Agnosticism, Atheism, Bible Study, Christianity, Culture, Faith, God, Religion

Frustration

Nate

Sigh…

So here’s what’s been going on lately. Most of you who read this blog already know that when my wife and I left Christianity, it wrecked most of our family relationships. My wife’s parents and siblings, as well as my own, felt that they could no longer interact with us socially after our deconversion. We were no longer invited to any family functions, and our communication with them all but disappeared. We would speak if it was about religious issues, or if there were logistic issues that needed to be worked out in letting them see our kids, etc.

Over the years, things have gotten a little better, especially with my wife’s parents. Things are by no means back to normal, but at least our infrequent interactions have become more civil and more comfortable. A few weeks ago, I even had a phone conversation with my father that lasted about half an hour and had no references to religion whatsoever. It was nice.

Nevertheless, the awkwardness is still there, just under the surface. And we’re still blacklisted from all the family functions.

Throughout this time, I’ve occasionally reached out to my side of the family with phone calls, letters, facebook messages, etc, in an effort to discuss the issues that divide us. I don’t get much response. I’ve always been puzzled by that, since I know they think I’m completely wrong. If their position is right, why aren’t they willing to discuss it?

In the last five years, I’ve also been sent books and articles and even been asked to speak to certain individuals, and I’ve complied with every request. Why not? How could more information hurt? But when I’ve suggested certain books to them, or written letters, they aren’t read. When I finally realized that my problems with Christianity weren’t going to be resolved, I wrote a 57-page paper to my family and close friends, explaining why I could no longer call myself a Christian. As far as I know, none of them ever read the whole thing. And sure, 57 pages is quite a commitment. But they say this is the most important subject in their lives…

This past week, the topic has started to come back around. A local church kicked off a new series on Monday entitled “Can We Believe the Bible?” It’s being led by an evangelist/professor/apologist that was kind enough to take time to correspond with me for several weeks in the summer of 2010. I’ve never met him in person, but a mutual friend connected us, since he was someone who was knowledgeable about the kinds of questions I was asking. Obviously, we didn’t wind up on the same page.

can we trust the bible?

My wife’s parents invited us to attend the series, but it happens to be at a time that I’m coaching my oldest daughter’s soccer team. So unless we get rained out at some point, there’s no way we can attend. However, we did tell them that if practice is ever cancelled, we’ll go. I also contacted the church and asked if the sermons (if that’s the right word?) will be recorded, and they said that they should be.

Monday night, the weather was fine, so we weren’t able to attend. And so far, the recording isn’t available on their website. However, they do have a recording of Sunday night’s service available, which is entitled “Question & Answer Night.” I just finished listening to it, and that’s where the bulk of my frustration comes from.

It’s essentially a prep for the series that kicked off Monday night. They’re discussing why such a study is important, as well as the kinds of things they plan to cover. What’s so frustrating to me is that I don’t understand the mindset of evangelists like this. I mean, they’ve studied enough to know what the major objections to fundamentalist Christianity are, yet they continue on as if there’s no problem. And when they do talk about atheists and skeptics, they misrepresent our position. I can’t tell if they honestly believe the version they’re peddling, or if they’re purposefully creating straw men.

A couple of times, they mentioned that one of the main reasons people reject the Bible comes down to a preconception that miracles are impossible. “And if you start from that position, then you’ll naturally reject the Bible.” But that’s a load of crap. Most atheists were once theists, so their starting position was one that believed in miracles.

They also mentioned that so many of these secular articles and documentaries “only show one side.” I thought my head was going to explode.

And they referred to the common complaints against the Bible as “the same tired old arguments that have been answered long ago.” It’s just so infuriating. If the congregants had any knowledge of the details of these “tired old arguments,” I doubt they’d unanimously find the “answers” satisfactory. But the danger with a series like this is that it almost works like a vaccination. The members of the congregation are sitting in a safe environment, listening to trusted “experts,” and they’re injected with a watered down strain of an argument. And it’s that watered down version that’s eradicated by the preacher’s message. So whenever the individual encounters the real thing, they think it’s already been dealt with, and the main point of the argument is completely lost on them.

