What Are Miracles...

[Consilius]

I think I covered that in the snippet you took out. These miracles were probably no easier to identify for those people than it is for us with mothers who survive cancer.
If you lived in BC: (a) you could attribute the miracle to demons due to the lack of science to explain it (b) just forget about it, considering that the world only had polytheistic priests who would tell you that the gods lived in idols and ate bread.
When Israel was a nomadic tribe in the desert, it wasn't exactly easy to believe that there was a single invisible god who was everywhere and then found a nation based of that belief. It was a pioneering concept. So these people needed very strong proof of who this God was to be convinced to keep incredibly specific commandments meant to preserve perfect monotheistic faith. Besides, crossing rivers didn't stop them from rebelling against Moses.
Miracles systematically decreased in splendor from crossing rivers to shaking vipers of your hand (St. Paul). When monotheism became more popular, it was a lot easier to join the Christians or the Jews. The problem became became actually believing whether or not the Judeo-Christian god did it. It was easy to believe in a god then.
Then, miracles become harder to prove and harder to attribute to a deity at all.
God doesn't make it easy on anybody. The problem with believing in him went from being the odd one out to trying to figure out which god did it to trying to figure out if a god did it at all. God does his part, and he requires being met halfway so he can carry you to where you need to go.

This has to be the worst excuse I've ever heard for why miracles don't occur anymore. People in the biblical times were credulous, and they believed that a deity directed lightning and that comets were omens of times to come. We have developed the scientific method, which is the greatest tool humanity has ever created to distinguish fact from fiction, and all of a sudden god thinks his miracles need to be less miraculous? If anything, the miracles should have to be even more incredible than burning bushes and the parting of seas due to our greater understanding of natural processes.

Does it bother you that our ability to understand nature around us has been accompanied by lesser and lesser miracles that have shrunk in such stature to the point that they are unverifiable, i.e. cancer being cured?

The thing is that no one would be satisfied. Worst case scenario, you would claim that we don't have the science to debunk it yet.
Why would God spend time drying up oceans when there are already Christians everywhere working to spread his message?
It's not about getting you to look at him; Christianity is about God getting people to meet him halfway.

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You recently denied that there will EVER be evidence opposing your belief, because you are prepared to cut God out of every happening you encounter,

How can I cut something out that isn't there?

So you will never find anything that challenges your belief. You are going to make it all nice and evade the contradictory so it all works out for you in the end.

If you think something is miraculous it is probably because you haven't done enough research.

is this a miracle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK-qFmCdBU0

You are certainly right about me not finding anything to challenge what I see as the truth, yet.

If you're going to cross your arms and look for fire in the sky just to say that God is NOT real, then don't expect him to dry up oceans for you.
God works to get people following him through the smaller miracles of everyday life that have greater impacts on people.
He works through the enormous Christian community that is waiting to take people in, and not by parting seas like he did when there were NO Christians available.
Christianity is about meeting God halfway, and NOT him begging you to worship him.

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I think I covered that in the snippet you took out.

Richard Carrier dealt with the whole issue.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/r...kooks.html

Conclusion

From all of this one thing should be apparent: the age of Jesus was not an age of critical reflection and remarkable religious acumen. It was an era filled with con artists, gullible believers, martyrs without a cause, and reputed miracles of every variety. In light of this picture, the tales of the Gospels do not seem very remarkable. Even if they were false in every detail, there is no evidence that they would have been disbelieved or rejected as absurd by many people, who at the time had little in the way of education or critical thinking skills. They had no newspapers, telephones, photographs, or public documents to consult to check a story. If they were not a witness, all they had was a man's word. And even if they were a witness, the tales above tell us that even then their skills of critical reflection were lacking. Certainly, this age did not lack keen and educated skeptics--it is not that there were no skilled and skeptical observers. There were. Rather, the shouts of the credulous rabble overpowered their voice and seized the world from them, boldly leading them all into the darkness of a thousand years of chaos. Perhaps we should not repeat the same mistake. After all, the wise learn from history. The fool ignores it.

What you are suggesting is that a very large group of Jewish con artists wrote a story about a magical superhero who is born into a poor family and dies on a cross. Why? Because when your nation is in political and religious strife, this is just a fun thing to do. Notice how that contradicted how people thought at the time: heroes were the greatest men alive and nothing more. They didn't die and were sons of kings.
After this, they went around the countryside of Judea and told their little story to the extremely devout Hebrews, who would have considered what they said blasphemy whether or not they knew it was true.
When they are done, their little story is so fun to tell people that they take it across the Roman Empire, and—because all of the non-Jews just happen to be completely gullible—the Gentiles stop worshipping their many visible gods, many of them older than Judaism itself, and leave them for the invisible one. Why? Because their story is so darn good.
And the best part is that these storytellers willingly die for the sake of their awesome storytelling.

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Life. The fact that we even can TELL between good and evil, let alone that we can actually experience it in our lives, points to an ultimate, unchanging good. That is evidence.

That is not evidence. That is a couple of examples of things you have ascribed importance to peppered with appeals to emotion. Do you have any actual evidence?

Yes. God is a 5-ft male, with a light-brown complexion and dark hair.
What you're looking for is an account of the day his voice boomed down from heaven, but that is something that you simply won't get.
And not because God wants people to believe in nothing. ANY concrete proof of the existence of God can be easily washed away by science. Even if the ocean legitimately parted, we would look for an explanation and find it in ocean currents. Using miracles in this present day and age simply would not work, no matter how spectacular.
Even if such a miracle DID successfully win a convert, the person would be a Christian out of fear and not love. It would be another failed attempt.
The avenue to being a Christian is wide open, with billions of Christians around the world. The origin of these Christians was heavily enforced far back into the past with the use of much more extreme miracles in a time of scientific ignorance. However, they succeeded in providing a strong foundation for Christianity.
In the present day and age, we are asked to look at the existence of, well—everything—for proof of God's existence. What we perceive to be good does not change. Therefore, there is an ultimate good that does not change. We have labelled this good, "God".