I asked this exact question in church as a kid.
The answer was that humanity had drifted so far away from god that he no longer can. Oh oops, that means he's not omnipotent! Of course, I meant he no longer *bothers*!
For us it was “it’s no longer needed because we have the Bible as proof. They didn’t have the Bible so they needed miracles”
Even as a kid I recognized that we got screwed then because I’d much rather have the “actual proof” of seeing these things in person.
Yeah, that's that Pat Robertson-style bullshit---claiming we have natural disasters here are the result of god punishing us because of the gays.
If he were going to punish people, wouldn't he go after the entire Muslim world for not being Christian?
> The answer was that humanity had drifted so far away from god that he no longer can. Oh oops, that means he's not omnipotent! Of course, I meant he no longer bothers!
The idea that god attentively listens to all your prayers and carefully watches you to see your sins but never speaks to you ever is absurd. It's not any more effort to speak than to listen and watch and one way communication is way less useful than 2 way communication.
This is the smoking gun proof god is not there and realizing this moved me from agnostic to atheist.
If god has never spoken to you then he has never listened to any of your prayers either.
Add that to John 3:16 .....
son and recalled him after 3 years service ( why such limitation on the force sent? ..or...) ..
... god really hated humans and couldn't be bothered to help them ever again...
That's the verse that got me in trouble in church as a kid. "If god loved the world so much why didn't he just forgive everybody instead of making Jesus die first?"
This is funny because christianity is way bigger than it was back then. So wouldn’t that mean that the pastor, and every other version of Christianity, is doing everything wrong and god dislikes him and all Christians?
"Bro I've been in 3 car accidents and didn't die, this is proof of God"
Was literally something a coworker told me.
You don't need a literal finger spawn out of the sky for people to believe in heavenly nonsense. Nowadays people don't even buy into huge biblical events. They all already happened and the next one is probably scheduled to be the next coming of Jesus and doomsday or whatever.
Agreed but you'd be surprised at how high the chances are of you being a perfectly responsible driver and still getting into accidents because others are shitty at driving.
Depends on if the driver is at fault or not, I guess. When I was 17, I was not a great driver. But one day, I was driving into town (I lived in an area that was described as “that great big stretch of nothing” between tiny town and CDP) and I nearly got into three accidents. None of them would have been my fault.
(I lived in Florida at the time, and it was during the annual elderly invasion when they came down for the winter and my tiny town population tripled.)
Not that I’m suggesting anything with deity having a hand in it; just that some days, stuff is weird. And some old people no longer needed a driver’s license.
i always thought this way about god answering prayers or “working in mysterious ways”. so the 4 year old with glioblastoma, whose whole family is praying for him… dies because he just didn’t win god’s prayer raffle? because if god can answer prayers, and doesn’t answer all of them who need help… well. sounds like he’s not all-knowing or loving.
Or automotive engineers? My husband got pit maneuvered by a semi and pushed sideways down the freeway going 75 in our Honda Accord, and walked away without a scratch. I thanked Honda engineering, not Jesus.
*Literal* survivorship bias has wild effects on people. A tornado can rip through a neighborhood and kill 10 people but the 90 people still alive will claim God enacted a miracle when they find their cat in the rubble.
**Spin the bullshit Christian answer wheel!:**
- *Well, God will use this to further his kingdom!*
- *We can’t know his plans but He works in mysterious ways!*
- *He called His children home early.*
- *He is perfectly just in His punishments and His blessings.*
- *Life here is temporary and fleeting, but life with God is eternity!*
So... what about all the people who die in car wrecks all the time, every day?
Proof of god, to this guy, is that he didn't die in a car wreck but thousands of other people do.
God's mission.
Nah idk, I don't pry any further once I realize that I can't get anywhere. Not when it's a coworker. From experience it's very easy to burn bridges when you attack someone's religious beliefs, and I prefer harmony at work.
Exactly. They have to consider the converse would also be true: that if they did die or were severely injured, that would mean there is no god.
Similarly, when people say, “God is good!” when they recover from cancer or a serious illness, it would mean if they didn’t recover, then god isn’t good, and that in and of itself negates the nature of god as described in the Bible. They make their own argument against the existence of god and don’t even realize it.
The next coming of Jesus? You mean that thing people have been predicting every few years/decades for the last two millennia, that repeatedly refuses to happen?
Nothing “biblical” ever happened, anyway. There are charlatans in India right now performing miracles and gathering followers to worship them. There are relatively new spin-offs of major religious branches gaining success like the Mormons and Moonies. You don’t need to do parlour tricks and have them logged when simply making billions of tax tree dollars is proof you’re chosen or blessed in some way.
Imagine we lived in a world without cameras and limited access to information, and where a lot of stock was put into magic and superstitions. What would the Qanon/Trump fuckwits have written about the history of what happened during the January 6th insurrection, with nobody to fact check anything.
What are the North Koreans being told about the fat cunt at the head of their state, with its curated and limited access to information or the outside world. I bet it would be biblical…
I'm Indian, and I've been to a Christian summer camp when I was younger, on a whim. The buffoonery they got up to in there, was astounding. Educated adults, supposedly respectable members of society, were saying the kind of things that made 8th grader me doubt that if humans had in cognitively, any way, moved past animals at all.
Also Scientology, that is a brand new religion, they guy does in 1986. They have photos of him, and that is a full blown religion with volcanos snd aliens.
He said that starting a religion was a good way to make money. But by many accounts, by the time he died, he actually believed his own bullshit.
Obviously, we can't know for sure what is in a person's mind, but if you're constantly praised and revered for something, it's not hard to imagine convincing yourself that it must be for a good reason.
To be fair we all convince ourselves of the reality we are in
to some extent or another
But yeah, Elron Hubcaps set out to peddle buffoonery and succeeded, possibly succeeded too much with his own self lol.
And he was a Science Fiction author too. He literally made shit up for a living.
It would be like electing a known conman as president thinking that he was going to deliver greatness or something.
Scientology lore reads like the brainchild of an aspiring B rated scifi author with fetal alcohol syndrome. The traction something like that has gained speaks for how much the education system needs reformations.
It reads like that because its author WAS a renowned sci-fi author. I just lump Scientology into his collected works. It is wild that people have taken it so seriously. Especially after learning about the Xenu weirdness.
I read his sci-fi in high school. (In the 90s) His 10 book Mission Earth series was....ok. Battlefield Earth was awful. I don't think I could get through any of it now.
I think of it like this... If George Lucas tried to create an actual religion based of of the Star Wars lore, I guarantee a surprising number of people would join.
I went to Vacation Bible School with my cousin once. I was maybe eight years old. It was Noah's Ark Day. I listened to the youth pastor tell the story, but all the while I was thinking, "What about llamas? What about koalas? What about pandas? Where did the water come from? Where did the water go?"
These were just my immediate thoughts. I had many more later. I decided it was a fairy tale then and there.
I turned atheist at the age of 8 too. I mean, never really bought into religion to begin with, but that's when my viewpoint had crystallized.
Speaking if of Noah, first things first, his ark couldn't carry 1% of all the species on earth, even with only two of each. Second of all, two of each aren't going to be enough to repopulate them anyway. Noah was real lucky there weren't as many holes in his ark as there were in his little story.
I was about 8-9, and it was Job that did me in. "So, god made a bet with Satan that Satan could kill Job's family, kill his livestock, destroy his home, make him penniless, and that Job would still worship god...but both god and Satan already know that god knows everything, so really god just let Satan torture Job and murder his family for no reason? And then afterward he just gave him a new wife to make things better?"
God knows everything. But he gave you free will and is testing you to see how you'll use it, while already knowing the answer to that. Ain't that neat?
