Miracles do Happen. The Story of John Smith.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

This wasn't a tale, this was a real event...

Whatever real event occurred is one thing.

When people decided to claim it means something it became a tale, a dramatization. And people have ownership rights to that tale. And people are making money off of those rights, and using it to claim that it reinforces a particular religious World view.

Suppose a pious gods fearing heathen witnessed this miracle. Would he then claim to know which particular god had intervened? I sort of doubt that.

Superstition: Etymology
While the formation of the Latin word is clear, from the verb super-stare, "to stand over, stand upon; survive", its original intended sense is less clear. It can be interpreted as "‘standing over a thing in amazement or awe",[5] but other possibilities have been suggested, e.g. the sense of excess, i.e. over scrupulousness or over-ceremoniousness in the performing of religious rites, or else the survival of old, irrational religious habits.

The earliest known use as a Latin noun occurs in Plautus, Ennius and later by Pliny, with the meaning of art of divination. From its use in the Classical Latin of Livy and Ovid (1st century BC), the term is used in the pejorative sense it still holds today, of an excessive fear of the gods or unreasonable religious belief, as opposed to religio, the proper, reasonable awe of the gods. Cicero derived the term from superstitiosi, lit. those who are "left over", i.e. "survivors", "descendants", connecting it with excessive anxiety of parents in hoping that their children would survive them to perform their necessary funerary rites. While Cicero distinguishes between religio and superstitio, Lucretius uses only the term religio (only with pejorative meaning). Throughout all of his work, he distinguished only between ratio and religio.

I highlighted where it says "art of divination". Divination is the assigning of meaning to an event or object alignment.

In this particular case people witness an event and say: "This miracle happened therefore the Christian God of my interpretation of the Bible." That is divination by definition.

A proper superstitious person (with a bit of religion) would say, "This miracle happened therefore … … um, I think I'll walk around this and not touch it. The last thing in the World I'd want to do is grab onto it and own it."

I get the feeling that some people who proselytize the hardest are actually Atheists who lack any fear of the gods. But that's just a feeling I get. I can't prove it.

ETA: Not that I have anything against Atheists. We need fearless unsuperstitious people to explore the limits and challenge the intrenched dogmas.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

He was in ice water, which drastically slows your metabolism. Which is why, for some injuries and medical emergencies, they put the body into extreme cold (for example, when NFL player Kevin Everett suffered a spinal injury). That alone explains much of this supposed "miracle." His metabolism was drastically lowered while paramedics continuously did CPR. There is no mystery or miracle here.
Feel free to post an article about any of the millions upon millions of incidents where people prayed for someone's survival and that person died anyways. Do those just not count? Were their loved ones just not praying hard enough? Those people didnt deserve to live?
PRAYING: the 0.1 percent of the time where whatever people pray for ends up happening is proof that it works, and the 99.9 percent of the time when it doesnt work is just somehow irrelevant!

originally posted by: ElectricUniverse
a reply to: TzarChasm

Since you are an atheist I am certain you are very left-wing and believe in abortion... That "left-wing" belief has murdered over 60 million children... So you shouldn't try to blame God for anything when you devalue the most innocent human life and believe "it's ok to murder them..."

Making a lot of assumptions about me right now and I'm not even the topic here. You didn't address any points in my post either.