Sorry for the multiple posts, I'm just replying to peeps separately.
And in the moments before death, they experienced a surge of strength and a joy that is inexplicable. I was pregnant when my father died, and I felt terrible that he didn't live to see my second child born.
So you're choosing to interpret a medically
possible occurrence in religious terms. ('Inexplicable' does not mean 'impossible'.)
After I gave birth, my father came to see me. Some might say that it was the morphine, but he was there. I know it. I don't know what world he crossed to be there, but he was THERE. And I believe that God sent him.
So you're choosing to interpret something very possible indeed - you've even mentioned the morphine yourself - in religious terms.
Again, does knowledge of the
idea of God preclude the interpretation of such visions in religious terms? I'd argue yes. Another way of putting it: if I lived in a society where there was no idea of God, no knowledge of him, would it be possible for me to explain such images of dead relatives in religious terms? I'd argue no.
Crucially, though, either way it still remains inexplicable. 'God' explains why we have visits from dead loved ones much less than the chemical reasons given by science.
I dreamed I was with my dead grandmother last week. I could just as easily choose to interpret that as God sending her to me in a dream.
However, my mother and I are both cancer survivors. Science? Of course. And I believe that God guided those doctors in their endeavors. I also believe the amazing complexities of the human body is further proof of God.
Why does God guide some doctors and not others? That agenda thing again: contradictory. He's a bit selective for someone who's apparently omnipotent, no?
We are incredible creatures, and I believe that we had a creator.
Riddle me this: Did God aid Darwin in his studies on evolution? If so, why? So that Darwin could publish his findings and that people could then be tested for their loyalty to God? Seems like a bit of a vindictive thing to do to me. It's like hiring somebody to seduce your girlfriend and then setting up CCTV in the bedroom...
Or did God secretly hope Darwin would fail in his research? Why didn't he intervene with his power? Why, with Darwin's findings, is God even part of this hypothetical question at all? It's all
very absurd, but it brings me back to my previous post.
Or did God place all the 'evidence' against him as a trick on poor old Charles? Again, seems a bit of a shitty thing to do for someone who loves everyone. What had Darwin done to deserve that?
Hmmm. Perhaps I'm thinking too much about this mystery being. Perhaps I just need to have a hot bath and wash away my rationality - it's done no one any good anyhow, has it, because the
real truth 'transcends all human endeavour'. (AND PEOPLE SAY IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT FAITH REASON IS INVOLVED AS WELL. BUT REASONING OFTEN ENDS IN FALLACY OHNO!)
That's not me misunderstanding, either: if a God exists and that God has a moral agenda (which he should, otherwise 'God' becomes reducible to 'physics' or 'nature', becomes a meaningless abuse of language), then
he is the real truth, and we'd be better off killing ourselves in the would-be full-of-meaning-and-explanation world, because what would be the point?
This same God could also have given us a better vocabulary, because the whole notion of 'belief' unavoidably implies a conscious choice to be made between something, between truth and non-truth. And if God exists, it doesn't come down to a belief at all, because it then becomes the ultimate truth. (Which then brings us to the last sentence of my previous paragraph.)
(Again, sorry to repeat, but this brings us back to what I said earlier: consider the meaninglessness of the following statement:
I do not believe that boys have penises and girls have vaginas. Or,
I do not believe that tigers have stripes or that leopards have spots.)