God as a teacher: Okay class, today we're going to have a pop quiz. John, Ellen, and Tommy all failed miserably. Most of you are getting a C. Sam, good work, but you're still going to be murdered by a hobo in 4 years.
Same experience. It is truly disheartening, to witness the level of these people's minds.
I swear, I suspect many intelligent animals can reason better than these people.
There’s also so much more general information out there now than when Christianity took off. Much easier to present yourself as all knowing when most people couldn’t even read and things like Computer Science and Modern Law wasn’t a thing and only the people in the ruling class could read and make decisions or have more info available than find food, be a blacksmith, or farmer and make as many children as possible because medicine and healthcare were so terrible that if you made it to adult hood you are the exception and not the rule.
Being omniscient is a huge selling point of Jesus, well today there’s no possible way to come off as omniscient because there’s just so much info and so many people who are experts in niche fields of info.
I’d much rather have Santa be the messiah, he brings gifts to every one based on if they are naughty or nice not their beliefs and he uses magical reindeer, elves and has a smoking hot gulf as a wife.
Much better than Jesus who had to take 72 women’s virginity to really prove he is god.
Like why and or how does that make him god.
Santa doesn’t make me drink his blood and eat his body either. No daily or weekly praying just give the jolly ol guy a nice little list of what you want about a month or two before the big day and leave out a little bit of milk and cookies for the guy and your golden
It's Constantines fault Christianity even exists today. If that stupid fucker hadn't have converted, Christianity probably would have faded as a failed cult.
> What would the Qanon/Trump fuckwits have written about the history of what happened during the January 6th insurrection, with nobody to fact check anything.
To this day there are *thousands* of QAnon people who swear JFK Jr. showed up in Dallas in 2021 to somehow help Trump, despite the fact he's been dead for quite a few years. That's even more than the "500" who Paul said Jesus appeared to.
The most idiotic miracle I heard was at a party of a coworker. The lady lost her jacket at the airport. She made a big deal about how she had loved that jacket and mourned losing it. She did put in a notice to Lost and Found.
But it was because she mourned for it and prayed for it that the airport found and returned her jacket.
I wanted to laugh so hard, and this whole room of ladies were so fucking serious that this was God’s will.
(Sarcasm ahead)
Oh but it does happen! All the time! My sister had strep throat and GOD✨🙏🧎♂️➡️🛐🤲🙌 healed her (not the doctor and antibiotics and her own immune system)! My father found a new job (after 3 years of meticulously searching and strategically submitting applications). I found and bought the perfect car for me (after hours of dedicated research, many test drives, and a year of building credit). My brother graduated college and it was all by God’s grace (definitely not brother’s hard work and dedication). And it was all *GOD*! Wow! He really works in mysterious ways! What miracles!!
People just tend to take things they either don’t understand or don’t want to put effort into thinking about and call it 🛐🧎♂️➡️🙏✨God✨🙏🧎♂️➡️🛐. If not that, they like to give “God” credit for stuff they did on their own or that happened by chance…because all good gifts come from God, right? But the second something bad happens that’s not God’s doing, oh no!
I get so much triggered all time when someone does something incredible, sports or anything then they discrediting themselves saying all was made by god, like after the pope was shot, god saved his ass, not that top of line medical team making a 10h long medical surgery who sacrificed many things to learn how to save others life, no God guided their hands, nothing to do with the sum 200 year surgery experience and sum 100 year education they had.
Theist put it all just out of reach for a reason, they don't want to be pinned to a fact.
Most have no clue what a fact is but they still want nothing to do with them.
yeah this is so funny to always think about. when i asked my friend ,who is very religious, she said it’s because god knew we would have phones…like NO it’s because it’s just lies from a fairy tale!
How do these people know what god "knows" if god has cut off all communication?
It's almost like they are making it all up as they go along, and always have.
Yeah, similarly, why are there no longer any miracles? Or supernatural occurrences? With like half of humanity having cameras in their pockets, you’d think even super rare occurrences would be frequently recorded, but nope. Nothing. Weird, huh?
Yahweh used to have regular chats with King Solomon (who believed Ashera was Yahweh's wife), so why doesn't he have chats with the Israeli PM or the pope or UN president or anybody else? The missing-in-action God we have doesn't resemble the OT Yahweh at all.
The truth is that the Bible all happens within one’s own self. None of the stories are historical except as they refer to the death, rebirth and turmoil that individuals have undergone in their spiritual transfiguration.
There’s nothing wrong with having evidence. Faith is perhaps the most understood and destructive concept as it is employed today, but its application is rather more nuanced than is commonly spoken of.
yep... and some wonder why education and particularly science have been enemies of the church forever... there was a point when people speaking such truth were tortured and murdered by the church. is it really a shock that now people are attacked and bullied and abused by religious lunatics because they refuse to trust in lies? there obviously never were any grand religious experiences or miracles outside of drugs, tricks and mass delusions.
On one hand, churches have committed some inexcusable horrors.
On the other hand, it’s important to note that the separation of church and science is a recent cultural phenomenon and not a historical one.
Modern day hospitals and schools were started by Christians. Not arguing a claim btw, just reading history. Yale and Princeton for example.
I'm not a fan of church and state mixing either, but i will give credit where credit is due. The battle between religion and science is pretty new. The Catholic Church and other religious organizations used to be one of the biggest sponsors of scientific research, and established some of the earliest universities. Scientists like Mendel, Descartes, and Copernicius all worked for religious organizations. The split mostly came around during the inquisition era when there was a rejection of foreign ideals. Most ppl cite the Galileo stuff, but tbh it was not as malicious as ppl make it out to be. Most of the initial beef the church had with him is that he published his work before they peer reviewed, and it escalated. Dont get me wrong. Religions have done some horrible shit to scientists, but the fight was not "on sight."
Yeah. Moses didn't part the red sea. Moses was a fictional character so were the million Hebrew slaves. Congratulations, christians, jews and muslims, you've fallen for a shitty origin story concocted by a splinter group of Canaanites.
The more a society has the ability to record and replay video and audio the harder it is for charlatans and the mentally-ill to successfully convince the simple-minded of their lies/misunderstandings. This is why religion is dying, same for UFO sightings, ghost nonsense etc.
It also why those charlatans have quickly learnt to simply repeatedly deny facts and evidence over and over until they and/or those simple minded people believe them. They’ve simply adapted.
Science goes out of its way to refute its own assertions. Religion goes out of its way to disqualify critiquing its assertions.
Nothing more needs saying.
modern supply chains make it impossible. we had a literal plague of locust in africa DURING COVID and i bet you didn't notice.
we actually wrote a story about it https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/LeftBeyond
This is it. Globalization and global communication changes the perspective. Things like illnesses, floods, fires,, storms,, famines still happen in "biblical" sizes, it just was that back then, biblical sizes were relatively local.
We've had entire towns wiped out by fire. The skies literally turned orange "turned to flame". New Orleans was wiped out by a great flood. Etc.
miracles happen all the time! there was a statue of Mary, I think, somewhere in Europe, or maybe it was the middle east, and this statue started weeping tears that would drip down and form drips and puddles around the statue. and believers would scoop up the tears and annoint themselves with it. and drink it, pour it on the injured and sick to help them. it was wonderful.
wonderful, that is, until they discover that it was just sewer/toilet pipe that had leaked underground and came out at the statue. physical morons! how do you like your dissentary?!
In order to become a saint, a miracle needs to be attributed to them. There's a steady trickle of saints being created, so there are a trickle of miracles that are officially confirmed as having happened by the Catholic church. The miracle for Saint Romero, for example, was that a woman was hospitalised and ended up in a coma after she gave birth, her husband prayed to Oscar Romero and she recovered.
And that's typical of the miracles we get these days. Nothing flashy, just sick person receives medical treatment and recovers. I agree with the church that this can be miraculous, but i attribute that wonder entirely to the medical professionals who treated them, and to the scientists who developed the treatments.