For example, most Christians would be bothered to find out that the texts of the Bible are not as reliable as were always led to believe. Even a beloved story like the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus writes on the ground, we’ve discovered that it was not originally part of the gospel of John. It’s a later addition from some unknown author. To a Christian who’s never heard that before, it’s unthinkable! But if they’ve gone through classes where they’ve been told that skeptics exaggerate the textual issues in the Bible, and that the few changes or uncertainties deal with only very minor things, and that none of the changes affect any doctrinal points about the gospel, then it’s suddenly easier for them to swallow “minor” issues like the insertion of an entire story into the gospel narrative.

Sigh…

I’m going to either attend these sessions, or I’ll watch/listen to them once they’re available online. I may need to keep some blood pressure medication handy, though.

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Published by Nate

1,060 thoughts on “Frustration”

  1. Crown – those are ‘terms of truth’??

    I would say terms of speculation, at best. Plus, there are scientific answers for all of those questions, which Josh probably learned in school.

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  2. Carmen,

    There are no scientific answers to any of the things I raised, because they are all related to things that cannot be examined. The tools of science are physical examination. We cannot examine proton decay, because it has never been observed to happen. We cannot examine the spirit, because it does not have mass or occupy space.

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  4. Your list of questions – beginning with, “Why do we have children”. .etc.

    I expect that everyone reading here will have a different answer for all those – “Goddidit” just doesn’t cut it.

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  5. It took 40 years for the first gospel writer to write about him – I wouldn’t exactly, Josh, call that “spreading like wildfire.”

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  7. “Recent studies show that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, and will match believers of Christianity by 2050. In other words, it’s spreading like wildfire.”

    The same Pew study, to which I assume Neuro is referring, indicates that currently the “Nones” stand at 16+% in the US, and that by 2050, that figure is expected to rise to a full 25%, so religion in the US is fading, but it’s actually expected, during that same time period, to rise in third-world countries, likely due to the influence of Islam.

    I was watching an older movie, set in Saudi Arabia, and Muslims live religion. They begin their day praising Allah, pray five times each day, spend every day living by their strict religious customs, and their children not only see this, and are influenced by it, but are expected to live by the same religious laws. I know that there are atheists out there who were former Muslims, because I know some of them personally, but it must be hard as hell, with all of that indoctrination, to ever break away. Even then, they face death as an apostate. American “ganstas” are “blood in, blood out,” but nowhere is that more true than in Islamic countries, and it’s no coincidence that it is spreading most rapidly in countries with the lowest education rate, where the gullibility rate is highest.

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  9. @Josh

    A factor that is clear from Paul’s own undisputed letters is that he was in serious conflict with other people in the Church. We know in at least one case, Galatians, there were people who considered to be a Christian one also had to be a Jew. The letter of James could be seen as preaching a quite different Gospel to Paul.

    In one of the early letters of the Church outside of the Bible, Clement of Rome indicated that he met the Apostle Peter, who appears to malign the Apostle Paul as a false teacher. In the Letter of Peter to James the brother of Jesus, the author attacks an un-named ‘enemy’ who works among the gentiles and teaches them that it is not necessary for them to keep the law.

    In one of the Clement homilies, Peter is recorded as saying:
    ‘And if our Jesus appeared to you and became known in a vision and met you as angry and as an enemy, yet he has spoken only through visions and dreams or through external revelations. But can anyone be made competent to teach through a vision? And if your opinion is that that is possible, why then did our teacher spend a whole year with us when awake? How can we believe you even if he has appeared to you? … But if you were visited by him for the space of an hour and were instructed by him and thereby have become an apostle, then proclaim his words, expound what he has taught, be a friend to his apostles, and do not contend with me, who am his confidant; for you have in hostility withstood me, who am a firm rick, the foundation stone of the Church.

    Most scholars see the second letter of Peter as a late work, over a hundred years later than these letters from Clement, that was written among other things to try to downplay the rift between Peter and Paul. If one thinks that 2 Peter is a genuine letter then i suggest that you read it side by side with the letter to Jude.

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  11. I dunno, the more I read Crown’s comments especially the ones about non-decomposed bodies I honestly think he has been extremely indoctrinated. I mean, seriously? Non-decomposed bodies = miracle? I think the bar is set waaaaaaaaay too low.

    One just need to read a little into Asian mythologies and also ancient preservation techniques to know that this is not unique to christianity. It’s as though that Crown has never heard of formaldehyde…..

