Question from Vern:
I’m a Christian. I think atheists have the wrong idea. I had a Near Death Experience involving Jesus. He told me the day my wife would have a baby boy, 3 years down the road. Sure enough it happened, he told me it would be a blond boy and sure enough it was. My wife and I have no family we know of with blond hair, so we were surprised. I have also researched Near Death Experiences, and they favour Christianity. This, plus read the Bible if you have not. Many historians and scholars agree that the Bible is true. Many many people witnessed Christ die on the cross, and they met him afterwards. He did rise from the dead. How can you deny it? There is lots of proof including the infamous shroud of Turin, the bible itself, and I met the lord. How can you dismiss it like this? Our religion has more proof than others, look at all the evidence.
Answer by SmartLX:
Everything but the kitchen sink here, it’s a pretty good jumping off point after a bit of a break. So let’s break it down.
– Thanks to some very persistent questioners we’ve covered every aspect of NDEs here: their place in Christian culture, famous claims, medical explanations and denials thereof, the information they impart and so on. Have a read if you want to consider experiences outside your own. From an atheist’s perspective, they favour Christianity basically because Christianity favours NDEs. (There are genetic and also potential practical explanations for your boy’s blonde hair which I won’t get into.)
– When a historian claims that the entire Bible is true, including the supernatural parts, he/she is not speaking as a historian (unless it’s as a really bad one) but as a religious apologist. Most of the arguments about judging the events of the Bible on their historical merit using the criteria of historians are totally invalid because historians have no standard of evidence for accepting supernatural events. Theologians, on the other hand, have to take it as a premise that God and Jesus are real to proceed with any of their work, because you can’t ponder the nature of God as anything but a moot point unless you think there is one. Consider how many of the scholars you refer to are in fact theologians.
– Post-crucifixion Jesus is documented as only appearing to a handful of people, except in just one passage in 1 Corinthians 15 where he appears to five hundred or so. An account of 500 witnesses is not 500 witness accounts. As for the greater argument about his divinity, it’s another popular subject here. Look.
– The Shroud of Turin appears to have finally bit the dust as a genuine relic in just the last few weeks, as reported here. Generally speaking, it goes through periods of high and low credibility based on studies and studies of studies. At the absolute best, it was really Jesus’ burial shroud, but tells us nothing about what happened after his burial as we have no idea where it came from.
– Your supposed personal experience of Jesus is not good evidence for anyone else. When you claim the supernatural you ask people to weigh the reality of the impossible against the integrity of your character and the constant impeccability of your senses and faculties. I don’t know you so I can’t even make that judgement, but it wouldn’t go well even for my dearest friends and family if they made the same claim. There are just too many ways that such an experience can seem real and not be.
If you want to follow up on one specific argument for Christianity, look it up here by keyword. If you think it’s less than done to death at this point, comment and we’ll talk about it.
‘Thus, read all the’… science, you, moron. There are scientific explanations for all you said, but you have no tool to fathom science, instead you have bad character, which makes you believe shit. Good riddance of, you, fool.
I had written this before I read smartlx’s answer. Understandable, he has no freedom of replying to creeps like you accordingly. He has the site. I owe you nothing, so, from me you hear the truth. I am disgusted from you.
PS. Ah, by necessary TOOL FOR STRAIGHT THINKING AND JUDGING, I, of course, meant…
…the necessary high enough INTELLIGENCE (IQ), EDUCATION, formal and/or otherwise, in THEORETICAL SCIENCES, PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY and BIOLOGY, i.e. KNOWLEDGE OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD, but, you also lack in CHARACTER TRAITS that are necessary for searching for the TRUTH, whenever you think and judge, but NOT applying your WISHFUL THINKING.
You are a coward, with no awareness of the self and of the world around you, uneducated and with a low I.Q. All these have been proven true for most religious people and racists, and for most conservatives, too.
You posses none of these.
I feel sorry for you.
Nikki, I don’t see logic, I see anger. All you ever do in replies is type with caps and tell people they are stupid when they disagree with you.
1) Take a deep breath (it isn’t good to always have such high blood pressure)
2) draw yourself a warm bath
3) add vanilla lotion
4) while seated, ask yourself why you must go on these rants day in and day out
5) calm down and talk to people so they can respond to you, maybe one point at a time, not these mini essays with a million points to them.
Have a nice day
I have a BETTER cure for my anger at
RELIGIOUS fools, RACIST idiots, CONSERVATIVE cretins and GAY creeps,
than you suggest.
I should stop reading their idiocies.
