For non-Christians only, please.......

Have you ever experienced a "miracle"? What I mean is....what things have happened to you or a close acquaintance that, had you been a Christian, you might have attributed to God? Fundamentalist Christians, especially, believe that God is involved in their daily lives.....helping them find their car keys, causing them to have a flat right in front of the tire store or....you get the picture. Amazing coincidences are often attributed to God. We have all seen the survivor of the tornado saying "God was watching over me", etc. It doesn't matter who else died...that person feels special.

Anyway, I feel that amazing stories can be found from atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, etc.

Please share if you have such a story.

Thanks.

That was, sadly, a miracle.

Thanks for sharing.

And don't give me that "UCCs aren't really Christian" crap!

is a fucking miracle.

If we need any more proof that there is a God, that's one of them.

To think that there might be parents who don't think that their child, no matter how loud or obnoxious or noxious, is God Himself, and therefore doesn't need to be taken out of the room when simply "expressing his/her most wonderful and godly and thank-God-we-fucked-successfully-so-you-can-have-SSI-benefits-you-pathetic-shitpile-non-breeding self" is, in all aspects that the Bible ever touches upon, a miracle of the highest order.

Sarai having a child in her 90s? Totally a write-off insignificant miracle. Dime a dozen, that one.

Parents who care about other people? THAT, my friend, IS A MIRACLE THAT DEFIES COMPREHENSION AND BELIEVABILITY.

and took Thomas Kincaide with them! :rofl:

Whenever, I hear children screaming in stores, I always loudly proclaim, "I'm going to find that child and kill."

Haven't had a kid screaming in a restaurant incident in a couple months. Last one was in a pizzeria, but I can't complain too much when I just spent $2.50 for a slice and soda. However, if I did that as a kid, my parents would have taken me outside and put the fear of God in me.

if it cannot be proven or is not falsifiable empirically, then i can make no commentary upon it.

what is, is, what is not, is absurd.

Once in college my alternator died as I was pulling into the car place for something else. It happened to be at the bottom of a hill so I coasted down. I was just lucky that it lasted to that very last second, that's all.

Good things happen to all people, Christian and not. I just wish those who think God has taken a personal interest in their everyday lives could understand that these things happen to everyone. That is all I'm after here. Thanks.

Coincidence and serendipity, all the time. Life works out, it continues (or is a continuum as George Calin put it, starting a few billion years ago)Connections are made, gained, lost. Our brains look for meaning, for explanations and it finds them.

Without going into detail, I should have been dead by now. I lived very hard with with very hard people. Saw messed up things. Why I'm alive when I leave a trail of dead and incarcerated acquaintances behind could, If I believed in such things, be a miracle. But then I think, were was the miracle for those I lost?

I was talking to a Vietnam era vet friend of mine the other day about this type of thing. He described a combat situation he was in were he lost the sense of "god" permanently. He could be a miracle, but he thinks he's just lucky as hell, and carries his burden of survivors guilt along with his PTSD.

town. I ended up working in that town for 10 years.

Another time I said..."I would sure like to go to a certain
city, but I guess it will never happen"...and then I won a trip to that very city and I went.

:)

Tikki

make it any less a miracle.

Just because you can't explain the mechanics doesn't mean the cause is divine intervention.



I'm quite comfortable with "cannot be explained by science as we understand it."

and the most important thing is how something affected my life (in this context, for the better), not what 'caused' it.

But I never considered it a miracle - I have always attributed it to the particular set of circumstances at the time. For every "miracle" that happens, there are probably hundreds of unhappy occurrences. Are the people who are not saved somehow less worthy? I doubt it. Frankly, I've always thought that way of thinking was incredibly selfish and egotistical.

"I've seen too many miracles not to (believe in god)."



That doesn't strike me as selfish or egotistical, but as simplistic and rather child-like.

the most powerful entity in the universe arranged their marriage, etc.

I was thinking specifically of those who attribute their surviving a tsunami or something in which hundreds of others were killed so they feel that they were singled out by god for some reason. But at any rate, there seems a lack of critical thinking involved either way. :shrug:

they have more faith or whatever, yeah; I agree.

One of the great "WTFs" I see in religion — it leaps out at you from Rapture Ready — is the "We're better Christians because we..." meme. It strikes me as similar to saying, "I'm a better Gerbils fan because I wear the team colors 24/7 and go to every home game." That doesn't make you a "better" fan, but it does mean you're more obsessed.

Here are some of the team members trying various exercise wheels to stay in shape in the off-season-
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/motorwhl/motorwhl3.htm

I understand statistics, probablility, and randomness.