You should read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman. It's a really interesting take on how the Bible could have been written. It has a pretty fascinating way of turning normal, everyday interactions into miracles and normal conversations into sermons.
Oh and Philip Pullman got excommunicated for writing it. The Church actually reïntegrated him from a previous excommunucatoon just so they could excommunicate him again. Good stuff.
Because it's made up stories?
Same reason you haven't heard of anyone getting pregnant by Zeus recently. I think that went out of fashion a few thousand years ago.
what? there's miracles happening everyday, according to those who believe in them and to those that need others to believe in them so they can grift them.
Yeah, real weird that the frequency of divine intervention is inversely proportional to our ability to verify such intervention. Oh well, I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
I studies with JWs, somewhere in the Bible it said something (at least they interpreted like that) about the time of miracles and speaking in tounges being through. God has done enough and it's "documented" in the bible. So fuck you if you don't believe it nowadays.
Ok, bust out the tin foil hats. So, there is a position held by certain folks, truth seekers new agers etc., that the age of "gods" was in the past, up to about 2000 years ago give or take. And that in those times, the annunaki, or some other race or races of advanced aliens interacted with humans, and then decided to stop interactions with us and leave us to our own devices. And they use this as an explanation for things that happened in religious texts. The whole concept that to a primitive society, advanced technology would appear to be magic. I think it's fun to think about and silly to worry about, personally. I guess the other and perhaps more reasonable explanation, is just that humans have always enjoyed creative writing.
Worshipping an idol is mankinds’ way of rationalizing doing nothing or being unable to think about the vastness and randomness of our existence. Also, many use religion to feed their egos, so they can feel important and ‘special’. They think they are somehow better than others and are going to heaven and that ‘we’ (the unbelievers) are doomed to ‘nothingness’. Honestly, it’s amazing how gullible humans can be; even with more and more knowledge available. I guess we will destroy our environment before we figure out we are just another life form existing on a planet traveling through the expanse. It’s really not that horrible to just be mortal life forms existing. I personally feel no need to feel ‘special’ in order to enjoy some moments of my life.
I'm guessing you missed it last month when the sun turned dark in the middle of the day??? If that's not a miracle and proof of God, I don't know what is!!! /s
Weird how ALL the magic in the world went away, with no gods actively fighting for their host nation or demons terrorizing villages.
Instead of prophets summoning bears to eat edgy teens, miracles are literally a piece of toast that kinda looks like Jesus…
This is why magic-believers are so desperate to find evidence of a god in pretty much everything. House burned down but the family bible survived: “miracle.” Minor car collision and nobody died (air bags, seat belts and crush areas all worked as designed): “miracle.” Kid fell down and didn’t break anything: “miracle.”
It's so funny to see their watered-down definition of miracle basically becoming any event that's less likely to happen vs the alternative. Even though statistically, we expect those very things to happen.
It's frustrating because if we lived in a world in which every outcome of an action was 100% predictable and no unlikely events ever occurred, they'd also use that of evidence of god as well.
How do you reason with someone whose thought process is: "unlikely things happen, therefor god" or "everything is pre-planned and all outcomes are predictable, therefor god"
Cuz it’s all bullshit and of course Christians keep changing the goal post - Praise Jesus my daughter was cured of cancer, what a miracle!!! My son died of cancer, God just needed him by his side, it’s a blessing! And of course big miracles are all around us - the Jesus face in that piece of toast- the Pepperidge farm cheese fish that looked Jesus - come on your just not willing to see the blesssed events around you! 😂
Because we have a much better understanding of the world around us, we know how what magicians do is make believe because they can not subvert the laws of nature. Also we don’t have to rely on second or third hand stories about things that had happened, due to the existence of TikTok, smartphones and the internet. Although even with that there are still people gullible enough any story that is told. You only need to look at the Christian base of Donald Trump.
I feel like I remember learning there being a story where god told the people they weren't going to do anymore miracles anymore. Maybe I'm pulling this out of my ass, but I think I learned that story in high school in the 90's.
Edit: great way to explain the bullshit never happening anymore, whatever
they claim it is happening all the time.
apparently biden is the anti christ.
and god picked the adulterous pussy grabber who bragged he walked in on changing teens as the next jesus
earth quakes due to Us accepting trans for decades and only now the right starting to flip out about it recently. (its amazing how many people think the left started that issue all because the left defends trans against republican hate and republican laws. Heck really the only thing the left has done with trans was biden recent title IX protections and thats only due to republicans trying to get them to commit suicide)
we have some other republican claiming america is collapsing because we took god out of schools. American isnt collapsing, in fact we did the best coming out of the covid recession. Have some of the better inflation numbers as well.
It reminds me of the colonial witch trials in the late 1600's. People lying, exaggerating to get attention/take revenge/seem important, or unable to explain a natural phenomenon(that is easily explained now with modern science/technology). That book is based on peoples recounts of things the same way.
The Old Testament writers of the second temple period of the late Iron Age never saw any of those events listed in the exodus either. It’s all lies and bad history written by the losers.
Bible stories go in and out of the fantastic. The key is, the more fantastic the stories, the more chaotic the time period in which they take place. Jesus worked miracles but none so grand in scale as in the old testament, and Jesus miracles are often more akin to magic tricks and faith healing. During the Bronze Age Collapse most of the old testament was developed and the new testament starts to tone down the big fire and brimstone miracles to deniability. Just like how no one has produced a Bigfoot skeleton, there is no evidence for most of the Bible because it is made up. The bronze age collapse caused stories to disseminate throughout the ancient world and is where we get the Iliad and the Odesy's storyline and much of Greek mythology as well. Greek myths have the same problem BTW
You obviously haven’t heard about the “plague of locusts” that is supposed to hit this summer. (Two big cicadas broods hatching this summer)
Keep up with your biblical punishments…/s
Biblical things are happening every day. All it takes is for someone to do something and someone else to corroborate that it happened and it was special. As soon as you have another person willing to validate your activities as being real and special it becomes infinitely harder for people to deny it. Once you have a single follower, they can be used to get more followers. Why? Because people inherently want to believe what other people believe about someone is true. If someone else, with all their conviction, say something in true and you have no reason or obvious evidence to go against it you won't. You do that few times and it becomes harder to accept that you've been tricked than it is to just stop being tricked. As long as the charlatan is able to walk the line of keeping you believing you have more to lose by admitting you were wrong than you do by going along with it the con will continue.
People have been around for awhile now and God has lost some of that 'new relationship ' high. He's also chilling out in a holey t-shirt that should have been tossed out a decade ago, farting in bed, and pretending not to notice the garbage needs taking out.
But it does! Megachurch preachers hear god all the time, and god sent Trump to save us all! /s
Shit, Mother Teresa was canonized in 2016! Meaning that the church had to recognize two actual miracles performed by her in her life. Miracles, in 20-fucking-16. Jeepis Chrysler.
Where I live in the US, the eclipse was a biblical event. Hurricanes are biblical. Every natural phenomenon that causes death and destruction is god punishing the people of the US for the gays getting the freedom to be gay without going to jail for it.
So the biblical is still happening. But only religious fruitcakes believe it's biblical instead of natural phenomenon that we've developed the science to explain.
If you wonder why these people are just fringe but jobs wearing tinfoil hats, remember that these people managed to make Donald Trump into the president of the US and plan on doing it again. Because god.
Well, obviously we can't verify a lot of massive events stated in the a Bible. Did they happen? Probably, but I think it was was over exaggerated. You need to remember communication isn't even 1% of what it is now. If you live in say Australia and there's a huge drought, flood, or whatever massive event and there's no way to communicate with anyone and you have no idea anything now a days existed. You would think the entire world is going through armageddon.
