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.

if there is a God, I am very angry with her. But there is a good tradition of being angry with God in the bible, it is allowed.

I find the miracles thing very difficult, it is one of the things that makes me agnostic. To heal some and not others seems unjust. I feel that if there is a God, she has given us eveything we need to heal ourselves, our intelligence, our environment and..science. I feel, probably, we could have found a cure for cancer by now if we had invested the time, energy and money we have invested in wars and huge capitalist profits, into research. And other illnesses too. We could certainly have solved world poverty and hunger by now if it weren't for our greed.

So yes, God gave us free will and we fucked it up. And doesn't seem as if we're going to change that. Heaven or earth is possible, but we don't seem to want to achieve it.

Heaven on earth is possible..

The point is the only types of miracle that occur are those that can't be observed by outsiders.

The reason no one grows a new leg at lourdes is not because god hates amputees, but because there is no way to fake a new leg. Even if you hid it under a blanket someone will say "hey I saw you jogging this morning"

I can't imagine anywhere as unhealthy as lourdes with god knows how many sick and people bathing day after day

I disagree ruty heaven is just hebrew for sky, OT theology doesn't acknowledge heaven it's a later theological concept. They believed that good and bad was evened out in your lifetime, see proverbs. Job questions this theology and Ecclesiastes says you don't know what happens to you when you die you might as well enjoy yourself. Besides heaven and hell are just perceptions, these concepts come from within if you ask me.

Wired did an article on this some years ago.

Here it is:
Prayer Before Dying - Story of a doctor who subjected faith to the rigors of science, and then became a test subject herself.

er, rebelmum, i was arguing for a state of heaven on earth, as JC did, not for a heaven somewhere in the ether.

I read a book recently (destiny of the soul iirc) with a whole new take on things and while I do reserve judgement, an interesting thought in it is that as spirits we choose the sort of life and sort of person we are going to be. That we can choose a difficult life for the challenge and opportunity to grow in spirit.
One of my best friends has cp and had a horrific childhood. But without those difficulties she wouldn't be the fantastic person she is...someone who goes round helping others all the time and who grabs life and lives it far more bravely than I live mine.

Yes life is precious and should be lived to the full but maybe it isn't meant to be easy and maybe death isn't as scarey as we think.

When my grandfather died, I woke up at the exact moment at some odd hour in the night. He was an old man, ready to go. He didn't need a miracle- he was ready to go.
I wonder why I woke up at the moment he died?

interesting and like the whole kama thing sounds more fair than the christian/muslim thing. However it would mean that some chose to die in the first few months so never getting to use their new found experience to be better people.

Onager, The idea was also that we reincarnate. That we exist in soul groups and keep coming back with our group to develop different skills and that sometimes we fail and go back and study our mistakes.

I read a book called Jonathan Livingston seagull by Richard Bach which I love all about spiritual development.

I really don't know how much truth there may be in those ideas but I like them.

Oh and in that book you will all be delighted to hear -it is suggested that imaginary friends are real, that they are our spiritual guides playing with us when at the child stage.

You never know!

The idea of coming back many times does satisfy the fairness part. That always made more sense to me than the usual one life, one judgement and eternal punishment/reward.

I love the bit about imaginary friends being real Okay, I don't believe it, but it's a nice idea isn't it.

Hey, does this mean we have established that comparing christianity to imaginary friends is not an insult because they are real too?

No.

The downside with the karmic thing is that people who find themselves born at the very bottom of the pile, amongst the poorest, the most despised are stuck there. Hey, it's their own choice/fault.

Supersillius that is a nice idea. But dd's imaginary friend is Lotta out of Charlie and Lola. She can't be a spirit guide, surely???

and my niece had two imaginary friends.

Oldlady some people have extaordinary hard lives don't they But I suppose if we all believed they had chosen their hardships we might have more respect for them.
Also if we thought they had chosen that role to offer us the opportunity to help them and not just think of ourselves all the time, we might rise to that challenge rather than turning a blind eye....

(feeling guilty for not always rising to the challenge to help people now...)

or 'extraordinarily' perhaps

Oh yes, of course, we needn't exert ourselves for a fairer world because all the people who suffer are the ones with supernatural superpowers really and/or it's all part of the imaginary friends' cunning plans.
JAGU, anecdotes are not debate either. They are just anecdotes.

There has been absolutely no evidence for miracles in the sense that most academics or scientists (anyone who takes data seriously, basically) would understand the word "evidence". And that's not a "special interpretation" of the word, or choosing a definition which deliberately excludes the sueprnatural. It's a level playing-field, giving the superstitious every opportunity to show that what they are saying is backed up by actual evidence.

If you think there's been a miracle, prove it. Offer case studies, proper data, proper analysis, peer-reviewed in a respected journal. Otherwise it's just a hundred people waving their arms and going "woooo!" Which I could do, frankly.

I lost some important work once on my PC after a powercut. I was sure it had gone for ever and was pretty despairing about it, as I hadn't done a recent backup. I was convinced I needed to start again.

And then I found it.

Don't know how, but it was still there. Deep in some temporary file somewhere, thanks to a techie-friend of mine, i found a salvageable version and saved myself weeks of work.

Halle-blooming-lujah. Were I so inclined, I'd have been praying to whichever flavour of god I preferred and would no doubt have taken the recovery of the lost data as some great miracle, proof that my prayers had been answered. (Ignoring the other 99 times my PC has screwed something up and made my life a misery.) You see?

Even if I could find a tenuous correlation between the recovery of the data and something I had done earlier - offering up a prayer, for example - correlation does not equal causation. You might as well say it came back because I put my shirt on a certain way that day, or because there was a full moon.

I go on about this a lot on here. I'm at risk of repeating myself.

It's worth reading that article to the end. Partly because it is interesting, but also because it raises some serious question marks about the study, and shows the problems that can happen when you really want a particular hypothesis to be true. Useful for those who find it difficult to understand how scientists can get things wrong.

Here is an interesting discussion about that research (including discussion of magic) by an anthropologist. It's a very alternate view though. I can't find any references to the study in any reputable scientific sites, but I can't get into Medline for a proper check.