But, why would not all of you FREAKS, stop writing at our sites, us logical good normal people called DEMOCRATS NORMAL ATHEISTS
I have a BETTER cure for my anger at
RELIGIOUS fools, RACIST idiots, CONSERVATIVE cretins and GAY creeps,
than you suggest.
I should stop reading their idiocies.
But, why would not all of you fourgropus of FREAKS, well there are more, like FATTIES, stop writing at our sites, us, logical, good, normal people called DEMOCRATS NORMAL PEOPLE, ATHEISTS
Yes, try your cure at yourself, do it and it will make you stop wishing to talk with and to higher brains that we atheists are.
STOP TALKING TO PEOPLE WITH BRAINS AND EDUCTION AND BOTH OUR PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED. YOU DON’T WRITE, I DON’T READ.
You see no LOGIC, your RELIGIOSITY is the CAUSE and PROOF of LACK of it, because YOU DON’T POSSES THE ORGAN for LOGICAL PROCESSING, the one we, logical people, the ATHEISTS, call BRAIN, or IQ, nor any relevant education.
You see ANGER thou, while I admit it is there, because you have no problem processing emotion.
your problem is lack of logic and excess of emotion, without the control of logic, because you have none of it.
It is well documented and statistically proven that the RELIGIOUS, RACISTS and CONSERVATIVES are, all of the three groups, short BOTH on LOGIC, i.e. IQ, and relevant and absolute EDUCATION.
In short, you lack logic and that is why you see none in my words, but you have excess of emotion, that’s why you see only my anger.
Yes, I am angry at the religious fools, idiots racists and narrow minded conservatives.
Please don’t even try to understand what atheist say before you get some relevant education. Read Dawkins’ GOD DELUSION.
As for excess of emotion, I cannot advise you, because it comes from FEAR OD DEATH. We, atheists, of course, have that too, but we are brave and don’t ‘think’ wishfully, as you, the religious folks do.
An atheist like myself has nothing to hear from you and tell you.
We are worlds apart, and you don’t exist for me.
Vern … here are some strange experiences I’ve had:
1. My father had a dream in his youth that showed him he had three sons. Later on, when he married, he sure enough had two sons and had the good sense to stop at two kids. But then he had recurrent dreams in which he would see a 3rd kid asking him why he was not having him (to which my father would point to a lack of resources … since he was middle class).
2. When my mentally incapacitated cousin disappeared (and was later found dead after a week) from our house (his family had come to visit us for a few days), my father had dreamt the night before that he saw my cousin’s father (who had died the previous year) lead my cousin by his hand out of our house and make him lose his sense of direction so that he could “join him” and not be a burden to his mother.
3. When I was a sort of fence-sitter between theism and atheism (leaning heavily towards atheism), I went to one of those places which claim to have your past life records. I went there out of curiosity. I was told there that I would face immediate troubles in the country I was currently living in – some frivolous cases and abuse of authority by others etc. and might even get deported. I was doing pretty well and had no problems at all so I laughed it away … but then within a few weeks, I had a few really difficult issues to face and I actually could have been deported had some influential persons I knew not intervened on my behalf.
How do I explain the above incidents? Do I invoke ghosts, god, a spiritual realm etc?
When I was in the middle of these things as they unfurled, I was stupefied. But when I look back at these incidents objectively now, I can come up with obvious explanations or I know that they are mere coincidences.
Having an NDE and what you saw in that NDE can make you emotionally very compromised into believing that what actually happened was not just coincidence. And for everyone like you whose NDE gave them a “true prophecy” there are likely to be others whose NDE prophecies never came true.
Its just a false positive.
Nothing in it to make one start believing in fairy tales.
I am a darn, firm atheist, as only can be.
As most people on the Earth, I have been in some trouble some time.
But, never have I had any such thing as the religious people refer to here.
NEVER.
Nor any of my atheist friends and other atheist have had such things happen to them. Ever.
So, I wonder, how come that atheists never experience any such thing.
To me, the answer is short of obvious, but because one can see only the things one believes in beforehand.
In my mind, this proves that there are no such things as afterlife of ‘soul’, ‘there is not in human material brain anything as ‘soul’, and that only the ones that believe in them can and do see them, as their
WISHFUL THINKING, IN THIS CASE…SEEING.
Science has satisfactorily explained every and all such experiences and seeings.
But, what do the religious folks know about high IQ and education…
An religious fanatic of an aunt of mine has once told me that,
BELIEVE IT OR NOT,
SCIENCE HAS DESTROYED THE WORLD !!!
NOT RELIGION, S C I E N C E …