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  14. “We cannot examine the spirit, because it does not have mass or occupy space” – Of course the fact that one doesn’t exist may have something to do with it.

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  15. UnklE – I went away for awhile, because I really don’t like getting insulted and beaten upon. I’m not some Jehovah’s WItness knocking on the door trying to “save” some unwilling homeowner by imposing a set of beliefs.

    I saw a discussion about miracle, and a challenge to prove something about faith using evidence that would hold up in Court, and I bit at it.

    Long ago, when I first discovered the site, Nate warned me what I’d be in for if I ever started talking about personal miracles and the like, and I heeded his advice then, but the lure was just too tempting when it was presented in the context of the US Rules of Evidence, so I struck at it, and quickly came to rue it.

    I struck back a little too hard at some of the blows. Should’ve turned the other cheek instead.

    One of my biggest regret, though, lies in agreeing to limit the discussion to the Shroud of Turin, and the legal argument to Gary M’s original challenge: to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God, crucified and resurrected in the First Century. This was far too narrow an argument really, because it focuses on the specific Christian claim.

    The Christian claim is only interesting if one first establishes the evidence that miracles exist (with “miracles” defined as things that directly violate the laws of physics, that CANNOT happen under under present scientific understanding of the natural world).

    THIS is very interesting and very fertile ground.

    I start from the perspective of somebody who has experienced them, so MY initial objective is never anything having to do with proving anything about Jesus or any other hairy old figure from the past. My interest in demonstrating the proof of miracles as being scientifically demonstrable facts then establishes a foundation for me to be able to present my OWN experiences as potential facts that fit within the scheme of a recognized (super-) natural phenomenon.

    Miracles prove that the laws of physics as we understand them are wrong. And that in itself brings down the authority of any appeal to “science” as the final, unanswerable authority. The science is wrong about THESE things, so how can it be trusted on anything else? This is the same argument made about imperfections in the Bible. It’s the mathematical counterexample: one counterexample disproves a theorem.

    So, presented with solid, scientifically documented things that cannot happen physically, one is forced into one of two positions, all of them salutary:

    (1) The physics are wrong – which then vitiates excessive claims made for the authority of science, or

    (2) The physics are still correct, but THESE incidents overrode it, which is to say, they are supernatural.

    Many people will become emotional, refuse to accept either conclusion, and resort to one of two illegitimate arguments:

    (3) The evidence is all false, it’s all lies, it’s all fabricated. (I know this is illegitimate because I myself have experienced miracles directly, and I’m not lying to myself. The only reason I became interested in miracles is because I experienced them and needed to fit them into the framework of a scientific worldview, and found they don’t fit. Of course, just because I know that the argument is illegitimate because it is not true doesn’t mean I can persuade somebody who wants to evade examining from hard issues from embracing it.)

    (4) Bang the furniture and go ad hominem. Already seen plenty of THAT over the years. One of the reasons I like the “US Rules of Evidence” challenge is that with the rules of court there’s a judge, the rules are imposed and cannot be evaded, and if one bangs the furniture and storms out of court, one loses. The judge won’t let one party stand there and berate the other party.

    So, if I could reset, I would start not with the Shroud, but with the issue of miracle itself, and it’s proof, and I would start with modern day miracles, things that are documented scientifically in the here and now.

    Each one is astounding. But of course one can discount one, as the Shroud was discounted. But then there is the next, and the next, and the next. All modern. All with evidence. I’d keep on presenting them. I’d be careful NOT to allow the argument to become “Yeah, ok, there are a bunch of “phenomena”, but let’s move to generic explanations, because every case is specific, and every case has its own special features that make it a miracle.

    I’d also play with my audience a little, let them go rushing into some traps. Example, I’d start with the hospital NDE studies. These are published, peer-reviewed science. The results: “scientifically inexplicable”. “Inexplicable” though they be, everybody HAS an “explanation” that satisfies him or her, and those who want to see no detachable spirit and no proof of anything supernatural here will advance them. But then I’ll lay down the particular cases that interest ME, because they transcend “inexplicable” and start to look like probative miracle.

    I am especially interested in the case of the born-blind, because they have never seen their whole lives. Having not seen, they don’t dream in pictures: they don’t have the memories of pictures. But when these people have NDEs and pass out of their bodies, they SEE, and when revived, they are everafter as SIGHTED persons. Now THAT is a pretty probative fact.