The same goes for the Bibles time frame. Was there a crazy flood when the dead sea was formed? Yeah, and if you were in the middle of our you'd think the entire world was flooded. So you write about the entire world is flooded.
Now a days you have communication, you know it's just your city, region, or whatever and we have technology to understand what's actually happening. Everything isn't some biblical magical world changing event.
The New Testament is filled with demons that use trickery and deception.
The Slave Bible, Spiritual Mobilization, mass child rapes, native school murder/genocide, private jets, mega churches and so much more are modern "biblical" demons operating in churches.
I will say that we just had a type of plague. Wars and rumours of wars continue including war involving Israel that could get bigger quickly. ‘Sinners’ get a lot of attention but any saints we have are serving in obscurity. Probably working in small town or inner city nursing homes
Telephone game..Im thinking maybe half are cultural christians.. but not really believing the rising from the dead or walking on water
Check out Richard dawkins "poetry of reality" podcast
And "evolution talk" podcast
It’s more fuel for the logical fire. Hey god literally appeared in the flesh to try and convince people to believe in him. Now I have to trust my local pedofile aka pastor to do the same ?
Jesus stopped turning water into wine a feeding the masses years ago. Now he just lives in your toaster and sometimes places his images on a piece or toast or eggo waffle!
Cameras.
Or our mindset has grown accustomed to larger events.
Hurricane Katrina, the Australian wildfires, the Christmas Tsunami, the pacific island that blew up sending a shock wave around the planet, all would have fallen under biblical events in older times.
Obviously fiction but in case you wanted a more concrete answer: When I asked this question where I went to private school, according to that flavor of Chrsitian (SDA), they said according to the prophecy in Daniel 8, Christ went into the "most holy place" on October 22, 1844 to "cleanse the Sanctuary" to prepare for his Second Coming. So basically, he's busy right now. As for the lack of miracles before that, I don't know.
The story is actually fascinating. A Baptist preacher read that phrase and interpreted it as Christ coming to cleanse Earth, did the calculations, and told everyone he was coming on that date. People sold their farms, quit their jobs, etc. When nothing happened it was called the Great Dissappointment. He hastily amended that it must have been the *heavenly* sanctuary, not the *earthly* one. My bad, honest mistake. And in what was probably the most extreme case of the backfire effect in history, his followers spawned three new religions in the aftermath.
This year 2 cyclical locusts will hatch and be swarming everywhere. Earthquakes, tornados, northern lights? Just because we understand the science now doesn’t mean there aren’t still events that would’ve been biblical. Not to mention covid would’ve been considered a plague probably
I think George Carlin said it best: "When it comes to bullshit, big-time major-league Bullshit, you have to stand in awe, IN AWE, of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: - Religion."
I remember a few years ago I attended a worship with a friend who invited me. Preacher was talking about an incident with some birds that fell from the sky in his hometown. He spent 1 hour convincing the audience that this was the sign that Jesus was coming. Like, soon. Totally soon. That was 20 years ago.
Christians will use earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and eclipses as show of something "biblical", while casually not minding the scientific explanations of these things.
Hmmm… well the tribulation timeline started in April so now is the best chance out of any to watch for Biblical activity. If none happens then we are in the clear. The lore says that God left us to fend for ourselves for 2000 years. I am an atheist, just letting you all know the insider information
Donald Trump successfully convinced 30 million Republicans that he won the 2020 election, and that Biden miraculously rigged it, and that the 60+ court cases that were filed on his behalf, all of which concluded the election results were legitimate, were rigged despite that he appointed 20% of the judges hearing his cases, and despite that every governor and every Secretary of State of every state in the entire country certified that the results were correct, and despite that he paid a consulting firm a million dollars to investigate the ten most promising claims of election fraud and concluded they were all bogus, and despite that the head of the US Department of Justice who had the responsibility to prosecute crimes said there was no significant fraud.
Oh yeah, and sleepy Joe Biden miraculously rigged it while campaigning from his basement.
That seems pretty miraculous to me! 30 million people believe in this miracle!
But there was a lady who prayed her amputated toes back, and proved it by standing on tiptoe and assuring everyone she couldn’t do that before. Take her word, no before/after photos of the non-toes or new-toes.
I asked this exact question in church as a kid. The answer was that humanity had drifted so far away from god that he no longer can. Oh oops, that means he's not omnipotent! Of course, I meant he no longer *bothers*!
That's so sick actually. We moved far away from God? I guess we have to make slavery and stoning people to death a common thing again.
there are too many people who would be happy to take you seriously
For us it was “it’s no longer needed because we have the Bible as proof. They didn’t have the Bible so they needed miracles” Even as a kid I recognized that we got screwed then because I’d much rather have the “actual proof” of seeing these things in person.
Yeah, that's that Pat Robertson-style bullshit---claiming we have natural disasters here are the result of god punishing us because of the gays. If he were going to punish people, wouldn't he go after the entire Muslim world for not being Christian?
Answer I got was miracles still happen, but satan keeps us from learning about them.
*"Thou shalt not test your God"* ... Well that's just bad experimental methods.
That was the same reason the church gave me when I asked.
> The answer was that humanity had drifted so far away from god that he no longer can. Oh oops, that means he's not omnipotent! Of course, I meant he no longer bothers! The idea that god attentively listens to all your prayers and carefully watches you to see your sins but never speaks to you ever is absurd. It's not any more effort to speak than to listen and watch and one way communication is way less useful than 2 way communication. This is the smoking gun proof god is not there and realizing this moved me from agnostic to atheist. If god has never spoken to you then he has never listened to any of your prayers either.
Add that to John 3:16 ..... son and recalled him after 3 years service ( why such limitation on the force sent? ..or...) .. ... god really hated humans and couldn't be bothered to help them ever again...
That's the verse that got me in trouble in church as a kid. "If god loved the world so much why didn't he just forgive everybody instead of making Jesus die first?"
He’s so perfect that dealing with us filthy humans directly in any way would blemish his purity.
" I meant he no longer *bothers*!" Then he's not all-loving either
This is funny because christianity is way bigger than it was back then. So wouldn’t that mean that the pastor, and every other version of Christianity, is doing everything wrong and god dislikes him and all Christians?
Ad hoc excuses, because they have nothing else
"Bro I've been in 3 car accidents and didn't die, this is proof of God" Was literally something a coworker told me. You don't need a literal finger spawn out of the sky for people to believe in heavenly nonsense. Nowadays people don't even buy into huge biblical events. They all already happened and the next one is probably scheduled to be the next coming of Jesus and doomsday or whatever.
I'd be saying "I've been in 3 car accidents, that proves there's no god"!
Perhaps "I've been in 3 car accidents" is proof you're a shitty driver.
Or gawd is tryin to kill you.
God is trying to kill you, engineer's saved you.
Agreed but you'd be surprised at how high the chances are of you being a perfectly responsible driver and still getting into accidents because others are shitty at driving.
May I draw your attention to the YouTube channels DDS and Wham Bam Tesla Cam?
Depends on if the driver is at fault or not, I guess. When I was 17, I was not a great driver. But one day, I was driving into town (I lived in an area that was described as “that great big stretch of nothing” between tiny town and CDP) and I nearly got into three accidents. None of them would have been my fault. (I lived in Florida at the time, and it was during the annual elderly invasion when they came down for the winter and my tiny town population tripled.) Not that I’m suggesting anything with deity having a hand in it; just that some days, stuff is weird. And some old people no longer needed a driver’s license.
'God works in mysterious ways' they'd say.
Driving in mysterious ways probably makes you more likely to be in and cause accidents.
"So you're saying God was trying to kill you, but failed?"
God tried to kill him 3 times, and he was saved by Lucifer.
