[H]umanistic culture, insofar as it functions as an ideology and therefore as a religion, consists essentially in being unaware of three things: firstly, of what God is, because it does not grant primacy to Him; secondly, of what man is, because it puts him in the place of God; thirdly, of what the meaning of life is, because this culture limits itself to playing with evanescent things and to plunging into them with criminal unconscious. In a word, there is nothing more inhuman than humanism, by the fact that it, so to speak, decapitates man: wishing to make of him an animal which is perfect, it succeeds in turning him into a perfect animal; not all at once… but in the long run, since it inevitably ends by “re-barbarizing” society, while “dehumanizing” it ipso facto in depth. –F. Schuon

Instead of “I am your God and you shall have no other gods before me,” the flatland secularist begins with “there is no Absolute and you shall be absolutely subject to the sacred relativities we have inserted in His place.”

Many implications follow from this initial inversion. In fact, author Eric Raymond writes, “There is no truth, only competing agendas,” “All Western claims to moral superiority are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism,” and “There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.” Ironically, each of these is a false and repressive absolute disguised as a relativity. Their real purpose is to undermine and subvert the Absolute.

Two things that the reconstructed mind knows for certain: that the world is intelligible, and that man is free. Take away either, and the world is simply an absurdity, a monstrosity, a mistake. For to say that we may know is equally to say that we are free, otherwise it is not knowledge at all. Knowledge proves freedom, freedom proves knowledge, and both prove the Creator, for the hierarchy of being disclosed by the free intellect leads back to its nonlocal source above.

Therefore, the second commandment follows logically from the first: you shall not turn the cosmos upside down and inside out and worship created things.
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2008/07/infinite-stupidity-of-liztardian-mind.html

No. Because your arguments from experience for the God you describe are indistinguishable from any number of other such claims, many of them incompatible with your god, they are not a good argument for God.

If for a moment you accept the possibility God existed, wouldn’t this be considered just a smidgin arogant?

I accept the possibility. The fact remains that it is a flawed argument.

I am not asking anyone to believe in God , just to conceed that the scientific method cannot easily explain some of the seemingly abundant supernatural evidence in the world around us.

I am not asking that the scientific method easily explain seemingly supernatural phenomena. I am just asking that it have a chance to.

The “word of knowledge” example I gave in my previous post is not easy to put down to coincidence, there are to many variables.
You may not believe it but I am actually a fairly skeptical person, especially so when I first became a christian. Skepticism can actually be a good thing when it is tempered properly, it can be a good tool to establish the truth in a matter.

Again, I would have to see this word of knowledge in action, in controlled conditions. Stage magicians do the same trick. It could blow your mind how accurately they describe your house, when you’ve never met these people before. It turns out that weeks earlier, after you’d booked your ticket, an assistant to the magician knocked on your door and said her car had broken down, and could she use your phone to call AA. You took her into your house, where she got a good look at everything and memorised it all, and reported back to the stage magician. Weeks later, he calls you up on to the stage and blows your mind.

I’m certainly not saying this is what happened with your or anyone else’s “word of knowledge” experience. What I am saying is that until these things are put in a controlled situation, they can’t be properly tested. And it seems awfully convenient that the only examples of supernatural phenomena people can come up with are ones that work “only when no one is watching”, so to speak.

The only place miracles don’t happen EVER is in a scientific laboratory or in front of a group of skeptical experts. There’s an inevitable conclusion to be drawn from this.

(And I know that you think YOUR miracles are real while all the muslim ones are satanic, or faked or whatever. They think the same about yours.)

Ps is the number 7947689601? Just kidding! I have never really done the word of knowledge thing very well!!!!!

I’m happy to see it for myself. But if I believed every report of supernatural phenomena, I’d believe that Shirley MacLaine talks psychically to aliens, that tarot cards can tell the future, that Mohammad spoke to God, that the Sensing Murder scammers speak to spirits of dead people, and so on.

The Randi Foundation offers $1 million to anyone who can display supernatural powers under test conditions, and no one has managed it in the decades the offer has been around. (http://www.randi.org/joom/challenge-info.html)

Your examples sound a little like the Invisible Boy in the movie The Mystery Men, whose superpower is to turn invisible only when no one is looking at him.

And this is the problem.
The “word of knowledge” is just one of many examples of srange phenomena WITHIN christianity, how can a fair defense of my faith be made if the argument from experience is inadmissable?
Dawkins just dissmisses this argument, presumably because that is where aetheism is at its weakest, which is intellectually dishonest.
The greatest proof for God is in his dealings with humanity yet these are not something the scientific community a prepared to admit as evidence for his existance.

Since (a) the miracle cannot be performed at will and (b) it is identical to a trick performed by stage magicians all over the world my explanation would be that it is yet another in an infinite line of pious frauds. (Read Hume’s ‘On Miracles’ for furthur details).

Feel free to prove me wrong though Shunda; I have written a ten digit number down on a piece of paper and hidden it inside a book in my office. If God decides to give you ‘word of knowledge’ and tells you what this number is then I will be hard pressed to deny that it is a miracle.

I’d have to see it before I went suggesting any explanations.

To test it with the scientific method, I’d first have to ask – can it be done on request?

The Russians do gallows humour terribly well; my favourite novel from post-revolutionary Russia is The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov; one day the devil comes to Moscow and walks around the city making people disappear. Authorities are powerless to stop him because they are atheists and do not believe in the devil.

The book was written under Stalin; a comic story about a demon who makes people disappear had ominous overtones.

http://dimpost.wordpress.com/

How relevant of Danyl

That’s force of habit, since just about everything people used to think were supernatural have now been explained as having rational natural causes.

May be able to arrange that for you Danyl, but it probably wouldn’t change your mind. I have seen people healed of serious disease and called it a miracle form God without it making any difference to their beliefs. People will always say there must be a rational explanation ,even when they don’t have one.

Then you will get a real debate.

Then you will get a real debate.

I don’t believe anything without the tiniest bit of doubt. Actually it would be very easy to convince me that God existed; pretty much any clear-cut miracle would do it.

What did I say I believe?

Nope. Can you orbit all of Saturn at once?