    One could challenge that the congenitally blind who have never seen DO dream in pictures, and this becomes an objective fact that is provable through expert testimony (the conclusion of which will be “No, they don’t.”) But if they don’t dream in pictures because they can’t see and have no memories of it, then how the devil do they SEE when they’re dying and passing out of their bodies and floating around the room? See with WHAT? How is it that, having died and been revived, they are able to (accurately) describe color, and other features that people who have had eyesight can describe, but that the born-blind cannot? HOW?

    It is not satisfying to wave the hands and say “because…SCIENCE!” because there’s actually no way, and that’s obvious when you think about it.

    If the testimony is TRUE, then it’s a REAL MIRACLE. Obviously. So one is left attacking the reliability of the testimony itself.

    But then one can move to the next, and the next and the next case. Are ALL of these people lying? There are so many thousands of cases of visions.

    I know that some of them are not lying, because I myself have had visions and experienced miracles, so that doubt that others may have – that everybody who reports miracles is lying – I know to a certitude is not true. I’m not. I’m not, and I’m, a pretty objective guy, trained in science and law.

    Any single person claiming Cosby raped her might be lying. But when many, many begin to appear, it starts to be harder and harder to think that they’re ALL lying. And when you find thousands and thousands of NDE accounts, most falling along a spectrum, it becomes impossible to legitimately just discount it all, or chalk it all up to hysteria or lies. Sure, the furniture bangers CAN do that, and probably will. But many other people are really interested in Finding Truth. So they’ll ponder.

    And then next I will move to the Lourdes healings. Because Lourdes started being a healing spring after a 19th Century alleged Marian visitation, most of what has happened there happened in the modern scientific age. While the hard-bitten skeptics reject everything with minds as closed as anyone, others are interested in the evidence. What is more, many medical doctors have been interested over the age. Things that medicine cannot cure have been cured in an instant at Lourdes. People who were on permanent government disability, under modern social welfare systems, have suddenly been cured and had no need of they payments any longer. Do people committing fraud give up money? That’s not a very normal behavior.

    That’s why there’s an international medical committee at Lourdes: to record the occurrences of things and keep a record. There have been thousands of cures at Lourdes in the past century and a half – it’s a very successful “hospital”, given that there’s only prayer going on there. The Catholic Church only recognizes 69 of them as “Miracles” following ITS stringent definitions of such things, but there is a lot of documentation of those 69. 69 is quite a number. And going through the cases, nobody can just disregard the evidence.

    Sure, some will bang the furniture, cover their eyes and go “la la la”, or will say “I will not accept THOSE miracles, but only the sort of miracle I demand!” but most who see the evidence do not end up so sure of themselves.

    Maybe all of these people are lying and all of the claims are exaggerated, and the doctors involved are all quacks, and it’s all made up. But even so, the jury will hear all 69 miracles, each entered into evidence one by one. I am trying to prove miracles, and I’m entitled to present evidence, and it can’t be shouted down or excluded. The jury gets to hear it all, piece by piece. The other side will have to rebut it, piece by piece. Or it can wait until all of the very persuasive, very convincing, in some cases, medical evidence is presented. Then they can categorically deny all of it.

    That would be a very ineffective strategy, though, because when people hear facts, they have an ear for hearing if its true or not. And alleging that hundreds of different people, afflicted with various diseases, all systematically lied in 69 separate cases over the span of 140 years is not believable.

    “Not medically explicable” will be the verdict, and the degree, the stark nature, and the sheer number of miracle healings has its own authority. Hospitals have more sick people go through them than Lourdes does, and yet there’s no hospital that has anything like Lourdes’ dramatic spontaneous remission rate for startling diseases like Lourdes.

    With the Lourdes healings, and their volume, and the DETAIL and modern QUALITY of the evidence, the ground begins to shift. NDE’s – especially blind people – and then these Lourdes healings. There’s a LOT of stuff here. And it all fits a pattern.

    And that pattern is religious. The NDEs fit the expected patterns based on religious cultures of the people experiencing them. They’re visions. And they seem to happen to dying people all over the world. So either there’s a spirit world, or something happens as the brain shuts down (any yet, how the devil to dying people without functioning eyes who have never seen, now SEE in their “visions”?).