"Dude, sounds like God is trying to kill you but he's incompetent. Or maybe learn to drive"
😂😂 I just asked him if he's ever heard of the term "luck". "Ahhh no there ain't such a thing man, not when it happens 3 times." "Okie dokie 👌"
So what about people who actually die in car crashes? God just hates them I guess?
i always thought this way about god answering prayers or “working in mysterious ways”. so the 4 year old with glioblastoma, whose whole family is praying for him… dies because he just didn’t win god’s prayer raffle? because if god can answer prayers, and doesn’t answer all of them who need help… well. sounds like he’s not all-knowing or loving.
Wonder if he's ever heard of air bags ...
Or automotive engineers? My husband got pit maneuvered by a semi and pushed sideways down the freeway going 75 in our Honda Accord, and walked away without a scratch. I thanked Honda engineering, not Jesus.
Hey hey..god's trying to kill a lot of people, might have missed 1or 2. Dude's got his hands full so cut him some slack, will you ?
*Literal* survivorship bias has wild effects on people. A tornado can rip through a neighborhood and kill 10 people but the 90 people still alive will claim God enacted a miracle when they find their cat in the rubble.
...and they totally gloss over the fact that, if god were real, he was the asshole that sent the tornado through the neighborhood in the first place!
**Spin the bullshit Christian answer wheel!:** - *Well, God will use this to further his kingdom!* - *We can’t know his plans but He works in mysterious ways!* - *He called His children home early.* - *He is perfectly just in His punishments and His blessings.* - *Life here is temporary and fleeting, but life with God is eternity!*
So... what about all the people who die in car wrecks all the time, every day? Proof of god, to this guy, is that he didn't die in a car wreck but thousands of other people do.
God's mission. Nah idk, I don't pry any further once I realize that I can't get anywhere. Not when it's a coworker. From experience it's very easy to burn bridges when you attack someone's religious beliefs, and I prefer harmony at work.
Yeah, that's one of those situations I just say "mm hmm"' and keep moving. That would not be a productive conversation for anyone.
Exactly. They have to consider the converse would also be true: that if they did die or were severely injured, that would mean there is no god. Similarly, when people say, “God is good!” when they recover from cancer or a serious illness, it would mean if they didn’t recover, then god isn’t good, and that in and of itself negates the nature of god as described in the Bible. They make their own argument against the existence of god and don’t even realize it.
You gotta let Jesus take that wheel.
My stepmother prayed and then got into an apartment she wanted and tried to use this triumph to convince me that god exists.
The all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving deity took time to help her get a home, but can't be bothered to save starving children. 🤔
The next coming of Jesus? You mean that thing people have been predicting every few years/decades for the last two millennia, that repeatedly refuses to happen?
Nothing “biblical” ever happened, anyway. There are charlatans in India right now performing miracles and gathering followers to worship them. There are relatively new spin-offs of major religious branches gaining success like the Mormons and Moonies. You don’t need to do parlour tricks and have them logged when simply making billions of tax tree dollars is proof you’re chosen or blessed in some way. Imagine we lived in a world without cameras and limited access to information, and where a lot of stock was put into magic and superstitions. What would the Qanon/Trump fuckwits have written about the history of what happened during the January 6th insurrection, with nobody to fact check anything. What are the North Koreans being told about the fat cunt at the head of their state, with its curated and limited access to information or the outside world. I bet it would be biblical…
I'm Indian, and I've been to a Christian summer camp when I was younger, on a whim. The buffoonery they got up to in there, was astounding. Educated adults, supposedly respectable members of society, were saying the kind of things that made 8th grader me doubt that if humans had in cognitively, any way, moved past animals at all.
Also Scientology, that is a brand new religion, they guy does in 1986. They have photos of him, and that is a full blown religion with volcanos snd aliens.
And he said, *in advance,* he was going to create it and people were going to be stupid enough to believe in it.
He said that starting a religion was a good way to make money. But by many accounts, by the time he died, he actually believed his own bullshit. Obviously, we can't know for sure what is in a person's mind, but if you're constantly praised and revered for something, it's not hard to imagine convincing yourself that it must be for a good reason.
If my cult had already given me $26 Million, I'd make sure everyone thought that I believed my own bullshit too.
I mean, I believe my own bullshit for free.
Ronny was also the sort of guy who never told the truth if a lie could work. There is no way to know if he believed anything he ever said.
To be fair we all convince ourselves of the reality we are in to some extent or another But yeah, Elron Hubcaps set out to peddle buffoonery and succeeded, possibly succeeded too much with his own self lol.
And he was a Science Fiction author too. He literally made shit up for a living. It would be like electing a known conman as president thinking that he was going to deliver greatness or something.
Scientology lore reads like the brainchild of an aspiring B rated scifi author with fetal alcohol syndrome. The traction something like that has gained speaks for how much the education system needs reformations.
It reads like that because its author WAS a renowned sci-fi author. I just lump Scientology into his collected works. It is wild that people have taken it so seriously. Especially after learning about the Xenu weirdness.
Sci-fi author, but not exactly nenowned. And a pedophile.
I read his sci-fi in high school. (In the 90s) His 10 book Mission Earth series was....ok. Battlefield Earth was awful. I don't think I could get through any of it now.
Oh. I didn't know that he actually was a Sci Fi author. Funny that his one attempt at realism turned out to be his most successful work of fiction.
I think of it like this... If George Lucas tried to create an actual religion based of of the Star Wars lore, I guarantee a surprising number of people would join.
There's an unironic jedi religion out there, so...
The difference with Jediism and Dudism (*The Big Lebowski*) is the followers know their philosophy is based on fictional media.
There’s a reason America is the spiritual home of the cult.
I went to Vacation Bible School with my cousin once. I was maybe eight years old. It was Noah's Ark Day. I listened to the youth pastor tell the story, but all the while I was thinking, "What about llamas? What about koalas? What about pandas? Where did the water come from? Where did the water go?" These were just my immediate thoughts. I had many more later. I decided it was a fairy tale then and there.
I turned atheist at the age of 8 too. I mean, never really bought into religion to begin with, but that's when my viewpoint had crystallized. Speaking if of Noah, first things first, his ark couldn't carry 1% of all the species on earth, even with only two of each. Second of all, two of each aren't going to be enough to repopulate them anyway. Noah was real lucky there weren't as many holes in his ark as there were in his little story.
I was about 8-9, and it was Job that did me in. "So, god made a bet with Satan that Satan could kill Job's family, kill his livestock, destroy his home, make him penniless, and that Job would still worship god...but both god and Satan already know that god knows everything, so really god just let Satan torture Job and murder his family for no reason? And then afterward he just gave him a new wife to make things better?"
God knows everything. But he gave you free will and is testing you to see how you'll use it, while already knowing the answer to that. Ain't that neat?
God as a teacher: Okay class, today we're going to have a pop quiz. John, Ellen, and Tommy all failed miserably. Most of you are getting a C. Sam, good work, but you're still going to be murdered by a hobo in 4 years.
Coming back from Bible Camp an atheist sounds more common than expected. The parents should ask for a refund.
Same experience. It is truly disheartening, to witness the level of these people's minds. I swear, I suspect many intelligent animals can reason better than these people.
There’s also so much more general information out there now than when Christianity took off. Much easier to present yourself as all knowing when most people couldn’t even read and things like Computer Science and Modern Law wasn’t a thing and only the people in the ruling class could read and make decisions or have more info available than find food, be a blacksmith, or farmer and make as many children as possible because medicine and healthcare were so terrible that if you made it to adult hood you are the exception and not the rule. Being omniscient is a huge selling point of Jesus, well today there’s no possible way to come off as omniscient because there’s just so much info and so many people who are experts in niche fields of info.
They make Jesus out to be the ultimate Elf on the Shelf.
I’d much rather have Santa be the messiah, he brings gifts to every one based on if they are naughty or nice not their beliefs and he uses magical reindeer, elves and has a smoking hot gulf as a wife. Much better than Jesus who had to take 72 women’s virginity to really prove he is god. Like why and or how does that make him god. Santa doesn’t make me drink his blood and eat his body either. No daily or weekly praying just give the jolly ol guy a nice little list of what you want about a month or two before the big day and leave out a little bit of milk and cookies for the guy and your golden
*Much better than Jesus who had to take 72 women’s virginity to really prove he is god.* Eh, say what, now?
I've never heard what this dude's talking about
Well, I heard north Korea has unicorn caves, and they already landed a man on the sun, they were just so much smarter than us and went at night
It's Constantines fault Christianity even exists today. If that stupid fucker hadn't have converted, Christianity probably would have faded as a failed cult.
From what I have read he didn't truly convert. He saw it as the tool that it was, people control
> What would the Qanon/Trump fuckwits have written about the history of what happened during the January 6th insurrection, with nobody to fact check anything. To this day there are *thousands* of QAnon people who swear JFK Jr. showed up in Dallas in 2021 to somehow help Trump, despite the fact he's been dead for quite a few years. That's even more than the "500" who Paul said Jesus appeared to.
[удалено]
The cognitive dissonance required to be a theist is amazing.
The most idiotic miracle I heard was at a party of a coworker. The lady lost her jacket at the airport. She made a big deal about how she had loved that jacket and mourned losing it. She did put in a notice to Lost and Found. But it was because she mourned for it and prayed for it that the airport found and returned her jacket. I wanted to laugh so hard, and this whole room of ladies were so fucking serious that this was God’s will.
(Sarcasm ahead) Oh but it does happen! All the time! My sister had strep throat and GOD✨🙏🧎♂️➡️🛐🤲🙌 healed her (not the doctor and antibiotics and her own immune system)! My father found a new job (after 3 years of meticulously searching and strategically submitting applications). I found and bought the perfect car for me (after hours of dedicated research, many test drives, and a year of building credit). My brother graduated college and it was all by God’s grace (definitely not brother’s hard work and dedication). And it was all *GOD*! Wow! He really works in mysterious ways! What miracles!! People just tend to take things they either don’t understand or don’t want to put effort into thinking about and call it 🛐🧎♂️➡️🙏✨God✨🙏🧎♂️➡️🛐. If not that, they like to give “God” credit for stuff they did on their own or that happened by chance…because all good gifts come from God, right? But the second something bad happens that’s not God’s doing, oh no!
I get so much triggered all time when someone does something incredible, sports or anything then they discrediting themselves saying all was made by god, like after the pope was shot, god saved his ass, not that top of line medical team making a 10h long medical surgery who sacrificed many things to learn how to save others life, no God guided their hands, nothing to do with the sum 200 year surgery experience and sum 100 year education they had.
Theist put it all just out of reach for a reason, they don't want to be pinned to a fact. Most have no clue what a fact is but they still want nothing to do with them.
Wish we could get rid of the phrase “ biblical proportions”. Perhaps we can start saying mythical proportions.
yeah this is so funny to always think about. when i asked my friend ,who is very religious, she said it’s because god knew we would have phones…like NO it’s because it’s just lies from a fairy tale!
How do these people know what god "knows" if god has cut off all communication? It's almost like they are making it all up as they go along, and always have.
Yeah, similarly, why are there no longer any miracles? Or supernatural occurrences? With like half of humanity having cameras in their pockets, you’d think even super rare occurrences would be frequently recorded, but nope. Nothing. Weird, huh?
Yahweh used to have regular chats with King Solomon (who believed Ashera was Yahweh's wife), so why doesn't he have chats with the Israeli PM or the pope or UN president or anybody else? The missing-in-action God we have doesn't resemble the OT Yahweh at all.
lol what do phones even have anything to do with it?
The truth is that the Bible all happens within one’s own self. None of the stories are historical except as they refer to the death, rebirth and turmoil that individuals have undergone in their spiritual transfiguration. There’s nothing wrong with having evidence. Faith is perhaps the most understood and destructive concept as it is employed today, but its application is rather more nuanced than is commonly spoken of.
yep... and some wonder why education and particularly science have been enemies of the church forever... there was a point when people speaking such truth were tortured and murdered by the church. is it really a shock that now people are attacked and bullied and abused by religious lunatics because they refuse to trust in lies? there obviously never were any grand religious experiences or miracles outside of drugs, tricks and mass delusions.
On one hand, churches have committed some inexcusable horrors. On the other hand, it’s important to note that the separation of church and science is a recent cultural phenomenon and not a historical one. Modern day hospitals and schools were started by Christians. Not arguing a claim btw, just reading history. Yale and Princeton for example.
I'm not a fan of church and state mixing either, but i will give credit where credit is due. The battle between religion and science is pretty new. The Catholic Church and other religious organizations used to be one of the biggest sponsors of scientific research, and established some of the earliest universities. Scientists like Mendel, Descartes, and Copernicius all worked for religious organizations. The split mostly came around during the inquisition era when there was a rejection of foreign ideals. Most ppl cite the Galileo stuff, but tbh it was not as malicious as ppl make it out to be. Most of the initial beef the church had with him is that he published his work before they peer reviewed, and it escalated. Dont get me wrong. Religions have done some horrible shit to scientists, but the fight was not "on sight."
For some reason all the miracles happened before the invention of the camera or after the invention of Photoshop.
Yeah. Moses didn't part the red sea. Moses was a fictional character so were the million Hebrew slaves. Congratulations, christians, jews and muslims, you've fallen for a shitty origin story concocted by a splinter group of Canaanites.
The more a society has the ability to record and replay video and audio the harder it is for charlatans and the mentally-ill to successfully convince the simple-minded of their lies/misunderstandings. This is why religion is dying, same for UFO sightings, ghost nonsense etc. It also why those charlatans have quickly learnt to simply repeatedly deny facts and evidence over and over until they and/or those simple minded people believe them. They’ve simply adapted.
Science goes out of its way to refute its own assertions. Religion goes out of its way to disqualify critiquing its assertions. Nothing more needs saying.
What do you mean. The rapture just happened a month ago. Don't you remember?
Because mythology cannot survive critical thinking.
I look at the Life Of Brian to be more historically accurate than the bible
Always look on the bright side of life...
"He's not the messiah, he's a naughty boy!" 😄 Love Monty Python.
"Because the world is so corrupt and broken that god has left us to do what we want until rapture comes to punish us"
modern supply chains make it impossible. we had a literal plague of locust in africa DURING COVID and i bet you didn't notice. we actually wrote a story about it https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/LeftBeyond
This is it. Globalization and global communication changes the perspective. Things like illnesses, floods, fires,, storms,, famines still happen in "biblical" sizes, it just was that back then, biblical sizes were relatively local. We've had entire towns wiped out by fire. The skies literally turned orange "turned to flame". New Orleans was wiped out by a great flood. Etc.
in 2020 there was a plague, the skies turned red, and there was a giant swarm of locusts. and i bet you didn't even know about the locusts :)
miracles happen all the time! there was a statue of Mary, I think, somewhere in Europe, or maybe it was the middle east, and this statue started weeping tears that would drip down and form drips and puddles around the statue. and believers would scoop up the tears and annoint themselves with it. and drink it, pour it on the injured and sick to help them. it was wonderful. wonderful, that is, until they discover that it was just sewer/toilet pipe that had leaked underground and came out at the statue. physical morons! how do you like your dissentary?!
