Stories

No evidence of the events, not too many names, no source cited.

note to self: proof read when its late...

JesusLovesYou,
Why do you think it's an atheists responsibility to provide an answer to urban legends?

seriously funny.

I mean the original post.

Also, the video link.

TESTIMONY #1
The parents obviously didn't teach their kids how to use the guns, how dangerous they are, or anything like that, as they could have learned by going shooting.

TESTIMONY #2
Insane preachers tell stories and get taken seriously by insane believers. He might just have been testing to see what stupid crap he could get you to believe.

TESTIMONY #3
A convert just so happens to find the preacher that converted him, from anonymity. Unlikely but not impossible. Stranger shit has happened which hasn't been credited to god.

Easy explanation:

IT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED!

Seriously, if something like this happened it would be a major news story, not something passed along in e mails. Please check out http://www.snopes.com

Unless you can prove that this occured I am not going to waste any time even duscussing such a obviously silly story.

I have to agree with everyone, you have claims but nothing to back them up. I hope you see the problem with doing this. I would love to believe bigfoot, lochness, chupacabrae exist. Aside from the claims of these people we have nothing else to go by.

To overcome this, we would need to see some evidence that they happened.

Are you saying that televangelists wouldn't jump on the bandwagon if given the chance with anything that would further their cause? I truly doubt that.

I have to agree with Symok on this. If his/her religion does not agree with the television news, I cannot imagine the religion would approve of the internet and web forums such as this.

Please note that JesusLovesYou has not addressed this issue.

Please note that JesusLovesYou does not address the issue of all the tragic events that his/her god did not correct. I have no doubt that there were plenty of prayers from the faithful in New Orleans which didn't help one bit.

Whoa Whoa Whoa, wait just a second.

ASSUMING that "Testimony" #1 is true (which I highly doubt),
consider the following.

Christians are taught to believe that people die for a reason. This reason being that God wants said peoples in heaven with him. Now, if this child was going to die, by God's will, would this preacher not have been overruling God? Is that not the greatest sin of all?

Commanding someone to live is no different than commanding someone to die.

No theist ever asks why a loving god creates a world where such things are possible in the first place..... I like to ask theists: If you were 'god', would you create a world where any of these things could even potentially happen to your own children?

Before you answer, consider this: Take a look at how parents actually care for their children: We do everything we can to create a safe haven, a safe world for our children. We spend hours, days searching for ways to create a safe place, free from the dangers of electricity or poison or sharp objects or even swallowable objects that could cause choking.

We devote time to finding the right foods, the right clothing, the right diapers (even something as minor as a rash is defended against) the right blankets, crib, pillow..... we purchase baby monitors, or make frequent examinations of the baby for safety.

We defend our child against disease, against crib death, against any possible danger that we can imagine.

Now a theist wants to tell me that someone who loves me infinitely more than I love my own child, is willing to place me, and the world's children in the midst of every single solitary imaginable harm in existence: poison, disease, natural disaster.....

The mistake theists usually make here is that they believe that these things are all 'givens', that there must be things like poison or disease, but if there is a loving, omnipotent god this is not the case.

So I ask you: why is it that while no caring parent would go so far as to put their child in danger of getting a diaper rash, that an infinite loving god not only creates diaper rash, but disease and death?

Obviously Christians who prevent their child from getting sick and safeguard it from injury are actually terrible parents. They need to follow in God's footsteps and get into the biochemical weapons industry, so they can make all kinds of fun diseases, just like God!

Why did your god make the boy sick in the first place then? If he was just going to heal him? And if the reverend HADN'T decided to help or had never heard of him, would the boy have died?
It just strikes me as odd. It doesn't make any sense.
"Take up serpents."
What about when religious snake handlers die from snake poison? Did they not pray hard enough?
What about this man?

KIEV (Reuters) - A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal’s enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.
“The man shouted ‘God will save me, if he exists’, lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions,” the official said.
“A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery.”

Pretty faithful to jump into a lion's den. He obviously thought he'd be fine. Pretty much wasn't. O_O

I think a better question is how does a theist explain this?
(My no-true-scotsman sense is tingling...)

What makes you think that God made this boy get shot. Those girls were playing with the gun in the same room that the boy was in. God gave man free will, God did not make us PUPPETS.
The grandmother that attends David Shatwell's church was obviously praying for a miracle, so when she asked the man to do a hospital visit (thats a normal thing for preacher to do) Rev. Shatwell felt in the Holy Ghost to do what he did. He did what he was told of God to do.

The man that was mauled? He was either a) putting on a show
or b) did not truely trust in God to save him.

Really?

Does that mean that when I am tyoing the following words...

Jesus Christ did not exist, does not exist, and probably never will exist. The while persona of Jesus Christ was made up and is utterly stupid

...Jesus is the one who is responsible?

perhaps you should either re-think or re-word your statement.

Shaun

Isn't your god the omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe? Isn't he perfectly responsible for his own creation?

Didn't he create the very possibility of pain, bloodshed, of being 'shot'

Actually, if this god is omnipotent and omniscient and the creator of the universe, then he god must be perfectly responsible for whatever happens in his own creation. A universe governed by an omnipotent, omniscient god obviates free will

However, you'll deny that away... so consider:

This god choose to gave free will knowing, when he didn't have to, even knowing the ramifications of doing so.

This god shapes the limits of free will. What is possible and what isn't. This god also creates the possibility of every possible option... we can't choose A or B until this god creates the options.

So even if you want to insist that there can be free will in a universe created and governed by a necessarily perfectly responsible being, then you have to concede that this god chooses to give us free will, shapes the free will and its limits, completely controls both the environment and the character of the person making the 'free choice" and finally, this chooses which options exist for us to 'choose'!

This god could have done away with the concepts of pain, or damage or death, he could have done away with concepts like weapons.... or, this god could have created free will differently with a different set of options....

So there's no way to deny the culpability of an omnipotent, omniscient creator... such a being must be perfectly responsible for whatever it creates.

Probably sometime around when he created nerve endings and blood. Just brainstorming here. Or are you saying that humans can create things God can't? That would be an interesting admission, to be sure. Are you saying that at the moment of creation, God didn't see what was coming? Or that he did see it coming, but was powerless to stop it? Or perhaps he saw it, and could stop it, but didn't want to stop it. But if that's the case, it's a pretty stupid move on his part to blame humans for something he could have fixed but chose not to.

By blaming pain and hurt and such on humanity, you're basically saying that God was outperformed by his own limited creation. We're like little mini-gods! Except no one worships me. Yet.

Does that mean humans can create things like pain and sin that God can't create? Also, if that's the case, why did God bother creating humans who can create pain and bloodshed? God, at the moment of creation, knew exactly what sort of shenanigans humanity would get up to. He'd have to, after all, what with being omniscient. He could have made humanity any way he liked. He'd have to be able to, after all, what with being omnipotent. But he chose the way that leads to sin and bloodshed. The end result is that God is still ultimately responsible for whatever humans create, and that includes pain and bloodshed. Saying that the way things are is not the way God wants them is basically an admission that God screwed up, that God got lazy, that an unlimited being, with all power and all knowledge, couldn't figure out how to get what he wanted. Sad, isn't it?

"God lost Adam spiritually"? What, God's omniscience and omnipotence only applies to the fleshy world? That sounds kind of limited, especially for a spiritual being. How does an all-knowing being "lose" someone spiritually? It's not like Adam fell behind the couch or something.

So he feels all that we feel. Except the feeling of being tempted, because he was born with grace. Contradictions abound! Was Jesus able to feel temptation like a real boy, or not? If he could, then I guess being born with grace didn't cover it. If he couldn't, then he couldn't feel all that we feel. I guess when one of your axioms is something ridiculous, contradictory, and basically undefined like "Jesus was 100% man as well as He is 100% God", you're bound to come out with some totally irrational conclusions.

Adam took a left turn at Albekoikie.

Man's envy created hurt and pain? Wow, we're better at this creation thing than God is. Ah, but I forget: who created the human capacity for envy in the first place? Did humans create their own envy? Did this happen before or after the Fall? If the Fall was caused by man's envy, I guess humans had envy before the Fall. But that would make God the creator of envy... But if envy was created after the Fall, how could the Fall be caused by something that hadn't been created yet? The mind boggles and reels! Blaming hurt and pain on humans is just putting another link on the chain which ultimately must lead back to the creator God. If you know that doing Action X will result in Bad Thing Y, and do Action X anyway, if Bad Thing Y happens, you're responsible. That's a pretty basic part of the concept of responsibility. God created the capacity for human faults and human error and did nothing to correct those errors, while knowing full well what would come about as a result of those errors. He must ultimately be responsible for anything arising from those errors.

God wants to get to know us? An omniscient, all-knowing, all-seeing God wants to get to know us? You mean he doesn't know us through and through already? An omnipotent, all-mighty, all-powerful being can't get what he wants? God is being outwitted and outmanuevered by his own limited creation, apparently.

Too late. God already knows everything about us. He knows how the brains work, he knows what's in our minds, he knows the environment we were raised in, he knows every little factor that has influenced, is influencing, or will influence every human being ever. How can God not know who's going to love him and who's not? If God can influence every aspect of creation at any time to achieve any result he wants, how can you say that it's not a puppet show? God knows who will love him and who won't and is apparently happy with the situation as is, because if he weren't happy with it he could change it.

If I don't believe in God, God must have wanted it that way, because if he didn't, he could have changed something. He could have made me born with a different sperm that had different genes that influenced my behavior in some new way. He could have altered some environmental factor in my upbringing, five or ten or fifteen years ago, that would have a subtle effect at the time, a but very definite effect here in the future. If you say that God really wants me to believe in him, but wants to respect my free will, then you've misstated God's priorities, because you're implying that God wants people to exercise their free will first and believe in him second -- not to mention implying that he couldn't accomplish both at the same time, a total impossibility for a big omnipotent stud like God. And if God's first priority is that I believe in him? Then I have beaten God at his own game, because I don't. Are you saying I'm more powerful than God?

Which is funny, because he's not a person. He's an unlimited superbeing living in some supernatural spirit realm. Kind of hard to relate to, you know? He doesn't come over to my house to watch House, he doesn't post on any of the forums I post at, we don't have long talks that keep me up past when I want to go to bed. How do you have a personal relationship with someone who doesn't talk or have conversations? Is magic involved? And, really, what would God be getting out of this relationship? He's supposed to be the creator of the entire freaking universe. He can watch galaxies collide and supernovas explode and stars coalesce out of dust and black holes tearing things apart and quasars pouring massive amounts of energy into the cosmos and cryovolcanoes spewing ice millions of miles from moons. I can't imagine listening to some guy in church ask for a new car is really going to compare.

Brilliant observation! Your too good! I've never in my life seen anyone ask this to a theist. I can't imagine how they can get around this one.

They don't even try... they just insist that being a blissful robot is bad, without ever knowing why.

Sorta like a kid who closes his mouth, frowns, and insists he doesn't like a food he's never tried. The alternative for both of them is too unappetizing....

Hey! Maybe you heard it from me!

I've expressed my feelings on this before, and my feel is this: Theists who read genesis already know the difference between good and evil, so they can't help but automatically impute their knowledge of good and evil onto adam and eve, while forgetting that adam and eve cannot have this knowledge. That's how it 'makes sense' to them.

Therefore, correcting their error is difficult, because you're trying to bring something unconscious to light.

To add to what you've said, adam and eve couldn't know what 'death' is either, seeing tha they had no experience of it, which makes their dilemma even more perplexing. Oddly enough, fundamentalists make matters worse for themselves here, because they insist that 'death' didn't exist prior to the fall! So how can you threaten someone with something that 1) didn't exist and 2) they know nothing about?

Again, it makes sense simply because theists know what death is, and they know full well it's a bad thing. They know that dying is the worst punishment. So they again confuse their knowledge for what adam and eve could know.

There's no need, I wasn't serious....

I bet the argument goes back well before either of us.... I first started using it on infidelguy.

Who wants to be a blissful robot?

HERE IS SOMETHING A FELLOW CHRISTIAN E-MAILED ME THAT I AGREE WITH, AFTER CONTEMPLATION:

God did in fact create hurt, pain, blood shed and even evil. He also gave man the choice as to whether or not he would have a relationship with Him. Let me explain. Hurt, which can be physical or emotional, is not a bad thing, nor is suffering. Some people (not pointing fingers in any direction, so don't take offense) tend to view pain, suffering, poverty, persecution and the like as bad because it is uncomfortable, undesirable, and seemingly unproductive, but they are only those things to those people who think God's perfect world is one in which none of these things exist. Is it plausible that before the fall Adam and Eve had an argument or a disagreement, or perhaps Adam was not giving her the emotional attention that she needed...sure, why not. God did not create us perfect in the sense that we never screwed up. Screwing up is part of how we learn and grow as human beings, it is absolutely essential, so yeah, I think it is absolutely plausible that Adam and Eve made mistakes before they fell from their relationship with God.

If you view the events and circumstances in your life (and this would apply to Christians) as essential elements and experiences in your growth that God will use to shape you to be the person you should be, than you can look at a lot of the circumstances in your life that one could easily blame on a sinful world (not that that isn't necessarily a factor) as God shaping you to be the person you should be.

As for evil, some Christians have a hard time with the idea that God created evil. What is evil? Is it some self-sufficient entity, or force, floating around, poisoning the world, dragging people to hell? Is it a seperate creation, dueling with good? Of course not, just like "good" is not some force floating around tryng to make people happy. Evil happened when man disobeyed God, when man started being more concerned with himself, when man sought to exalt himself. Evil is disobience to God, it is seeking after oneself, instead of God. It is the absence of God.

Finally, I will touch on freewill. God gave man freewill? Why? What's the point of creating a bunch of robots that always do whatever you want? It might be entertaining for a short bit, but that's it. God gave man freewill so that man's love for God would be genuine. God wants man to choose to be in relationship with Him. And God certainly wants to have a relationship with man, but not for anything God can gain, for what can God gain? Indeed, it is not God that needs man, rather that man needs God. Man has everything to gain by being in relationship with God, in that he can live and be and love and experience all that God wants for him, and God wants all that is good for man. Man can only fully experience love and joy and peace when he is right with God. For God is the author of these things. Now God is also the author of evil, in the sense that God gave man the choice to not be in relationship with him, and what follows is emptiness. Man tries to compensate by making gods of other things like money, sex, ambition (not that all ambition is bad) and etc., because man has an instinct to search for God, and that also plays itself out in adopting the idea that God does not exist, like the athiests we are trying to reason with.

So, if I tell you that either you are to love me and worship me, or I would torture you forever with my insidious profundity, and you said "I love you, Lord Profundis" and worshipped me, is that genuine?

Better yet, if a man and women are in love, does that mean that that the husband is infinitely more powerful than the wive and forces her to worship him, threatening that he would beat her (this is the analogous portion to hell)? Or is love something between two equals? Now you will bring up the parent-child scenario. Well, when a child is still immature, a parent might punish him so that he will learn from his mistakes. But hell is a punishment that comes after you have made all your mistakes and used up your chances to do right from wrong. So it is useless as a deterrant. It is impossible to learn from your mistakes if you go to hell for eternity. Also, what's the worst punishment that you think is just for a parent to deliver unto his child? Eternal torture? No way. Death? Nope. Physical/sexual/emotional abuse of any kind? Negative. At worst, a parent should reprimant the child so as to deter him from making the same mistake again. Hell once again fails.

What have we learned? Our relationship with god is not love, since he has infinite power over us and will exercise infinite retribution upon us if we do not obey. Notice that the only reason for hell is retribution, not correction, nor deterrance.

In order to choose to have a relationship, I first have to believe that the other person suposedly involved exists. Without that, I'm just talking to myself.

Sorry, but this just continues the same error. The only reason that things like 'pain' are good are because they provide information. We can learn from them.

But why would an all powerful, all knowing, all loving being need to communicate through pain?

Again, this is how things make sense in the natural world, where we need to learn. But your 'god' need not have done things this way!

Again, you're not thinking this through.

Your friend needs to make up his mind, did 'god' create evil or not?

Same old mistakes... This "god" made adam and eve as robots in the garden of eden.... and what's so bad with being a blissful robot anyway?

First off, you misunderstand what is meant by Son of God. Jesus Christ was not a God's son, like you are your father's child, but you aren't your father as well. By being the Son of God, Christ was the image of the invisible God.(Collosians 1:15). Christ had the Spirit of God inside of Him. Everything that Christ did, and showed us to do was of course what Christians are supposed to do. He referred to His Spirit as Father because that is what Jesus was saying God is to man.

second, nobody you know has ever interacted with God. Whom do you know?

Have you ever heard of Pentecost? NOT THE CHARISMATIC/HOLINESS MOVEMENT, that movement is a knockoff of Pentecost because those people claim that they can still live how they have always lived, that they don't have to change to a Biblical holiness lifestyle.

before you claim that God doesn't speak to/through people take a good look at Pentecost(Acts 2), and follow it all throughout the book of Acts. Research Azusa Street Los Angeles California 1906.

Have you ever tried fasting and praying for an answer? Don't claim that God doesn't speak to/through people unless you have done that with your heart in the right direction.