God is knocking on the door to our hearts. Some people can't hear the knock because they're so busy rushing here and there taking care of the trivial details of modern life. Some people hear the knock, and hide behind the furniture fearfully, hoping God will go away. Some people hear the knock, shrug with indifference, and turn up the volume of the TV. Some people hear the knock, but they think its a door-to-door salesman selling something they don't want, and they ignore it. Some people hear the knock, and rush to the door with hope in their hearts, and fall into the arms of a loving God waiting to embrace them.
I made a slight revision to make it more relevant. _________________ Maynard is knocking on the door to our minds and our inner hearts. Some people can't hear the knock because they're so busy rushing here and there taking care of the trivial details of modern life, ignoring the thoughts that should be entertained. Some people hear the knock, and hide behind the furniture fearfully, hoping the word of Maynard will go away. Some people hear the knock, shrug with indifference, and turn up the volume of the TV and decay their minds with Jersey Shore. Some people hear the knock, but they think its a door-to-door salesman selling something they don't want to understand, and they ignore it so that they may continue being told what to think. Some people hear the knock, and rush to the door with hope in their hearts, and fall into the arms of our kind and compassionate Maynard waiting to enlighten them. ".... this song is about choosing compassion over fear.." -Maynard [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07pLGIgyfjw"]Tool - Stinkfist [hq - fullscreen] - YouTube[/ame]
This is more of the "flying spaghetti monster" tactic which I've seen many times before. Giving God an absurd name doesn't change a thing. Call him Maynard if you like, he's still there and he still loves you.
However Maynard's word, his philosophy is to love everyone who is intern loving and tolerant. All this and Maynard is not even a deity, he is a man. A man who does not request worship, but that his ideas be recognized. For example, Maynardists do not believe in stoning homosexuals. Its all about choosing compassion over fear.
Should he smash down the door and force his way in? Should he force you to love him against your will? Should he make sure that nothing bad ever happens to you? What exactly do you want?
As it is currently, your proposed deity acts suspiciously similar to one which does not exist. Perhaps some evidence would help.
You want a fairy godmother God who makes sure nothing bad ever happens to anyone. But when you eat a hamburger, do you care that a cow died for you? When you get a new job, are you sad for all the people who were passed over and remain unemployed? When you buy a Ford, do you feel guilt because Chrysler didn't sell you a car and might go out of business because of it? When you marry Veronica, are you sad for Betty whose heart you've broken? Please explain a world where nothing bad ever happens to anyone.
Atheists claim they believe in science, yet demand God create a world without natural disasters in violation of all the physical laws of the universe.
Its odd how you excluded the inherent need to kill small children. Funny how instead of condemning the deaths of the innocent, you justify it. I suggest referencing the problem of evil.
There are thousands of recorded miracles that prove God exists but I will list but one. In 1917, 70,000 people, some of them atheists, saw the sun move erratically in the sky in a 10 mile radius around Fatima, Portugal. I have cited this miracle many times as proof of God and yet atheists ignore it and keep demanding proof.
Miracles are not proof of a deity - they are merely proof that there is something we do not yet know. In any case, evidence for a god should be easy. He could come down from the heavens, introduce himself, walk around 200 feet tall, conjure something from nothing, make inanimate objects talk, shoot people with lightning, etc. There could be no doubting the existence of a god that did that kind of thing regularly.
That theory makes no sense but go ahead and try to explain it to me. How do 70,000 people go hysterical at the same time? And how does that occur?
God did come down, he raised people from the dead, he drove out demons, he fed the multitudes, he walked on water, he cured lepers, he gave sight to the blind, and to top it off he died and rose from the dead three days later. Why is that not enough for you?
Today we're going to go back in time nearly a century, to the day of one of the Roman Catholic Church's greatest miracles; indeed, an event cited by some religious scholars as not merely our greatest miracle, but perhaps the most important event in history. This was the incident known as the "Miracle of the Sun", an inexplicable solar phenomenon predicted by three children to the day, and witnessed by tens of thousands of gathered worshipers and journalists. How can one be skeptical of something with so many eyewitnesses, so much printed news coverage, so many photographs, and such a specific prediction? Three shepherd children, ten-year-old Lucia Santos and her two cousins, worked in a field called Cova da Iria near Fátima, Portugal, in 1917, during the first World War. Over a period of six months, the children reported a long series of religious apparitions, the most extraordinary of which were six visits from the Virgin Mary herself. Mary told the children many things, including three famous secrets; but the most extraordinary revelation was that on October 13 of that year, they would witness a miracle. The children's reports of these apparitions in the village church attracted the attention of a local newspaper or two, which in turn attracted the attention of a regional newspaper or two; and soon the Cova da Iria fields turned into something of a Grand Central Station of miracle seekers. And, on October 13, as many as 100,000 believers packed the area, and just as the Virgin Mary foretold, they witnessed an inexplicable miracle in the sky: From behind the rain clouds, the sun came out, danced, changed colors, spun like a pinwheel, and made a most sensational demonstration. Photographs and articles plastered the newspapers of the world, and thirteen years to the day later, it was officially recognized as a miracle by the Roman Catholic Church. It's hard to argue with the facts of this event. The day was predicted in newspapers by a ten-year-old girl, and this is thoroughly proven. Tens of thousands of people personally witnessed exactly what the prediction said would happen. The sun's behavior was clearly unique, and couldn't have been mistaken for some chance atmospheric oddity. You add all this together, and the only reasonable conclusion is that Lucia Santos' vision and prediction was a genuine miracle. Unless, of course, you set a