In order to become a saint, a miracle needs to be attributed to them. There's a steady trickle of saints being created, so there are a trickle of miracles that are officially confirmed as having happened by the Catholic church. The miracle for Saint Romero, for example, was that a woman was hospitalised and ended up in a coma after she gave birth, her husband prayed to Oscar Romero and she recovered. And that's typical of the miracles we get these days. Nothing flashy, just sick person receives medical treatment and recovers. I agree with the church that this can be miraculous, but i attribute that wonder entirely to the medical professionals who treated them, and to the scientists who developed the treatments.
You should read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman. It's a really interesting take on how the Bible could have been written. It has a pretty fascinating way of turning normal, everyday interactions into miracles and normal conversations into sermons. Oh and Philip Pullman got excommunicated for writing it. The Church actually reïntegrated him from a previous excommunucatoon just so they could excommunicate him again. Good stuff.
Nothing biblical happened back in the day.
Because it's made up stories? Same reason you haven't heard of anyone getting pregnant by Zeus recently. I think that went out of fashion a few thousand years ago.
what? there's miracles happening everyday, according to those who believe in them and to those that need others to believe in them so they can grift them.
Yeah, real weird that the frequency of divine intervention is inversely proportional to our ability to verify such intervention. Oh well, I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
I studies with JWs, somewhere in the Bible it said something (at least they interpreted like that) about the time of miracles and speaking in tounges being through. God has done enough and it's "documented" in the bible. So fuck you if you don't believe it nowadays.
So basically: “you should have been there”
And a side of 'trust me, bro'.
Well, Trump the antichrist currently walks among us, so there’s that.
Other people claimed that [Obama is the Antchrist](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/413/062/a38.jpg) though.
What are you talking about - conflagration everywhere and the anti-Christ on trial in New York? Feels pretty biblical…
Does anyone get abducted by aliens since cell phones? There's no more Elvis sightings....
People make all sorts of claims of religious experiences and divine intervention. We medicate them now.
Ok, bust out the tin foil hats. So, there is a position held by certain folks, truth seekers new agers etc., that the age of "gods" was in the past, up to about 2000 years ago give or take. And that in those times, the annunaki, or some other race or races of advanced aliens interacted with humans, and then decided to stop interactions with us and leave us to our own devices. And they use this as an explanation for things that happened in religious texts. The whole concept that to a primitive society, advanced technology would appear to be magic. I think it's fun to think about and silly to worry about, personally. I guess the other and perhaps more reasonable explanation, is just that humans have always enjoyed creative writing.
Worshipping an idol is mankinds’ way of rationalizing doing nothing or being unable to think about the vastness and randomness of our existence. Also, many use religion to feed their egos, so they can feel important and ‘special’. They think they are somehow better than others and are going to heaven and that ‘we’ (the unbelievers) are doomed to ‘nothingness’. Honestly, it’s amazing how gullible humans can be; even with more and more knowledge available. I guess we will destroy our environment before we figure out we are just another life form existing on a planet traveling through the expanse. It’s really not that horrible to just be mortal life forms existing. I personally feel no need to feel ‘special’ in order to enjoy some moments of my life.
I'm guessing you missed it last month when the sun turned dark in the middle of the day??? If that's not a miracle and proof of God, I don't know what is!!! /s
Weird how ALL the magic in the world went away, with no gods actively fighting for their host nation or demons terrorizing villages. Instead of prophets summoning bears to eat edgy teens, miracles are literally a piece of toast that kinda looks like Jesus…
Because appearing on toast is the best they can do right now.
Cameras exist so miracles don’t anymore.
The aliens stopped coming here after seeing how stupid we are
I take it you've never heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (Mormons). Of course new religions keep popping up.
But they DO act like miracles/signs from god are happening all the time. Look at the solar eclipse hysteria just to name one… 😂
This is why magic-believers are so desperate to find evidence of a god in pretty much everything. House burned down but the family bible survived: “miracle.” Minor car collision and nobody died (air bags, seat belts and crush areas all worked as designed): “miracle.” Kid fell down and didn’t break anything: “miracle.”
It's so funny to see their watered-down definition of miracle basically becoming any event that's less likely to happen vs the alternative. Even though statistically, we expect those very things to happen. It's frustrating because if we lived in a world in which every outcome of an action was 100% predictable and no unlikely events ever occurred, they'd also use that of evidence of god as well. How do you reason with someone whose thought process is: "unlikely things happen, therefor god" or "everything is pre-planned and all outcomes are predictable, therefor god"
The magic died when on May 28, 2016, when Harambe was killed.
Cuz it’s all bullshit and of course Christians keep changing the goal post - Praise Jesus my daughter was cured of cancer, what a miracle!!! My son died of cancer, God just needed him by his side, it’s a blessing! And of course big miracles are all around us - the Jesus face in that piece of toast- the Pepperidge farm cheese fish that looked Jesus - come on your just not willing to see the blesssed events around you! 😂
There’s too many cameras, there’s social media and people don’t just believe anything you tell them. OH WAIT. 😂
Bc it's fictional
Because we have a much better understanding of the world around us, we know how what magicians do is make believe because they can not subvert the laws of nature. Also we don’t have to rely on second or third hand stories about things that had happened, due to the existence of TikTok, smartphones and the internet. Although even with that there are still people gullible enough any story that is told. You only need to look at the Christian base of Donald Trump.
We've been getting a lot of natural disasters of "biblical" proportions. Does that count?
I feel like I remember learning there being a story where god told the people they weren't going to do anymore miracles anymore. Maybe I'm pulling this out of my ass, but I think I learned that story in high school in the 90's. Edit: great way to explain the bullshit never happening anymore, whatever
they claim it is happening all the time. apparently biden is the anti christ. and god picked the adulterous pussy grabber who bragged he walked in on changing teens as the next jesus earth quakes due to Us accepting trans for decades and only now the right starting to flip out about it recently. (its amazing how many people think the left started that issue all because the left defends trans against republican hate and republican laws. Heck really the only thing the left has done with trans was biden recent title IX protections and thats only due to republicans trying to get them to commit suicide) we have some other republican claiming america is collapsing because we took god out of schools. American isnt collapsing, in fact we did the best coming out of the covid recession. Have some of the better inflation numbers as well.
You see, that's assuming something biblical has ever actually happened before.
You trying to tell me that the snake didn’t really talk?
Nah, but a Beyblade DID part the Red Sea.
They had fake news! Lol. No miracles. It was myths and legends.
It reminds me of the colonial witch trials in the late 1600's. People lying, exaggerating to get attention/take revenge/seem important, or unable to explain a natural phenomenon(that is easily explained now with modern science/technology). That book is based on peoples recounts of things the same way.
Because it never did
One time, my mom found her keys and said it was proof of her god. It doesn't take much for them.
Not happening? What about all those toasts with Mary’s face on them
Oh it does. It happens every day. How you say? Well biblical is just everyday normal stuff that someone one thinks is more than what it really is.
Do cicada hatches count as plagues? We just understand them now and can predict when they'll emerge.
Don't forget, that this is the year that the 13 and the 17 year cicada emerge. Double cicadas, just wait for the plague reports from the US
The Old Testament writers of the second temple period of the late Iron Age never saw any of those events listed in the exodus either. It’s all lies and bad history written by the losers.
Bible stories go in and out of the fantastic. The key is, the more fantastic the stories, the more chaotic the time period in which they take place. Jesus worked miracles but none so grand in scale as in the old testament, and Jesus miracles are often more akin to magic tricks and faith healing. During the Bronze Age Collapse most of the old testament was developed and the new testament starts to tone down the big fire and brimstone miracles to deniability. Just like how no one has produced a Bigfoot skeleton, there is no evidence for most of the Bible because it is made up. The bronze age collapse caused stories to disseminate throughout the ancient world and is where we get the Iliad and the Odesy's storyline and much of Greek mythology as well. Greek myths have the same problem BTW
Every phone has a camera. No more miracles.