    But the Lourdes’ healings have a peculiar aspect that the NDE’s lack: they’re geographically concentrated – at Lourdes – and they all have the overlay of overt religious content that is highly denominationally specific: Lourdes is at a site where the VIRGIN MARY is said to have appeared to a young girl, and a spring welled up. The healings at Lourdes are not everywhere and anywhere. They’re Christian. Only. And they’re not simply Christian, they are specifically Catholic.

    The fact they are MIRACLES offends the atheists. But the fact that God is performing overt miracles at a place where he is said to have sent the Virgin MARY, is infuriating to everybody but Catholics. How could God DO THAT! If it’s supernatural, it MUST be the Devil!

    That’s what the Pharisees said to Jesus about the healings HE did. But Jesus retorted that Satan cannot cast out Satan, and – in direct references to his healing powers – said that to ascribe such works of the Holy Spirit to Satan was to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and was unforgiveable.

    So, faced with the mountain of Lourdes healings, the irreligious have the uncomfortable fact of a LOT of apparently miraculous healings. And the religious of all sorts of religions face the same problem that the priests of Ba’al did when pitted against Elijah in the test of fire. Where is the Protestant, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Shtitno, or animist Lourdes? There isn’t any. There is only Lourdes, and the Virgin Mary appeared there to a girl.

    So, you don’t just have MIRACLE, but you have THEOLOGICAL CONTENT.

    That is why Lourdes is so COMPELLING, and DISTRESSING.

    The same pattern will hold as we move on to older miracles. There are about 100 bodies of people who have died over the past 600 years or so that are still undecayed. Some eventually do decay, but these Incorrupt bodies mostly stay supple for decades and centuries, as though they were sleeping.

    It’s stunning. Some say mummification, but it is clear from inspection that these are not mummies. Some eventually shrink and BECOME mummies, and when that happens, they’re clearly not incorrupt anymore. But others have not and do not.

    WHY NOT? Well, that’s the miracle, isn’t it. Some grouse that parrafin masks have been placed over some of the incorrupt faces, for the application of makeup. Is that all that is really required? Throw out mortunary science and shut down the funeral homes. When granny dies, leave her be and put some candle wax on her face, and she won’t rot for 300 years.

    Yes, she will. Bodies rot. Except for THESE bodies. It’s not a common thing. In the late 1700s they dug up all of the ancient cemeteries of Paris and placed the bones of 6 million people in the catacombs under the city. 6 million dead dug up – all the dead from a whole region. How many were found incorrupt? None, of course: bodies rot.

    Except for the incorrupt. Their bodies didn’t. Now, these bodies are ON DISPLAY. You can go to various Churches and SEE THEM, right there. Dead people who were not embalmed or stuffed, lying there in class cases, unrotted after 100, 200, 300 years.

    The one thing they have in common? Except for one pious Lutheran woman, they’re all Catholic saints.

    And one of the most recent Incorrupt? The body of Bernadette Soubirous. She died in
    1879. You can Google it and look at her body. It’s still there, unstuffed, unembalmed, uncorrupted, just like the bodies of St. Francis Xavier and St. Vincent de Paul, and others. These are not secrets: they’re hidden in the wide open.

    Lenin’s body is in fluid, has the organs out of it, and has to be tended every year or two to keep it from falling to mush. But these Catholic saints lie there, unembalmed, in their class cases, for centuries, unrotted.

    They’re all Catholic saints. No ne’er do wells. No surprises. Oh, and Bernadette Soubirous, St. Bernadette. She just happened to be that girl who saw the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. What a REMARKABLE coincidence. Eh?

    No, it isn’t. It’s as obvious IN YOUR FACE miracle by God as you can get.

    Does the theological content of the miracles disturb? Why? The question always is posed: so many religions, they can’t all be right. No, they can’t be. The one that has all the miracles is the one that’s right, obviously.

    Before the Incorrupt, we have the Lanciano Eucharistic miracle, circa 600 AD. There have been many claims of such things, but this one has been studied.

    And then finally the Shroud of Turin.

    Every Catholic relic is not a miracle. Some are outright frauds. But then there are all of these miracles, hundreds of them, that CAN be studied, and that HAVE been studied enough to be admissible as evidence.

    Hundreds of miracles. That’s what I want to focus on. That they’re all Catholic is a point for later.

    The central point is the EXISTENCE OF MIRACLE.

