Even a young, simple-minded (I say this in a non-offensive way) child who attends church will understand that God (in this case, assuming that He is real) does not heal all the time, instantly. In fact, cases of things like healing that take place within such a short time-span are incredibly infrequent - I'm shocked to have experienced that, myself.
You're now proposing something that is indistinguishable from chance. What you just proposed is a system that would work as easily well with Vishnu, Zeus, or any other god other than Yahweh. Actually, it would still work with ANYTHING. Unless you can statistically show that your god provides a more reliable "prayer to effect" ratio than the others it's literally no different than blind luck. In case your fire back with a personal experience, people who are Muslisms (who believe in Allah) have personal experiences, and so did ancient Greeks (who believed in Zeus). All groups believe their prayer works equally well, yet we don't have a shred of objective evidence to sway us in one way or another.
A quick reminder: In this case, my singular "statistic" is that praying affected/improved physical health.
Once again, even if it did "heal" you. It wouldn't be more statistically likely to be healed from praying to a milk carton than to a god. This is because A. There is no mechanism by which "praying" would effect those things. Seriously, how does a god do that? B. What about contradictory prayers? What if someone prays for one thing and someone else prays for the opposite? How does god decide? and C. If there is no objective way to statistically tell the difference between the results of praying to a milk carton or to god, then there is NO difference between them. I know you will make an excuse for this later on though.
Within Christianity, there's a belief that God does not (ordinarily) work "miracles" for those who do not have faith. An enormous part of the reason that "prayer studies" haven't typically shown results is because they're done from a perspective of unbelief, for a purpose that does not align with "God's Will" (a biblical concept).
Nope. Actually they use believers. To better address my point and to avoid writing out long paragraphs; have fun with this.
However, if I were to accidentally receive an incision the same size and then pray for 10 minutes with an earnest heart, then the Christian faith teaches that God (might) exhibit compassion and provide healing, such as in the form of a sped-up process of mending the incision.
See the above video on how you're literally psychologically shielding yourself from being wrong.
"God" is an everlasting entity, spanning beyond the capacity of imagination and logic.
What the f*** does that mean? Everlasting? What? Spanning beyond the capacity of imagination and logic? What? So it's beyond logic? So it's illogical? LOL what. I'm having a bit of trouble understanding what it even means to say that such a thing exists...
This entity is not bound by the restrictions of time or space
How is a spaceless and timeless entity any different from an entity that doesn't exist at all? A unicorn is technically spaceless and timeless too.
(thus the "a second is like a million years, and vice versa" concept), but can choose to make actions that progress within the scope of our timeline.
??? What are you even talking about dude? So god DOES exist in time and space? But not bound by the usual external restrictions we find ourselves with?
"Jesus" is a manifestation of God, who intentionally "split off" and allowed Himself to be temporarily constrained by time and space for our sake's - to be more understandable, basically.
The trinity violates the law of identity. (I assume you believe in that)
Excerpt taken from rationalwiki.org
- "The Father is God"
- "The Son is God"
- "The Holy Spirit is God"
- "God is the Father"
- "God is the Son"
- "God is the Holy Spirit"
- "The Father is not the Son"
- "The Son is not the Father"
- "The Father is not the Holy Spirit"
- "The Holy Spirit is not the Father"
- "The Son is not the Holy Spirit"
- "The Holy Spirit is not the Son"
Since
, the statements 1-6 can be restated as follows:
God = Father
God = Son
God = Holy Spirit
while the statements 7-12 can be restated as:
Father ≠ Son
Father ≠ Holy Spirit
Son ≠ Holy Spirit
Conventional logic says that equality is transitive:
. Let's start from one of the "is not" relations.
Father ≠ Son
Now let's substitute the left side with the statement "God = Father":
God ≠ Son
and then substitute the right side with "God = Son":
God ≠ God
Further application of transitivity leads to the following statements:
Son ≠ Son
Father ≠ Father
Holy Spirit ≠ Holy Spirit
We conclude that God is not God, and so the doctrine of the Trinity implies that God as well as all three persons of the Trinity violate the law of identity. One of the fundamental assumptions of conventional logic is that objects that violate the law of identity do not exist: there is no entity that is not itself. This means several things:
- If Trinity is true, then God does not exist, and neither do any of his three persons.
- If God exists, then by the law of noncontradiction Trinity is a false doctrine.
- If God exists and Trinity is true, it can mean two things:
- Logic is meaningless, because it is possible to prove anything, including the existence and the non-existence of God.
- Trinity means something else than its Christian definition.
I'm sure researching can give you a much better explanation of this than I can - however, it's absolutely crucial to be researching from a neutral point of view. Perhaps try all three perspectives - against, neutral, and for. It seems like quite a few of your sources in the past were "against", and that can sometimes make for a weaker argument. (unless that side of the argument has been proven to be correct/true without any doubt.)
I don't know what your issue with my "sources" are, but obviously if you can't provide a defense against them they are correct by default. There is nothing you can do about it. Here is a fundamental issue with proving the whole concept and it IS on the neutral side. Basically, it's other religions. Other religons claimed to have the word of god and their prophets preform miracles.
Your options are
- They are telling the truth. Or
- They are not.
If they are, Christianity cannot be true.
If they aren't, then you just admitted that sometimes, gee whiz, people can, for any reason, actually write things down on paper that didn't really happen in real life... which further contradicts your faith.
- person A interpret's a specific passage of the Bible literally
- someone else, person B, goes, "oh, so you mean the ENTIRE world was created in 144 hours?" (6x24)
- person A either explains that he/she was talking about only that one passage, or explains the new issue that was raised, or tries to do both.
- person B asks about a new issue that doesn't quite follow either line of logic, because it was written in a different context or something
- person A explains that new part
- person B says, "well then why do people say that ___ was the case, when you just said that this verse talks about _(other)_ subject?"
- person A has to explain that the passage was talking about BOTH FREAKIN' THINGS (whoops, almost wrote a swear word. wrong website.)
- person B points out that it doesn't make sense
- person A has to help person B understand what the "Living Word" is
- five minutes later, person B forgets about the "Living Word" concept again.
You keep ranting about this "living word" concept. Honestly I don't know what the f*** that means. Please tell me what it is, then tell me how can this be used to make predictions in objective reality? Moreover, why are you only interpreting Genesis as metaphor AFTER science has proved it wrong?
TLDR? I'm honestly disappointed. Most of what you said is nonsensical gibberish and I expected much better from you. Thanks for the quick debate though.
