(December 21, 2010 at 5:00 pm)AngelThMan Wrote: What you have to understand is that I didn't bring up 9/11 to begin with. Entropist brought it up to demonstrate that prayer doesn't work, and therefore God doesn't exist. I was just countering his claim by providing possible scenarios that could've occurred during that tragedy which do not contradict or deny the existence or God and the power of prayer.
I can't be sure of what happened on 9/11 since I wasn't there and I'm not God. But to say that 9/11 shows there's no God is jumping the gun.
That's nice, but whether it's 9/11 or praying for your team to win the superbowl, my point still stands. My point being that I can't help but notice that your examples (read: any example) of prayer is indestinguishable from random coincidence.
As does my follow-up question:
How can you profess a power of prayer that doesn't do anything that wouldn't happen anyway?
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan