Some things that have happened in my personal experience that have made me question my existence and the stability of my reality. I live a life full of coinsidence and full of stange activities.

While I was depressed and seriously doubting God I asked the deity (that I hated, at the time) to make my life a little more bearable. Within a few days I had made a great number of good experiences (mostly through friends who often were so disorganised they "forgot" to invite me out).

I also had a great number of other experiences concerning my confidence etc.

How can an atheist explain these minute chances without challenging reality (not just concerning god)? No such things can be explained by science.

After reading Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, my agnostic centre has been stirred into action into believing the posibility that a grand designer exists, indifferent to the lives formed out of chance and evolution.

As this creator grows in maturity, so do the universes.

I'd like to discuss the contents of Star Maker and this view in this forum.

Reposted from http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/science-vs-religion-part-ii/

I’ve had several private correspondences over the last couple of days dealing with what I’ve started calling the Church of Dawkins.  A significant number of theists and atheists seem to believe that there’s some sort of cult forming around everything that comes out of the mouth of the “King of Atheists,” or some nonsense like that.  This also ties into the hubbub over the New Atheists and The Four Horsemen and all the other monikers earned by various atheist writers over the last few years.

To begin with, let me say a few things about what is happening in atheism.  I’m tempted to put atheism in scare quotes because atheism is not a philosophy or a worldview, but I will let that stand for the moment.  Just please realize that when I talk about “atheism” in this sense, I’m talking about a vaguely defined social movement, not the ordinary epistemological position.

I'm seeing a lot of arguments for God recently that approach the problem philosophically. Let's test out another entity: God's sister.

So from Metacrock's site, I'll just take an a priori argument for God and change all the instances of "God" to "God's sister" and see if they're any less true.

"God's sister is not given directly in sense data, God's sister transcends the threshold of human understanding, and thus is not given amenable to empirical proof."

"As I have stated in previous essays, what we must do is find the "co-detemrinate," the thing that is left by God's sister like footprints in the snow. The trace of God's sister can be found in God's sister's affects upon the human heart, and that shows up objectively, or inter-subjectvely in changed behavior, changed attitudes, life transformations. This is the basis of the mystical argument that I use, and in a sense it also have a bearing upon my religious instruct argument. But here I wish to present anther view of the trace of God's sister. This could be seen as a co-detmiernate perhaps, more importantly, it frees religion from the structures of having to measure up to a scientific standard of proof: the religious a prori."

Ignoring the multitude of spelling mistakes, do you want to believe more or less, now that it's God's sister? She could be nice!

The thread this was in took a detour into computer talk, so I'm restarting it here.

Those faculties are also well known to be subject to trickery. That's why there's so much work that goes into experiment design -- the idea is to eliminate the influence of our fallible senses.

The only problem is that noumenology failed as spectacularly as did logical positivism, in terms of competing philosophies. Nietzsche famously tears it apart in Beyond Good and Evil for being a non-starter. The "thing-in-itself" is made up of a whole lot of nothing, it turns out, and even Nietzsche's objections weren't as strong as later efforts.

This is just going to be rant, of course everyone is welcome to critique it. I know not all theists are ignorant, this isn't a rant to ALL theists, just the one ignorant about science and history. What brought about this? A discussion with an American friends regarding the health care plan as well as this loving morning after a night of fun with friends I had the a knock at my door at 9AM from some good old Jehovah witnesses.......needless to say I am not in a pleasant mood, because the amount of ignorant statements made by both parties just made me sad for our education system, and for how badly indoctrinated these people are.

nothing you liars ever say or do means anything:

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/640-million-dollar-challenge-update-its-not-ending.html

HOW WE WON THE JAMES RANDI MILLION DOLLAR PARANORMAL CHALLENGE:

http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=264

the objective was simple:

1) to reveal that Nostradamus was a genuine prophet who could predict

After the Roman Catholic church fell into disrepute and disrepair, Martin Luther advanced the idea of brining schooling from the original position of the elite to the masses. The intention was one of creating a better Christian in becoming personalized with scripture and that this would also benefit the state and the church. Yet whether one agrees with his reasons or not, the credit of public education started with people like Martin Luther as well as other Christian humanists. Whatever one's arguments against religion's truth claims, we have to give credit where it's due.

By request from this thread, I'm starting a new thread to discuss Christianity without institution.

Non-institutionalized Christianity has no human authority structure or hierarchy. So there's no modern pastor in an individual church, no denomination, nothing like that. There's rarely a building.

Instead, a group of Christians meet (usually in a house) and share Christ collectively with each other. A meeting is ideally led by Christ directly, supernaturally if you will through the Holy Spirit. People will spontaneously, by guidance from the Spirit, share a song, a prayer, a story, a prophecy, a teaching from scripture, or whatever else they're led to do. It doesn't always work out smoothly - people aren't perfect - but it's a powerful experience when it happens.

There are workers, people who carry on the tradition of the apostles. They help establish churches, help people come together and learn to follow the Spirit. They're often available to answer questions or give advice to resolve conflicts, but as a rule workers are hands-off so Christians can grow to maturity by resolving their own differences and not relying on human leaders. Workers don't have authority over churches; they're respected for their experience and call from God.

 Hello all:

If y'all have discussed this topic elsewhere, please point me to the relevant thread!