Also, I got into graduate school, I got a scholarship I can use for living expenses, and my family has an adorable (and energetic) puppy.

Now I can only hope I can get a job and a place of my own after grad school. THAT would be a miracle.

Blessed Be His Pastaness. Ramen.

and I have been the recipient of miracles

and I have seen them

I to should be dead

:hi:

lost

i mean, what exactly is a "miracle?" Essentially, it's something that has no other explanation within the realms of natural law that we are currently aware of. Frankly, I have never ever heard of any such situation or occurrence. Chance is chance, and that's that.

when they know I'm an atheist. In their minds, it doesn't matter if you are a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or non-believer, it was all God's doing. It's an impossible argument to counter, really. Although it does prove that God doesn't reward Christians for good behavior if he's out there rewarding people like me when I don't even believe in him/her/it/them/whatever.

I once walked in a graveyard with a believer and pointed out that all these Christian graves ranged from infancy to old age, and there was no indication that God watched out for any of them any more than he watches out for anyone else. Woooshh, over their head.

In the end, it's just faith. They have faith that it's all God's doing, I have faith that there is no God to do it, and both of us fit everything to our interpretation of reality. The only ones on either side that really bother me are the ones who are absolutely certain that the other side, either side, is less for their belief.

:)

parents meeting and falling in love. The odds of my children involve the odds of my wife existing, also at 1 in 70 trillion and us meeting and falling in love.

In fact, if you look at the distribution of velocities and locations of the air molecules in your room, they dwarf the odds of my children existing.

As a preface to this, let me first say that I am a Discordian, and therefore believe that "God" is a crazy woman who binge drinks named Eris.

A few years back, wile hitching around the country, I got stuck in boulder for about 3 weeks. It was the longest I had stayed in any one place for about 7 months. I was trying to aim my rides back to San Francisco by this point and, so close to home, being "stuck" for so long was starting to get to me and my traveling companion. We were running low on supplies and even lower on patience as the days passed without our departure. We had seen many of the street kids begging for change amidst the buskers who were earning basically the same. With little food, and less money, but absolutely no desire to join the "bums", we decided to try something particularly erisian: we sat down not far from one of the kids who was calling out "Can any one spare some change?" and began asking "Can anyone spare some ruby slippers so we can get home?"

Seriously.

But the funny thing is, after just five minuets, someone said, "actually, yes, I can." He then produced a pair of ruby-red house slippers, and gave them to us because the shoe fit, so to speak. So, to keep with tradition, I donned the "magic" shoes and clicked my heals three times saying "there's no place like San Fran." It worked. Four hours later, we were on our way, straight back to San Francisco.

If you ask me (and If I read the OP correctly you did) that is just to perfect to be "coincidence".

Unless the shoe-donor rode in on a magic bubble, and the subsequent heel-clicking wafted you to Frisco on plumes of enchanted ether.

and im still here..that is my own personal miracle. When I was first diagnosed and told my mother, ,she said, "You are not going to die of AIDS." I am starting to believe her.Atheist here....

:evilgrin:

that thread cracks me up to this day! So funny!!

If you wake up naked in a chicken coop, don't say I didn't warn you.

:shrug:

It is something that I view as having the potential for being the result of the intervention of fate. A few years ago, I was supposed to go abroad to work as a nanny but for some reason I was having a hard time working up the desire to get myself packed and moved. As much as I was looking forward to getting out of the country after Bush's re-election, something kept me from doing so. I ended up not going. A friend of the family mentioned to my mother that she was considering closing her business as she had no one to run it. I called her after talking to my mother but she had already found someone to run things. However, she knew someone who was looking for an assistant. So, I took that job and was pretty miserable at first, all the while wishing I had known about the first job offering sooner. Because of the work location, I came into contact with many airport workers and would say "hi" and "bye" to many, have casual conversations, etc. One random morning I was bored and just decided to head into the city with nothing really to do. One of those airport workers was on the bus, we recognized each other and spent the afternoon together. We hit off famously but after that, we didn't keep in touch and rarely saw each other. A few months later, I planned on leaving the job and moving away but the manager became seriously ill and I had to to take over. A couple of weeks later, Mr. airport worker sauntered in and asked for my phone number. We became very good friends, talking every day and we remain close. While we are still "just friends", I feel there is more that is meant for us in the future and if I am correct, I would have met my "soul mate" through circumstances that seem to me to be more than coincidental. Perhaps it's just dumb luck but so much in my life has been topsy turvy and nonsensical, with no clear path or direction that the idea that there may actually be some meaning in all of the chaos comforts me. I still don't believe in a supreme being of any sort but perhaps there is some kind of universal order that puts pieces in place as they are meant to be.

