How can one say that there were over 300 prohecies fufilled by Jesus, when it is quite questionable whether he was a historical person at all?
As Xander touches on, there are less than a handfull of references to Jesus in contemporary texts, and those that are there are considered by many scholars to be added later. There is no reference anywhere in any historical document other than the Bible of the dead rising from their tombs and preaching God's word in Jerusalem after Jesus died. How can this be extraordinary event be 'missed' out of contemorary history? Maybe it didn't happen! If this didn't happen, what else didn't happen? The resurrection? The walking on water? The feeding of five thousand? His entire life?
Look at the parrallels between the Jesus story and the Buhdda story... and by that, I mean go and look at the life story of the Buhdda for yourself. You will be amased at the level of similarity, and Buhdda pre-dates Christ. Look at the parrallels between some Christian beliefs and those of Zorastorians.
Maybe the reason all those 'prophecies' are fulfilled is that the Jesus story was written so that his 'life' fufilled all the prohecies.
And, if god cares, and would not destroy a city if there were more than a handfull of good people in it (Lot), why does he now give no sign today? The lack of proof of the existance of god is the biggest proof there is no god. We are meant to work out who is right from a host of religions, not JUST the Christian ones, and we have no evidence to base this on. How loving! Our fate is based on a guessing game where the evidence of the Hindu, Seikh, Muslim or Buhddist is as convincing as that of the Christian.
Or are all paths paths to god? In which case, why does god allow some paths to be damaging to those that follow them? Is the claim that 'it gets kissed better in the afterlife' any justification for all the harm triggered by religion in the here and now?
God would not allow his name to be so polluted.
If there were a loving god, the existance of it and its way would be made obvious by him. All it would take is making big letters, readable to all, blaze in the sky reading "Actually, God does exist" to make people believe. It would be as inarguable as gravity.
But, not only is there no proof of miracles (other than those that are claimed by religionists of all faiths, all of which elude scientific validation), there is no such obvious path, which means either god does not care, or he does not exist.
In either case, worship would seem to be futile.
The comments regarding natural philosophy and science by Xander are spot on. Yeah, the 'scientists' 'of the day' believed the world was flat, that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, that if trains went too fast the oxygen would be sucked out of peoples lungs... all sort of dumb things.
Sometimes, they even went back to believing dumb things, like the Earth being flat, because religious people made it very clear they would be invited to a bonfire, with them starring as the wood, if they believed otherwise; hell, a Greek mathematician calculated the diameter of the Earth's GLOBE a good thousand years before Colombus 'proved' it was round AGAIN, and the minute the Church knew that there were souls to convert and gold to get, they were quite happy for the world to be round.
Comparing dumb ass religously influenced natural philosophy using non-scientic methodology to modern science is a non sequiter. The closest comparison is certain biblical apologists whose approach to science is rather un-scientific and reminiscent of the natural philosophers of old. We call them creationists, flood geologists, etc., nowadays.
Now this does not mean that scientists don't make mistakes, but the entire methodology of experimentation and peer review helps minimise that. Mistakes and charlatans get spotted quite quickly nowadays; the Chinese bird-dinosaur, for example (which was actually made up of two fossils, expertly faked to look like one, and which amusingly is still scientifically important as the two species used to make the fake are both previously unknown and transitional in structure ANYWAY), cold-fusion, etc. Also, as more evidence is found, scientific knowledge is refined. Religious knowledge is not refined with the discovery of new evidence, it's mainly all a big fat lump of assumptions passed on for generations.
For all religionist's criticism of scientific theory, they get awfully flighty when you point out all they have is a theory which is vanishingly light on evidence. You could bury St. Pete's in Rome under scientific evidence and still have dozens of museums and Universities full of more evidence. So who's silly? Science is a hundred and fifty years old and has proven many things. Religion is thousands of years old and has only proved one thing; that it's a mind virus humans are susceptable too. It's even been scientifically shown that high levels of religious belief is genetic... does that mean people with the wrong genes are in god's bad books by right of birth? Purlease!
As regards your miracle Apostate Man, your experience in giving up smoking was just self-will, bolstered by the placebo effect of thinking god was helping. If god WAS helping, I think his order of priorities is screwed. Help Apostate Man quit smoking. Watch babies die. Yay god!
As for the get up and walk incident, well, authenticated X-Rays showing a severed spinal chord would be nice, not cause I don't believe what you say, but because there is a lot of difference between proving a severed spinal chord re-grew in a church service, and having to accept on the evidence that the placebo effect of belief, combined with natural healing proccess, reached a point where the trauma to the spinal chord had healed to a point where walking was possible.
A spinal chord doesn't have to be severed to be useless, it can be so bruised and traumatised it's regarded as useless, but in such cases recovery can and does occur... even to atheists reading 'Scientific American' (although I have no proof of that, it's just a joke!)
Miracles are subjective. Science is objective. DIfferent things.
Anyone with objective proof of a miracle is free to provide it!