    Unrotted bodies, eyesight restored in an instant, heart tissue and photographic negatives on ancient linen – this is an arc of miracle after miracle, after miracle, all evincing the same message, spanning 2000 years. There’s nothing in any OTHER religion, or lack of religion, to compete with it.

    It’s UNNATURAL, but there it is. And much of the evidence is admissible, because these things have fascinated real scientists over the course of history.

    Against all that, bellowing and banging the furniture won’t do. Neither will facile dismissal.

    Take it from me, who has experienced a powerful healing miracle and seen two raisings from the dead of animals, who has been embraced by Jesus, seen a demon, had the Holy Dove dive into my face and disappear into my head, been plunged into the black abyss, felt the flames of Gehenna beneath the soles of my feet, and seen a gate of the City far above – these things are not dismissable. If you really seek Truth, you have to engage with miracles and study them.

    In the huge mountain of evidence left by God for the Thomases like me in our age, who NEED the proof, and need it scientific: he left it. If you study it, and if you apply science and reason to your study and don’t fudge by assuming facts not on offer, you will discover a compelling case for miracle laid out…by miracles themselves.

    And you will discover that the content of the miracles tells you who the one true God is.

    And THEN (and maybe even ONLY then) can you read the Bible and discern that there is, somehow, some truth in the thing. And that even if there are errors and untruths, that it’s the most ancient source you can go to that will explain the Lourdes healings, and the Incorrupt, and the Lanciano MIracle, and the Shroud.

    Miracles are real. And they point out a path straight to God, the real one.

    I know it. And I want you to have the chance of knowing it too.

    Which is why I wrote this.

    That I won’t stick around and read the hostility that comes from it, is because the deniers really have nothing to say to me. I have had all of the miracles and visions of which I spoke. You can’t know I’m telling the truth, but I do, which is why I am not interested at all in arguing about the REALITY of God and miracles with people who are ignorant and insulting.

    Ignorance means “doesn’t know” – and those who deny God categorically DO NOT KNOW. But I know they’re wrong.

    PROVE IT? I just did: NDE studies in the 2000s. 69 medical miracles (accepted as such by the Church) at Lourdes plus thousands more, in 150 years, 50 undecayed bodies, of saints only, spanning 7 centuries, a piece of eucharist bread changed into a piece of the heart of Jesus in 600 AD, with the same blood on it as is on the Shroud of Turin and Oviedo Cloth.

    There, Thomas: you have the proof you need. A second chance.
    Now go look at it and believe.

    Don’t argue with ME about it. I’ll tell you how I snapped my neck at a young age and was paralyzed and drowning at the bottom of a lake, and how God healed me. I’ll tell you about a dead lizard and a dead mouse that God raised in my hands. I’ll tell you about the City, and the black abyss, and the fires of Gehenna, and the Dove, and the demon. I’ll tell you about the conversation God and I had about the physics.

    I’ll be consistent, too, year after year, decade after decade, because I am recounting real memories of real things, the most important things that marked my life (and I’ve seen and done lots of exciting secular stuff).

    Attack ME, and I’ll respond with MY miracles. It’s not about me. God already showed me.

    He didn’t show me how to show you. I figured that out on my own. Over 150 objects, all admissible. Rebut them one at a time.

    In the Common Law, there is an old doctrine called the “Last Clear Chance”.

    An online legal dictionary gives this very serviceable explanation:

    The rule of last clear chance operates when the plaintiff negligently enters into an area of danger from which the person cannot extricate himself or herself. The defendant has the final opportunity to prevent the harm that the plaintiff otherwise will suffer. The doctrine was formulated to relieve the severity of the application of the contributory negligence rule against the plaintiff, which completely bars any recovery if the person was at all negligent.

    Many of you were left bitter by the doctrines of a false religion that told you to worship a book, translated the book badly such that it was more incoherent and contradictory than it really is in the original languages. You applied the logical minds and insights that God gave you to escape from the clutches of that false religion.

    Alas, you also ran out on God completely, and have a jaundiced eye towards him. And you have unhelpful angels urging you along a path farther away from him. Some of you are utterly lost and have given yourselves over completely to hostility to God.

    But others are just wandering and lost. Unable to accept God on the bibliolatrous terms of the old, false religion, yet still with your own angel urging you to look back, to look again.

    The darker angels urge you to never look back. They pretend that they have the truth, however bitter.

    So another messenger arrives, from a surprising source, and brings you a fresh supply of data, NONE OF IT from the Book you were taught to worship and came to distrust. Such is the price of false religion: it can kill the ability to see any truth where there is any error. You don’t want to be fooled again.

    So DON’T be! Don’t throw off Bibliolatry to run off worshiping your own paltry reasoning and your flesh and your temporal – and very temporary desires.

    Don’t be fooled again. Insist on SCIENCE, which includes the “We don’t know” part.

    Take your time and STUDY those miracles, miracle by miracle. Look at the NDE studies, start with the Lancet 2001 article. Ponder the REAL PROBLEM of the congenitally blind SEEING when they are in their near death experience visions. That cannot be, but it IS. Think what that MEANS: it means that there is a spirit, and IT sees when it passes out of their damaged flesh. That is precisely what it means, and it is true. And you can go look up the NDEs of the congenitally blind and you can see for yourself.

    You may DOUBT it, but if you are honest you cannot DISMISS it. Do you REALLY want to die so badly that you have closed your mind? Some of you. But not all of you.

    There’s your first lifeboat.

    Then the Lourdes Miracles. They’re published. Don’t go to “Sillyrelgions.com” to find an excuse not to look at the cornucopia of healing miracles that God has laid before you, Thomas. You owe it to yourself to LOOK. Look at EACH miracle, not two. Start with the most recent in time. LOOK. Ponder. Think.

    All 69 of them.

    Then look at the body of the girl that saw Mary. She died in 1879. She’s not rotted. She looks like she’s asleep. Sure, you can read about the parrafin mask on her face. And you can read why it’s there. Now think of the last person you know who died. No embalming or refrigeration or stuffing, just drip some wax on the face (so that you can apply makeup). THAT’S all that’s required to stop a whole intact body from rotting for 140 years. REALLY?

    You know better than that.

    Now look at those unembalmed saints from the 1700s and the 1600s, and the 1500s. Sure, some of the ones from the 1300s have decayed. So what. No dead body should be undecayed after a week, let alone 300 years.

    And why are they ALL Catholic saints, except for one saintly Lutheran.
    (and lest you be inclined to add in the Buddhist mummies – who themselves were saintly men – really LOOK at them, and then look at St. Vincent de Paul and St. Francis Xavier. The latter two are MEN. The Buddhist mummies are mummies.

    Do not be so EAGER to cast away these many rungs of the ladder that God has flung to you for your rescue. If you really want to die, then die. But if you want to see the light, then LET yourself look and see, and don’t just accept any old bullshit “explanation”. You know damned well that dead bodies all rot. They do. So why did these 51 bodies, of all of them, NOT rot, and why are they ALL Catholic saints plus one Lutheran saint?

    It’s obvious why! Don’t be SUCH a critic of the evidence God has left for you to see. Examine it. Doubt it or believe it. But don’t be INSTANTLY HOSTILE TO IT like those who are possessed by demons who hate anything that might bring them back towards the Light.

    Look at Lanciano and think what it proves. And think why, then, the eucharist is so important, and baptism, how they drive back the evil spirits that they say they do.

    And then look again at the Shroud, and see whose heart that was, and remember what he said about the bread as his body – and think of his healings, and look at Lourdes – and think of how he spoke of those dying in Christ having fallen asleep, and look at the Incorrupt.

    And think about how all of this is tangible, real, and how all that Book you used to erroneously worship DOES give you explanatory background material about these things, but really is not the POINT at all!

    The POINT is to LIVE! Do you want to LIVE? Then LOOK! I’ve laid it all out for you, end to end, brick by brick.

    If God sent an angel on the wing to your side right now, HE wouldn’t give you as much concrete, tangible, mundane, examinable, scientifically examined proof of miracle, and of the God behind that miracle, as you have in this one short little post.

    But you’d believe HIM the instant you saw him. So settle for the next best thing, Thomas. You always said you wanted proof? Well, there’s your proof.

    Read it first. If you want more, if you want an angel to seal the deal, given how far you’ve wandered from God you had best follow the path back that he gave you first.

    Put down your Bible and look at the miracles God wrote with his OWN hand.

    And don’t yell at me. I’m not going to read anything critical. Save your time instead to go read about a Lourdes healing or an Incorrupt.

    That’s all.

