Why God can’t heal amputees

One of Mighty Timbo’s lost posts addresses the question of why God does not heal amputees. As with the question of why God doesn’t show up, though, he phrases the issue in such a way as to miss the most important aspects of the question.

The Atheist has likely never been witness to a miraculous healing or work of God, and when evidence is provided to him of one will often seek a scientific explanation. If none can be found it will often be labeled as a “fluke”, rather than a miracle, they then look to the miraculous things God didn’t do to prove he doesn’t exist, which is where this question comes in.

Notice how he tries to make it sound like the atheist’s problem, as though there were something wrong with seeking scientific explanations. But the atheist’s approach isn’t really the problem here. The problem is one of consistency.

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1981 global warming predictions

In August of 1981, James Hansen and 6 other authors wrote a paper describing the projected impact of CO2 emissions on global temperatures. And now those predictions have once again come to light.

In the ongoing debate over climate change, it’s at times a good idea to check in with historial predictions made by climate modelers and see how well they have been able to predict global warming – which is exactly what a pair of researchers at the Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI) have done.

via The Register.

Check out the second graph in that article, where the actual warming trend is overlaid on top of the prediction by Hansen et al. It looks like they were actually a bit optimistic.

One correction, however: vocal denials by well-funded and profit-minded vested interests do not constitute any genuine “ongoing debate.” The science has been settled for a while. All the opposition has is propaganda at this point.

Intoxicating faith

One of the topics I keep coming back to (in my mind at least) is the question of religion itself. Why is it so appealing to so many people? Religionists would like to tell us that we have some kind of “God-shaped hole” in our heads, er hearts, but if that were the case you’d think that only God would really fill it. People, however, seem to have a powerful hunger for religion regardless of what the religion is, which would be odd if our “hole” were specifically shaped like any particular god or gods.

Two thoughts occurred to me the other day. One was alcoholism, and how it seems to affect people physically, creating an ongoing craving for a substance that only impairs their perceptions and judgment. The other thought was how computers break down: some failures are hardware, and some are software. I’m not sure why I had these two thoughts together, but it does suggest an interesting possibility: faith may be literally intoxicating, or at least it might bear the same relationship to physical intoxication as a software bug has to a flaky keyboard.

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Troll sues, gets 6-figure legal bill

Apparently blog comments and online forums aren’t the only place you can troll these days. If you want to make the leap to the big leagues, you can self-publish a book on Amazon, and then sue people for posting critical reviews. Only sometimes it backfires.

An author who tried to sue … is facing a six figure legal bill after a judge struck out his case.

Chris McGrath, an online entrepreneur from Milton Keynes, tried to sue Vaughan Jones, 28, from Nuneaton, over a series of reviews and postings he made on the Amazon website about his self-published and little-known book “The Attempted Murder of God”.

Amazon, the prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and his eponymous foundation were also named as defendants because they either carried the review or discussion threads linked to it that Mr McGrath claimed were libellous.

via The Independent.

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A good Friday: miracle in Texas

Now here’s a miracle I can believe in.

Zachary Moore, DFWCoR’s spokesman, tells Unfair Park that the group reached out to the Angelika chain after being it’s-not-you-it’s-me’d by Movie Tavern. “Initially they said no, and then they said maybe if we changed the ad, and then they said yes to the original,” he writes. “It’s an Easter miracle!”

The ad will begin playing at the theater on Friday.

This would be the ads for the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason, on the theme of happy atheist families and what makes them tick. After initially being refused by local theaters, it now looks like the ads are going to run after all.

via “It’s an Easter Miracle”: Dallas Atheists’ New Pre-Movie Ad Will Run at the Plano Angelika – Dallas News – Unfair Park.

God’s evil addiction

There’s an old joke about a woman who keeps hitting herself in the head with a hammer. When they asked, “Why are you doing that?” she replied, “Because it feels so good when I stop!”

Yesterday we looked at Mighty Timbo’s story about how God allegedly healed his wife years after a serious car accident left her disabled and in pain. It’s a great story because it points out a huge flaw in the Christian theology of healing. Think about it. God supposedly could have healed her any time he wanted. He could have healed her a year earlier than He did, or within a few weeks of the crash. Heck, He could have prevented the crash in the first place. Instead, He chose to allow her to be seriously injured and to go through several years of pain and disability, just so that He could take the credit where her suffering finally stopped.

At least in the old joke, the woman was wielding her own hammer, and could stop whenever she liked. But this business of God putting us though sin and suffering and evil just so that it will seem so good when He stops—yikes!

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Does God show up through miracles?

Today I’d like to look at Mighty Timbo’s claim that he has evidence of God, in the form of a miracle that allegedly happened to his wife. It follows the traditional outline for miracle stories, so we can reasonably call this a typical case. And that’s a good thing because it also gives us at least the beginnings of an approach to understanding “miracles” in general. I’m going to go over a few of the general alternatives, and then (unlike Timbo) I’m going to suggest a way that we can objectively evaluate the evidence to find out which alternative is most consistent with real-world truth.

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I am Peter Ingersoll

When Mighty Timbo undertook his disproof of Mormonism, the first point he offered was eyewitness testimony by one Peter Ingersoll (or Ingersol, or Ingersall, not sure why there are so many different spellings), to the effect that Smith’s “Golden Bible” wasn’t really there. When I invited Timbo to submit that article, I told him that I would look for parallels between the weaknesses of Mormonism and the weaknesses of Christianity, and this is one of them. Just as Joseph Smith had eyewitnesses who could see for himself that the Book wasn’t really there, you and I and even Timbo himself are all eyewitnesses to the fact that Christianity’s God isn’t really there. In effect, we are all Peter Ingersolls, because we are eyewitnesses to God’s manifest absence from the real world.

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Santorum to oppose abstinence

Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum took a bold step today by announcing that his campaign is now opposed to the traditionally conservative position on abstinence. Speaking outside the Women’s Reproductive Health Center in Albany, NY, where he was helping to counsel prospective patients on their imminent damnation, Santorum said, “The conservative movement has been in favor of abstinence for a very long time, but I think that’s a mistake. In fact, I’d go as far as to call it a leading cause of the moral decay that has gripped our nation and led to equal rights for gays and other forms of apostasy.”

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Life in the Kingdom?

Do you live in the buckle on the Bible Belt? Are you a skeptic, unbeliever, or other form of non-Christian sojourner there? The Uncredible Hallq is hosting a discussion for people to share what the secular experience is really like for someone in the midst of the Kingdom of God.

Strange as it may sound for someone who writes about religion so much, there are times when religion seems like this thing that’s “out there” but which doesn’t affect my life. And I guess that’s been true for some parts of my life, particularly when I’ve lived in the “blue” (i.e. liberal) city* of Madison, WI. So let this be a thread for people to talk about their experiences living in “red” parts of the country.

Stop on over if you’ve got an interesting story to tell. Or even a boring one. All perspectives are welcome.