(December 30, 2019 at 10:54 pm)Lek Wrote: If I had advanced stage cancer and it suddenly disappeared or went into remission, how could it be proven to be from natural, rather than supernatural causes? [...] This has happened many times to many people.
Why do you think people developed medicine if God healed people? Also, why aren't hospitals staffed with shamans and preachers rather than doctors and nurses?
The thing is that people tried that method and it failed, so they developed medicine.
If any prayer works, one would think it would be a mother's prayer for the health of her baby. Few prayers are more sincere or more passionately delivered, especially if the baby is seriously ill. Unfortunately, these prayers do not seem to work well at all. This is obvious because there are many highly religious nations with horrible infant mortality rates. Meanwhile, highly secular nations with large percentages of atheists in their populations have very low infant mortality rates. How can this be? Why are the babies of so many atheist mothers faring better than the babies of so many Christian, Muslim, and Hindu mothers?
According to the UNICEF report, State of the World's Children, the ten countries with the highest death rates for children under the age of five are: Sierra Leone, Angola, Afghanistan, Niger, Liberia, Somalia, Mali, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Equatorial Guinea. These countries have populations that are virtually all Christian, Muslim, or followers of traditional African religions. None of them have a significant number of atheists in their population.
And when it comes to individual cases it is just as with alien abductions, Nessie sightings, ghost encounters... when you examine individual cases closely they look very discouraging.
https://youtu.be/pPR4oFJkxgI
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