    The Crown is amused.

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  16. Nan, you’re quite the skeptic, but when it comes right down to it, I am telling you the truth.
    And I am showing you a clear path to see it this side of the grave.

    If you love yourself, you will look at the things I’ve shown you.

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  17. @Crown,

    We actually acknowledge your sincerity. You honestly do think you are telling the truth. Obviously we don’t agree but credit must be given to you for your perseverance. However, please do not mistake sincerity and earnest as benchmark for “truth”.

    I think I speak for many of us when I say I basically do not believe in your evidence. You can say we are deluded and what have you not, too bad, not convincing. You are a lawyer, there are many times when you firmly think certain cases should have certain outcome but the judge has applied the law wrongly etc etc, so yes, you will recognize that what you believe strongly doesn’t mean the same for others.

    Oh well. At least take comfort that you have presented your case. Unfortunately it has been found wanting by many people here. Maybe we are all screwed up, then I guess whose fault it is? Us, you, your god?

    With regards to all your latest looooooooooooong comment:

    http://bit.ly/1aozFod

    I’m joking of course.

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  18. Hey Victoria-
    So, I took a shower, grabbed a cold beer, put my game face on…then I read your comment. I understand where you are coming from as well. I don’t have any answers for the suffering in the world. I’m not comfortable with it. My intention in my previous comment shouldn’t have been to try to justify any suffering. Just to suggest that good really does come out of suffering sometimes. It’s not much, and I can understand why it is unconvincing and insensitive. If God does exist, you are right in that his allowance of suffering is disturbing. I think any believer who is honest would have to admit that. Your point is very well and seriously taken.

    Liked by 3 people

  19. “Now THAT’S the Neuronotes I was talkin’ about! I was afraid she had gone away.”

    Arch, just because you don’t follow all the same blogs that I do (and you don’t) doesn’t mean that I’ve gone away — and do keep in mind that you had major computer woes over the winter. Also, you don’t keep up with near as many comments as I do. 😉

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  21. Hey Josh, I didn’t realize you had responded until after I responded to your previous post. Lol. I understand where you are coming from when it comes to people suffering — though I do believe there are less invasive ways to encourage empathy without needless suffering. We do know from a proliferation of studies (especially child development) that toxic stress — suffering causes more harm than good.

    One of the things I appreciate about you, Josh, is that you don’t claim to have all the answers. That is refreshing. 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

  23. I just finished listening to 3 hours of YouTube videos on the shroud of Turin. There are a lot of interesting claims, but I’m not convinced one way or the other yet. I need to find some concrete sources to back-up some of the claims that are being made by both skeptics and believers alike.

    One claim that confuses me is the idea that the image is a photographic negative. I’ve taken a hi-res photo of the shroud and opened it in Photoshop. Switching back and forth between the regular and inverted image, there is nothing unusual about the image. Dark areas become light and light areas become dark – this really does not signify anything. Perhaps people think that the negative version looks more realistic because the face is now white? If the image was made using a live person and the substance (whatever that may be) was rubbed on to the raised portions of the face then it is no surprise that the dark portions on the linen pertain to the raised areas of the face (nose, cheeks, eyes, [mustache?]). I guess I must be missing something, because I don’t see anything spectacular about this particular claim.

    I will keep researching the other claims and report back if I find anything interesting one way or the other. I look forward to reading what Nate and UnkleE uncover as well.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. No one will believe what Texas is up to now —

    Texas approves textbooks with Moses as Founding Father

    Christian conservatives win, children lose: Texas textbooks will teach public school students that the Founding Fathers based the Constitution on the Bible, and the American system of democracy was inspired by Moses.

    On Friday the Republican-controlled Texas State Board of Education voted along party lines 10-5 to approve the biased and inaccurate textbooks. The vote signals a victory for Christian conservatives in Texas, and a disappointing defeat for historical accuracy and the education of innocent children.

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  25. Well, I’ve got you fooled a little if you think I even have some answers, Victoria! The more I “know” the more I’m awed by life, the universe, and the less I think I really understand anything. I can’t really argue with many who say the world would be a better place without religion. I actually think Jesus made a strong case against religious dogma himself. There is much in what he said that transcends religion. Grace and mercy comes to the fore when I read Jesus. Maybe I’m delusional, but I guess there are worse things to be delusional about.

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