Actually, he isn't looking for just a "healing." What he wants is a NEW LIMB REGROWN where an old appendage had been before. I'm not real sure why the restoration of a severed limb does not qualify, but he insists that a "healing" God would also be able to "grow" a new limb.
There are stories of restored body parts.
The first is Jesus restoring the soldier's severed ear in the garden of Gethsemene. My relative rejected that as not "regrowing a new ear." I'm not sure why healing a severed ear with an entirely new ear is necessary, but those apparently are the ground rules for this current athist obsession.
There is the story of St Winifred, but it, too, is restorative rather than regrowth.
St. Winifred Feastday: November 3 According to legend, she was the daughter of a wealthy resident of Tegeingl, Flintshire, Wales, and the sister of St. Beuno. She was most impressed by Beuno, was supposedly beheaded on June 22 by one Caradog when she refused to submit to him, had her head restored by Beuno, and sometime later, became a nun of the convent of a double monastery at Gwytherin in Denbigshire. She succeeded an Abbess Tenoy, as Abbess and died there fifteen years after her miraculous restoration to life. A spring supposedly springing up where Winifred's head fell, is called Holy Well or St. Winifred's Well and became a great pilgrimage center where many cures have been reported over the centuries. She is also known as Gwenfrewi. Her feast day is November 3.
Raising Lazarus from the dead doesn't count. Healing the blind doesn't count. Healing anything doesn't count.
All that counts is "regrowth."
That got me to thinking about the perfect healing of Lepers by Jesus. These had to go show themselves to the priest. They were declared clean.
Since lepers have their appendages fall off entirely irretrievable, and since these were declared entirely "clean" by the priest, does it make sense to see a "regrowth" in these healings.
I think so, but, of course, I cannot prove it. It is rational, though.
This author suggests artificial limbs as an answer to the amputation-obsessed anti-Christian variety of atheists. (Isn't that the only variety....if WE didn't exist, they would go out of business. :>)
I see his point, and I agree with him. These folks won't accept that, though. I know my relative would argue against it.
They want an appendage regrown and they're sticking with it.
Bizarre.
Pretty much missed the point right there, didn't he?
This is equivalent to a 16 year old brat telling his parents, who have provided everything for him, that unless they buy him a new Corvette they don’t love him. Tis the same with these “atheists” and God. Just as the brat does not see that his parents love is the greatest gift, but focuses on the material, so do these people.
Truth is, if an amputee did grow a limb back, they would not accept it as a sign from God, but just a scientific oddity.
Do not tempt the Lord your God.
This fellow is heading for a warm eternity.
Don’t mean to sound childish here but...........if Christians work to help amputees get and use artificial limbs so that they can walk, isn’t that somehow, in some way the same thing as God restoring the ability to walk to the amputee, except that he’s working indirectly through those who love Him?
If it is, then how many people have the Atheists helped to walk again?
I guarantee that if the author’s wife were to appear on worldwide TV and her legs were to suddenly become whole the atheists of the world would deny that God had anything to do with it. They would most likely become enraged at such an affront to their “truth”.
Atheists have no knowledge of God. They make no effort to determine if He exists for the simple reason that in their cramped universe there is no God - never has been and never will be. This is a certainty arrived at by no effort to determine its validity. It is an utterly unscientific superstition. They make their ignorance the criterion for truth.
May God bless the author of this piece, his wife and the organization they work with for the sake of others.
Aethists and non-believers are simply decieved by the great deciever. The Bible says The Word is gibberish to them.
They do not understand that we aren’t in the Old Testament times when miracles occured. We are in the period known as the era of Grace. God doesn’t perform obvious miracles, but we don’t have to sacrifice a lamb everyday either, thanks to Jesus the Son!
God is not mocked.
Malcolm Muggeridge once said that atheists are the only people who seem to have no doubts whatsoever about their beliefs (which he dubbed "an absurd certitude"). This seems strange at first, but when you consider that if they are right they'll never get to crow about it you can't blame them for doing their crowing now.
One prominent atheist went a step further to suggest that if Mother Teresa had been an atheist, her deeds would have been "more noble," since she wouldn't have been doing them with the thought of an afterlife as a reward. (You can't make this up; this is actually what they are saying.)
See below.
Such challenges declare a hatred of God, not a disbelief. People that don’t believe in things do not organize and rant, they simply don’t believe.
To me this is the only logical reason for the crusading moralism of people whose beliefs logically do not support any acts of altruism whatsoever (calling Ayn Rand!). They should be out under a warm sun enjoying the breeze and touching themselves until they die of old age. Instead they're trying to save the universe, the earth, "the children," and every single one of us. This psychotic compulsion to be "more moral than G-d" can only come from their pathological hatred of Him.
And I agree that atheists don't attack all religions. Despite their loud and intentionally obnoxious declarations about the non-existence (or injustice) of G-d they have always allied themselves with "religious minorities." The Jewish experience has been most often invoked, to Israel's shame (even while the Jewish Bible was ridiculed, perhaps out of a provincial ignorance that the Bible is a Jewish book), but now head-chopping moslems and chicken slaughtering santeria practitioners "benefit" from atheist "protection". Then of course "Blacks and Hispanics," though Fundamentalist Protestants and Counter-Reformation Catholics in that order, have also been celebrated as "victims" rather than practitioners of religion. Even the "rightwing" Randian atheists here at FR foam at the mouth in defense of other religions even as they attack "religion."
Their is more spite and rebellion than intellectuality in all this.
I think it’s instructive to understand the background for this question. A common theme with atheists is that, while healings do occur, it is never a healing that mends a broken bone or regrows a lost limb. The implication is that only healings that can be psychologically explained actually occur, whereas presumably God can perform any healing requested if it is His will. I do believe God could to any of these things if He so chose, but atheists point to this as “proof” He doesn’t actually exist. I think they are ignoring many miracles to focus on one that is rare indeed in order to question faith.
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