Amillionyears
Thank you for getting round to answering that one for me.
The other half of the same question was aimed at atheists: "why do atheists always give the same answer to a question". To which the answer would be because we only deal with facts, and when we don't know the answer we always say either "I don't know", or "our current best theory is".
The problem is, that your list of reasons from a to g add further evidence that Christians just make up their own interpretation of a book, which was in itself is a translation of someone else's interpretation of events (often after some good-old Chinese whispers). So basically, very very very unreliable data which is generally baseless.
I can understand why this boom was useful before the knowledge we have today, but to keep clinging onto it when it can clearly be replaced is just ignorance!
By the way - I survived the body boarding, so if anyone did pray that I wouldn't, then this can be included as another datapoint that prayer doesn't work (but if you prayed that I would survive, then please bear in mind that my chances of survival were almost 1 (i.e. pretty much certain) so it can not be used to prove that prayer works!)
Did anyone on this thread listen to the Randomness and Probability episode of "The Infinite Monkey Cage" podcast like I suggested? Please do, I guarantee you will find it an interesting half an hour!
Now that this thread has run to over 400 posts there are people joining in who have not read a lot of important posts. This means we are now going over old ground. I will keep checking to see if anyone has anything to say after listening to TIMC podcast (or if people have anything interesting to say about this last post that isn't a repeat of an old discussion).