urge to pray - advice/help

[Ziploc Surprise]

But if you could set your belief aside (which, I recognize might be too difficult for you, no offense) and look at the situation objectively would it stand up to scrutiny?

This assumes that knowledge only comes from the hard sciences, which is a faulty definition of the word 'objective.' The real argument is about who gets to decide what we can know. Postmoderns and naturalists believe it can only be gained directly through the senses. But we know there are also personal ways to gain knowledge. Say you punch me in the face. Someone else might say "He is really angry." But suppose I hold out on interpreting your action. Suppose I look for a naturalistic reason for the motion of your hand. Maybe the moon was too close or there is some kind of wave we haven't discovered yet. Using this logic I would never get to the root of the matter--which is, that your motion was intelligently designed with the intent of harming me, maybe because of your dislike of people with a different view than yourself. So, too, should we consider an intelligent designer when a structure looks designed. Irreducibly complex setups like mousetraps have the same scientifically-observed mark of design as we see elsewhere in nature. You don't have to trust what other people tell you about God. Investigate it for yourself. If you don't try to feel God out he won't reveal himself. Naturalistic points of view rule out God automatically, and it's no wonder why people have trouble finding him.

I know that this is just a matter of semantics but motions of the hand cannot be intelligently designed. Using speech incorrectly like this makes it difficult to understand your intent. I understand that the words "intelligent design" are used frequently enough in fundy circles that you all can play with the words without losing the meaning of the sentence. Here in this forum these words are not commonly used so the play on the words will lead to poor communication. Remember where you are -feel free to insert humorous statement here-.

As for the intent behind the punch: Finding intent is not that difficult, often little interpretation is needed. You can go straight to the facts in this case. You could wipe the blood off your face, and with your rapidly swelling tongue, ask me if I was angry with you. A tooth might fall out in this process but you could still do it. As you stand there bleeding, with your teeth all screwed up, I could tell you I was angry and you could hear it with your own ears and see me say it with your unswollen eye. Furthermore those watching the events could witness, perhaps even electronically record the events.

It is possible that my response might need some interpretation because I might give you a sarcastic or a false reason why I hit you but you could at least ask. Furthermore, if you had enough time, a brain scan could be used. There are other diagnostic devices that could have been used to give objective factual evidence to suggest a reason.

My point in saying this is that my emotion would not have been unproveable. There are ways to objectively find the truth. Your approach is for those who believe that knowledge and understanding of the things around us are far too complicated and vast for humans to understand therefore we need to surrender our brains to something or someone supernatural that does understand these things and can guide us and/or manipulate things in our favor. Note that this something or someone would be something or someone that we don't and can't fully understand (nor prove for that matter). This belief does not stand up to the facts. We can discover, learn, and understand the things around us, and we can do this through the scientific method. Several hundred years of research and discovery has proven this. Your's is a good way to keep people ignorant, poor, unwell, oppressed, and in the stone age.

I will say that I have tried your approach though. I did try to "feel" god and I was successful for 30 years. In the end neither Christian doctrine, experience, or a deep feeling that god existed, stood up to scrutiny. After everything was examined, even after my deep knowing of the existence of god was examined, I discovered that these beliefs had natural explanations. Natural explanations that explained the phenomena better than anything in Christianity could do.

Explanations that do not require faith, exist.