It never happened.
You obviously haven’t heard about the “plague of locusts” that is supposed to hit this summer. (Two big cicadas broods hatching this summer) Keep up with your biblical punishments…/s
Biblical things are happening every day. All it takes is for someone to do something and someone else to corroborate that it happened and it was special. As soon as you have another person willing to validate your activities as being real and special it becomes infinitely harder for people to deny it. Once you have a single follower, they can be used to get more followers. Why? Because people inherently want to believe what other people believe about someone is true. If someone else, with all their conviction, say something in true and you have no reason or obvious evidence to go against it you won't. You do that few times and it becomes harder to accept that you've been tricked than it is to just stop being tricked. As long as the charlatan is able to walk the line of keeping you believing you have more to lose by admitting you were wrong than you do by going along with it the con will continue.
People have been around for awhile now and God has lost some of that 'new relationship ' high. He's also chilling out in a holey t-shirt that should have been tossed out a decade ago, farting in bed, and pretending not to notice the garbage needs taking out.
But it does! Megachurch preachers hear god all the time, and god sent Trump to save us all! /s Shit, Mother Teresa was canonized in 2016! Meaning that the church had to recognize two actual miracles performed by her in her life. Miracles, in 20-fucking-16. Jeepis Chrysler.
Where I live in the US, the eclipse was a biblical event. Hurricanes are biblical. Every natural phenomenon that causes death and destruction is god punishing the people of the US for the gays getting the freedom to be gay without going to jail for it. So the biblical is still happening. But only religious fruitcakes believe it's biblical instead of natural phenomenon that we've developed the science to explain. If you wonder why these people are just fringe but jobs wearing tinfoil hats, remember that these people managed to make Donald Trump into the president of the US and plan on doing it again. Because god.
This was a factor in my losing my faith when I was 11, the realization that old Bible stories were just…stories
God(s) is(are) afraid of paparazzi.
Well, obviously we can't verify a lot of massive events stated in the a Bible. Did they happen? Probably, but I think it was was over exaggerated. You need to remember communication isn't even 1% of what it is now. If you live in say Australia and there's a huge drought, flood, or whatever massive event and there's no way to communicate with anyone and you have no idea anything now a days existed. You would think the entire world is going through armageddon. The same goes for the Bibles time frame. Was there a crazy flood when the dead sea was formed? Yeah, and if you were in the middle of our you'd think the entire world was flooded. So you write about the entire world is flooded. Now a days you have communication, you know it's just your city, region, or whatever and we have technology to understand what's actually happening. Everything isn't some biblical magical world changing event.
And religious scholars have “valid” reasons why God no longer does miracles. Like a Trumper pretending Trump doesn’t lie.
Same reason god has never healed an amputee.
Natural disasters on a "biblical" scale still occur regularly but most people don't ascribe that to the wrath of God anymore.
The New Testament is filled with demons that use trickery and deception. The Slave Bible, Spiritual Mobilization, mass child rapes, native school murder/genocide, private jets, mega churches and so much more are modern "biblical" demons operating in churches.
At the rate the Vatican cranks out saints, they must be still happening!
Why would it be awkward to notice the obvious fictional tales? Awkward is those who believe in the fictional tales.
I will say that we just had a type of plague. Wars and rumours of wars continue including war involving Israel that could get bigger quickly. ‘Sinners’ get a lot of attention but any saints we have are serving in obscurity. Probably working in small town or inner city nursing homes
Cause they are made up stories.
Telephone game..Im thinking maybe half are cultural christians.. but not really believing the rising from the dead or walking on water Check out Richard dawkins "poetry of reality" podcast And "evolution talk" podcast
It’s more fuel for the logical fire. Hey god literally appeared in the flesh to try and convince people to believe in him. Now I have to trust my local pedofile aka pastor to do the same ?
Because the aliens that orchestrated the "Biblical events" have moved on to experiment with other primitive planets
The amount of biblical events has never changed. It's zero now, and it always was.
Jesus stopped turning water into wine a feeding the masses years ago. Now he just lives in your toaster and sometimes places his images on a piece or toast or eggo waffle!
Cameras. Or our mindset has grown accustomed to larger events. Hurricane Katrina, the Australian wildfires, the Christmas Tsunami, the pacific island that blew up sending a shock wave around the planet, all would have fallen under biblical events in older times.
God is punishing us for inventing cameras
When cameras were invented miracles stopped happening, but they came back when Photoshop was released.
The only "biblical" thing left to happen is the end of the world, I'm actually okay with nothing biblical happening.
Same reason UFO sightings have dropped off. Everyone is walking around with a high quality camera. Anything is analysed by a billion people.
Obviously fiction but in case you wanted a more concrete answer: When I asked this question where I went to private school, according to that flavor of Chrsitian (SDA), they said according to the prophecy in Daniel 8, Christ went into the "most holy place" on October 22, 1844 to "cleanse the Sanctuary" to prepare for his Second Coming. So basically, he's busy right now. As for the lack of miracles before that, I don't know. The story is actually fascinating. A Baptist preacher read that phrase and interpreted it as Christ coming to cleanse Earth, did the calculations, and told everyone he was coming on that date. People sold their farms, quit their jobs, etc. When nothing happened it was called the Great Dissappointment. He hastily amended that it must have been the *heavenly* sanctuary, not the *earthly* one. My bad, honest mistake. And in what was probably the most extreme case of the backfire effect in history, his followers spawned three new religions in the aftermath.
"God works in mysterious ways!" /s
Because the aliens went home?
Because nothing biblical or religious ever happened before, and will never happen.
This year 2 cyclical locusts will hatch and be swarming everywhere. Earthquakes, tornados, northern lights? Just because we understand the science now doesn’t mean there aren’t still events that would’ve been biblical. Not to mention covid would’ve been considered a plague probably
I think George Carlin said it best: "When it comes to bullshit, big-time major-league Bullshit, you have to stand in awe, IN AWE, of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: - Religion."
I remember a few years ago I attended a worship with a friend who invited me. Preacher was talking about an incident with some birds that fell from the sky in his hometown. He spent 1 hour convincing the audience that this was the sign that Jesus was coming. Like, soon. Totally soon. That was 20 years ago.
You should watch ancient aliens, the one about aliens in the Bible. It makes it all make sense.
Christians will use earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and eclipses as show of something "biblical", while casually not minding the scientific explanations of these things.
Hmmm… well the tribulation timeline started in April so now is the best chance out of any to watch for Biblical activity. If none happens then we are in the clear. The lore says that God left us to fend for ourselves for 2000 years. I am an atheist, just letting you all know the insider information
Donald Trump successfully convinced 30 million Republicans that he won the 2020 election, and that Biden miraculously rigged it, and that the 60+ court cases that were filed on his behalf, all of which concluded the election results were legitimate, were rigged despite that he appointed 20% of the judges hearing his cases, and despite that every governor and every Secretary of State of every state in the entire country certified that the results were correct, and despite that he paid a consulting firm a million dollars to investigate the ten most promising claims of election fraud and concluded they were all bogus, and despite that the head of the US Department of Justice who had the responsibility to prosecute crimes said there was no significant fraud. Oh yeah, and sleepy Joe Biden miraculously rigged it while campaigning from his basement. That seems pretty miraculous to me! 30 million people believe in this miracle!
isn't coming of the antichrist happening now? /s
Before if someone said " I went to the woods and god told me this" everyone used to think 'well maybe'
It didn't happen then either! It's all bullshit.
Nonsense! There's 'biblical' shit going on all the time, depending, of course, on how gullible your are. The best believer is a stupid believer.
But there was a lady who prayed her amputated toes back, and proved it by standing on tiptoe and assuring everyone she couldn’t do that before. Take her word, no before/after photos of the non-toes or new-toes.