to think it is rude to persistently refer to God/Allah/etc. as an "imaginary friend"

[AtheneNoctua]

even after asked not to by several posters who have stated they found it offensive.

No idea. Sorry but this is a theory which I am working on even as you ask!

Maybe God really is the Higgs Boson?

well i suppose God doesn't obey the laws of physics, she is the laws of physics, and all the mystery that entails.

belief in God does not preclude belief in evolution.

I've noticed a suppression of really good ideas and development over the past few years. It probably has been happening and I just didn't notice or it's been going on for some time and I was just too young to be concerned.
One of the ideas was developed in California. The article is in a Scientific American (I think) where they heat with sunlight and mirrors. They (at the time I read it) had been working on perfecting it for over 7 years. They magnified the sunlight and boiled water in less than 30 seconds. Of course it was all told in laymans terms and they would have to find the right light frequency and focus to not burn the place down.
There was another interesting article about a company that bought the diamond growing Russian machines and DeBeers has down everything it can (short of having them put down) to make sure the diamond market isn't saturated.
They grow perfect diamonds (in almost every color) to huge sizes so they only cost a fraction of mined diamonds. No blood, no mining...no profit for DeBeers.
They want to make enough financial backing to produce chips to replace the silicon ones in computers. They would outlast, run hotter and faster.

I rather think thinking and feeling are very complicated subjects indeed.

To elaborate a little.

Maybe those of you who believe in god know other people who believe in things which you know are "not real" (either other deities, or ghosts, or imaginary friends, or demons, or fairies, or tealeaf-reading, or crystal healing, or..... whatever).

How does this belief in "things which are not real" manifest itself? How do you know that these things are just in their imaginations?

No, I never said the two were incompatible (though I am dubious as to the point of God supposedly starting it all then sitting back - why do we need 'him' then?)
I am responding to a post from whatif which seemed to suggest our difference from, say, whales, was a huge incomprehensible mystery and another stating that humans are the only animals that think and feel.
If God doesn't obey the laws of physics, why do no Christians have any theory as to how exactly these physical events (neurons firing, miracles happening/prayers answered etc) occur? Aren't you interested?

Why would a christian not have theories about neurophysiology?

Consciousness (if this is what you mean by thinking and feeling) is a very interesting subject I think, and very much debated too.

On the imaginary friend subject. My sister was in the WC and her son was playing with his imaginary friend down the hall. He was having a discussion to which he and the "friend" were disagreeing.
The son then went racing to the WC and closed the door behind him..as he turned toward her away from the door...there was a loud thump on the other side.
This surprised her and she asked him what was going on. He replied that the "friend" was upset because he won the argument.
When we were little she also had IFs to which she outgrew them. I never saw them myself but they were not my friends.

Mabanana, My point in that is that man "records". Why? Why compose music and put it down on paper? Why compose anything? It sets us apart from those thinking feeling animals. That was the point to that. I know they feel (animals) I suppose they even dream...my dogs howl in their sleep looking for others.

'Why would a christian not have theories about neurophysiology?'
I have no idea. All I know is that I hear a lot of 'God sees everything' 'God talks to everyone' 'The universe is in God' yet no interest in any theory as to how this could physically happen. Scientists normally think a gap in their knowledge is a reason to look for an explanation.

Oh I see. I thought you were talking about neurons firing in general, not about in religious experience.

You ask about "how this could physically happen" but I think many religious people would not think of it as a physical thing. Supernatural as opposed to natural.

Which I know UnquietDad would call "bloody convenient" , and I suppose it is.

Okay, miracles...I have only a few personal ones to offer.
A few blocks from where I live a couple years ago a man had holed up in his shop. He had a gun. They closed off the highway that runs past there and brought in a swat team.
Here in Texas bringing in a swat team is a big deal. Someone was going to die. I don't usually pray. Sorry, raised Catholic...it is almost an everyday thing but lots had happened since so...anyway, I was impelled to pray for this stranger. I didn't know him, nor have I met him or any of the swat team. I prayed (I was overwhelmed with need and teary) and was pretty much physically exhausted after (why I don't know) but he gave himself up and no one was hurt. I then gave thanks and haven't really given it much thought until someting recently with another friends son occured.