And it's my un-religious awakening. The thing that made me not have faith and which made me wake up and start living my life instead of doing what was expected of me. The fact is that it's not exactly what you asked for, but it's the sort of story I think you're seeking.

It was the second week of my senior year of college at The Catholic University of America, which also means my last year before entering the seminary full-time (The question of whether that was what I wanted was never broached. It was expected of me from birth. You'd have to be old-school traditional and Catholic to understand, I suspect.)...the night before I went to a back-to-school party at my best friend's condo just outside the city (Pentagon Row, if you're familiar with greater DC.)...where I drank too much, danced not enough, and flirted (only semi-intentionally) just the right amount with the best friend of an out-of-town friend I hadn't spoken to in years. I spent the entire night talking to this one woman...every other woman in the room was invisible to me. I kissed her, it was amazing...then I went to sleep on the couch because it's 4am and she went to sleep in my best friend's room with our mutual friend. (My best friend slept in the bed of whatever woman he was chasing after that week whom he'd left with several hours earlier, leaving me "in charge of (his) place". He'd promised them weeks in advance the bedroom if they came down and he was stuck with it.)

Early the next morning she got up with her best friend and went into DC to do the monuments tour. (Because everybody does the friggin' monuments tour their first time in DC.) I rolled out of bed an hour later and couldn't get her out of my head. Right there, on the spot, I was torn...my vocation which I no longer felt right about after a life of conviction or some woman I barely knew. I sat down to thinking on the concrete slab floor of the porch and began to engage in the only vices still available to me: scotch straight from the bottle, mental self-flagellation and my narghil. So there I sat complete torn in my being when my "miracle" occurred and I knew without a doubt that there was no God, a result of theodicy.

I didn't "get the girl" either...well, I did for a short time but it did not last.

down the aisle. That was a miracle.

But really, I don't believe in miracles. I believe things happen just because they happen. There's no higher force/power guiding anything.

Seriously though... the strange thing for me is that I've seen a lot of terrible shit in my life. I am a journalist, so you see dead bodies, drug addicts, corruption... the list is endless. I've found reporters go one of two ways. MOST become very jaded and cynical, which I am, however after seeing so much suffering what really keeps me going is the belief that SOMEONE, SOME WHERE must have this under control for some reason. That doesn't mean I'm christian, but it means I'm agnostic, at the very least and that I have reason to believe their MAY be a god, no matter how dumb that sounds when I say it out loud.

There are no miracles....

I think there are things that happen that science can't explain; I don't think of it a miracle, just a discovery.

...when my daughter was going to be born (2001), it was all planned for a normal birth (like my oldest.) When the little head started to appear, it was rather slow, and the doctor said immediately, "the chord is wrapped. Let's cut. NOW."

After a quick C-section, it turned out the umbilical chord was making TWO turns around the baby's neck.

If she had tried two more minutes to deliver normally, she'd have brain damage from lack of oxygenation.

Five more minutes and she'd be DEAD.

I don't think its possible for one person to be more grateful for another than I am for that obstetrician. Here's do Dr. Olinta. :toast:

"Miracles" is what you guys got. We got science we just don't understand yet. Oh and also just plain dumb luck.

"Miracle" is hyperbole. It points to the unusualness of a given circumstance; since there are no (and never have been) any factual miracles, describing an incident as such defines it as fabulously rare. The phrase is the mystical equivalent of "scarce as hen's teeth".

The universe is big enough that, statistically speaking, sooner or later there had to be an inhabited planet. There would be a planet of the right mass, and the right composition that was just the right distance from the right kind of star of the right size that eventually a collection of molecules would organize themselves, reproduce and produce yet more complicated collections of molecules. Eventually the collections of molecules would be complicated enough to get up, look around and wonder how the heck they got there...

But what are the odds it would have been so freakin' beautiful? That it would have things like rainbows and sunsets that serve no purpose except to make us pause in our tracks and go "Oh Wow!"? Yes, rainbows and sunsets can be explained by the laws of optics, but our reaction to them cannot. We're hard-wired to appreciate beauty, and we evolved on a beautiful planet. How cool is that?

Compared to that the statistically improbable things that have happened to me are insignificant. Yes, I've had a few encounters with the uncanny: times when I should not have prospered or even survived but somehow did. Some would have attributed them to Guardian Angels, but I attribute them to God having a sense of humor. She finds me amusing and wants me to stick around for just a little longer.