information-based systems such as DNA, which mysteriously gives every indication of having been designed, which mysteriously provides innumerable hints and clues of a creative intelligence interacting with odd creatures who have evolved to a self-aware state and who share an intuitive sense of a higher reality and a creator - well, YEAH, I agree that would be "more amazing" than a God. A supreme intelligence is, however (it seems to me), the best explanation to be inferred from the available evidence.
I can't imagine what you found to be humorous about anything I wrote but I'm glad to have provided you with some entertainment.
I didn't say ANY of this by the way:
"There are lots of aspects of reality I can't explain, and some of them are puzzlingly suggestive of a designing or guiding intelligence..."
Those are your words not mine. I absolutely DO NOT believe any of it is suggestive of a designing or guiding intelligence - this is a misinterpretation.
Where you see intelligence, personality, communication, purpose and humor, I see none of that. At least not in the directed sense that you mean. There's no middle man. No orchestra conductor. No designer.
There's communication going on but there's nobody in between deciding who communicates with who. There's humor, there's also tragedy and cruelty. Let's hope none of that is directed.
What I see is a universe that functions through cause and effect; that continually creates itself from lighter to heavier elements; that forms galaxies around black holes that formed from collapsed stars and so on. An earth formed in just the right place in the milky way, stable enough across deep time, allowing life to evolve - could have the appearance of having a designer. I get that might be your interpretation. Or maybe it's an inevitability given the circumstances that came together.
When I talk about the possibility of there being something outside of our understanding, I mean just that: something outside of our understanding. Humans have always had concepts to deal with that are just out of reach. I'm okay with recognizing I'll probably never know what that is, nor should I be expecting anything else. It's a possibly infinite universe out there. Why should I expect to understand all of it?
I think she would have felt NO connection to an obscenity, since obscenities were not what had been occupying her mind. It was the connection between her thoughts and the words she saw.
Based on the title of the thread, it was beyond a "connection".
But this is a complaint I have long had...since childhood...about christian thinking. If it's good, god did it. If it's bad, humans did it. Sorry, I do not accept that. I'm tired of that kind of warm and fuzzy thinking...whether it be a christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim or...
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