We record because we can. Because we have much bigger and more complex brains, we dont live in water (hard to get a piano underwater!), we have those very useful thumbs, the right kind of throat to produce a complex verbal language - which is the precurser of complex thoughts, and we live in complex societies which makes writing useful. We do stuff for a mix of practical reasons (writing started to record very useful things, like how many bales of corn you'd sold).
This is an interesting academic article on music and evolution
www.mus.cam.ac.uk/~ic108/MMS/

A lot of people seem to think that just because they don't instantly know the answer to something it is inherently unanswerable and unknowable - ever - and therefore must be Godly. People used to think that the rising of the sun was so incomprehensible that it must be a daily miracle by a capricious God that required human sacrifice to keep it going. We now know different!

Miracles are amatter of interpretation; one person talks abut the miracle of a child not sying despite the severity of an illness- another talks of science but I think tha maybe God gave us that science? I beleive that God gave us the resources on this planet to do the best we can with; from this comes such wonders as medical science, charity and kindness, but also such horrors as murder, starvation etc- becuase people are greedy and self obsessed and don't always want to work to the greater good.

I'm afraid I would think that was entirely conincidental.

My second ex lives south of us in San Antonio. He and his wife don't have children together but she has a son in Iraq presently.
While told to check out a building he and another soldier disappeared.
They were waiting to hear from her sister as she doesn't seem to get on with this son of hers. They waited 5 days. I prayed for him and his companion.
Okay, sounds really bonkers but I just didn't feel it was his time to die.
They were found, they had been taken out into the desert and stripped of their guns and uniforms and left naked to die.
A family (Iraqi) found them, nursed them as well as they could and returned them to the Americans.
This in itself is a miracle. That family is probably paying the price for intervening. So call it conincidence or whatever you wish. I call it a miracle. Again, I gave thanks for answering the prayers.

wehaveallbeenthere it is nice that you belieeve you personally made a difference but as proof of god or the effectiveness of prayer I think it is what we would call anecdotal evidence

OK, my best theory so far - God is the Higgs boson, and all the other particles, and all the forces between them. God is therefore in everything and can know everything. God can cause neurons to fire by spinning a few subatomic particles in a different direction. God can also do anything, without breaking the laws of physics, again by spinning particles differently.

(And yes, I'm pretty sure you can tell from that explanation that I don't really understand physics)

wehaveallbeenthere, that's a nice story, but what is it supposed to prove? Are you saying there has never been a case of a swat team not killing somebody once they have been called out?

I think you really need to have faith for your examples because to me they are just coincidence

Sorry, but that's a rubbish miracle wehave! There have been endless armed standoffs and sieges that have ended when the armed person gave themselves up without anyone being killed - even in Texas, I'd guess. Certainly in the UK. It's not a miracle!
Don't you find the idea that God would intervene (how exactly?) to save someone from 'certain death' because you were praying, while at the same time condemning children to death by slow starvation all over the world pretty unpleasant? I do. If he has the ability to save one he has the ability to save all, surely? And why should your prayer make any difference? I am pretty sure that every single victim of the Black Death was prayed for - a lot. They still died. Didn't the people praying pray properly or something?

Also wehaveallbeenthere if you did cause it to happen then presumably god intervened and forced the man to come out. Thereby violating his free will.

there is a cochrane review on studies that looked at prayer more people died in the prayed for group than the control group I linked to it much earlier on in the thread

these were rcts so well controlled for had good powers etc

I think that is an example of people behaving in altruistic ways. I don't think your prayers had anythign to do with their actions. What about when bad things happen, or when you pray for something that doesn't turn out the way you hope? My understanding is that miracles are when there is no other way to explain something.