reasonable standard for evidence, and start looking for things like alternate explanations. Let's point our skeptical eye at some of these details one by one, and see if they hold up to scrutiny. I'll start with the children's reports of six months of religious apparitions. These were three kids, ages 7 to 10, and came back home each night with wild tales. Is this surprising? Is the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary really the most probable explanation for stories told by small kids? The two youngest, Lucia's cousins, both died of influenza within a couple of years, but Lucia lived to the age of 97 and clung to her stories her entire life. Investigator Joe Nickell reports that Lucia's own mother said that she was "Nothing but a fake who is leading half the world astray." Friar Mario de Oliveira, who knew her well, described her as living in a "delirious world of infantile fantasies" and suffering from "religious hallucinations". There are alternate explanations for the children's stories, imagination and boredom being chief among them. So onto the specific date of October 13, 1917, so widely publicized in print that tens of thousands of people appeared. Clearly you're not going to make a pilgrimage like that unless you're pretty religious and pretty confident that you're going to witness a miracle. So, we have a crowd preconditioned to expect to see something. Newspaper accounts estimated between 30,000 and 100,000 worshipers gathered at Cova da Iria. However, a number of photographs of the crowd do exist, and though it does look like several thousand to me, I certainly wouldn't go as high as thirty. Either the photographers chose not to show the largest part of the crowds, which seems an odd choice; or the newspapers reported exaggerated numbers. Interestingly, if you do a Google image search you'll find lots of pictures of huge crowds, many of which show a perfectly bright and sunny day. It is always reported to have been raining quite heavily during the event, and I only ever found a single picture that showed a crowd with umbrellas. So I think a snippet of skepticism is warranted when viewing these large crowd photos with thousands of faces staring heavenward. How impressive was the sun's display? An old black and white photograph of the actual sun miracle event shows a lot of dark rain clouds behind some trees and the sun poking through. There is certainly nothing in the photograph that looks unusual, but of course a photograph is static. Whatever the crowd saw was not interesting enough to be noticeable in a photograph. A lot of skeptical explanations have been put forward: Dust in the atmosphere causing the sun to appear in different colors, a sundog or parhelion formed by ice crystals, a rainbow, and observations that the descriptions don't match where the sun should have been in the sky at that time. It's also been pointed out that observatories around the world reported nothing unusual that day, so whatever it was had to have been a localized phenomenon. Personally I gravitate toward an even simpler explanation, fueled by having spent many happy hours as a child laying on my back and staring directly at the sun. When you do that, you can't see a round, static disk. Your eyes and pupils spazz out, and "dancing" is certainly one way to describe what you see. Spinning would be another valid way to perceive it. If there are tens of thousands of people fully expecting to see something amazing, and someone shouts "Hey look at the sun," guess what, you've now got tens of thousands of people seeing something amazing in the sun. There's an experiment you can do. Stand on the sidewalk and point up toward the top of a building. People walking by will look up too. Some of them will pause. If another person looks at them, they might point up as well. Anything anyone sees will be assumed to be what you were pointing at. Go to Starbucks, have a coffee, and watch the fun. To me it's not only plausible, it's probable that if a single person at Cova da Iria told that desperate crowd that the sun looked strange, you'd have had ten thousand people agreeing "Yeah, it did look a little funky, kind of jumped around and danced when I tried to look at it," or whatever they thought they saw. And this would have happened on October 12, June 1, or any other day you choose. Most of what's popularly reported about the sun incident, such as the colors and the spinning, comes from Father John de Marchi, a Catholic priest who spent years interviewing eyewitnesses to build evidence supporting the miraculous event. But more objective assessments of the eyewitness accounts have found very little evidence of a single shared experience. Author Kevin McClure, who also compiled eyewitness accounts, reported that he had "never seen such a collection of contradictory accounts in any of the research I have done in the past 10 years." If you were there, as a devout Catholic (otherwise you wouldn't be there), you fully believed in a miracle happening that day (otherwise you wouldn't be there), whether you personally saw anything or not you'd support the majority opinion, and probably go to your grave insisting that a miracle happened there. There's no surprise that Father de Marchi was able to form a consensus description of a spinning color wheel of a sun, and no need for any actual event to justify his consensus. Father de Marchi says the sun was a spinning color wheel that day, which cannot be reconciled with the photograph. I say there was nothing special in the sky that day, which reconciles exactly with the photograph. http://skeptoid.com/episode.php?id=4110&comments=all
He did that supposedly. Once. And only managed to accumulate 12 followers in his lifetime. 12 is not a very impressive number. If I had all the powers of a God, you can be sure there would be more believers than that.
I can write stuff too, that however does not make it true. Why not come down from heaven today? Save the millions of children dieing of starvation? Malaria? Why not wipe out Ebola while he is at it? I cite a couple supposed miracles from a mythological book, but that does not explain why evil exists in the world today. More children die of malaria in a single hour than the few characters Jesus saved.
MASS hysteria. What the hell do you think that word means? People saw an optical illusion, word spread, hysteria spread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun De Marchi claims that the prediction of an unspecified "miracle", the abrupt beginning and end of the alleged miracle of the sun, the varied religious backgrounds of the observers, the sheer numbers of people present, and the lack of any known scientific causative factor make a mass hallucination unlikely.[25] That the activity of the sun was reported as visible by those up to 18 kilometres (11 mi) away, also precludes the theory of a collective hallucination or mass hysteria.[25]
