Well you got me there. If you can move mountains at any point to any level then anypoint on earth could have been anywhere at any time. There is no zero on the ruler, no reference. So in return how do you know there was not a flood if every moutain top has fossils?
Then of course there's the earth dam that burst & let in the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, likely giving rise to a certain myth about a guy named Noah...
Uh, myth? Myths dont create fossils. Nor do bodies of things laying around. That creates stink. I have seen a lot of dead deer and other critters in water and out of it. Never saw a fossil in progress, just maggots. You know maggots stir feathers? What ever makes fossils is faster than maggots or keeps flys away.
Hey, apparently tsunamis in inland lakes are not unheard of! Can you believe that?
Sure. Never seen one tho...
OH THANKS A LOT. If it works, you will be hearing from my lawyer! >:-O
NO NO NO! First do the leg length test and if one is SHORT let me know. Trying to curse someone in Gods name is like trying to fly with lead baloons. Don't work, never will.
Seriously, if you think you're getting consistent results with faith healing, then I can point you to someone who could set up a blind test. They're offering a million $$$ if you can show results.
Hmmm, I think they should try to go see it happen themselves, would be much cheaper. I don't have much use for a million bucks, but what is the point? Is it to heal someone or to put a silly test on God? If it is to play with Gods mind I don't think it would work, I or the child were not the healers, we were just the messengers. I don't like trying to force God's hand. He lets me sometimes when I am being stupid, but you have to understand that I love God. This is not a game to me, and I feel pretty bad if I misuse his grace. Kinda like finding out you took advantage of someone you love. You feel loved but feel icky at the same time. I don't like icky.
God is pretty smart, don't think anybody has ever pulled the wool over his eyes. There is a lot of healing in the Church, it seems the person who is willing to risk a million bucks at this point is a pretty even bet that they got heart problems that would prevent them from using their eyes to see. My bet is that it is a waste of time.
I was just giving my own first person perspective. Hey, just grab a girl friend and do the leg check for a lark. Don't need to make a big deal of it, just say you have heard it causes back problems and you wanted to check yours and hers. The dice are loaded a bit against it working as per the rules above but I know God lets His hand be moved. To remove a lot of the dice loading, publish the results if it does not work as you wish, but if it does publish it privately if you wish. I am not offering to prove something but to test something, and if you get a healing in the course of the test good. Perhaps we should take this to email at this point, I am getting way off thread...
My apologies to ya all on my long chat here.
As for the gold, I still have to ask: Why do you assume the hills were 4500 feet tall when the gold was deposited crosswise over them? In between the original shallow sea and the current upthrusted 4500 foot canyon walls, there were many different intermediate states - including hilly intertidal areas, etc.Well you got me there. If you can move mountains at any point to any level then anypoint on earth could have been anywhere at any time. There is no zero on the ruler, no reference. So in return how do you know there was not a flood if every moutain top has fossils?
Well sure, if you assume there's a supernatural God out there who regularly puts His hand on the scale, then no evidence we ever saw about anything in the past could ever be trusted, even in principle. As for marine fossils on top of mountains, you just went into great detail earlier about how subtle geological details in the gold-filled canyons imply there was a flood! Maybe you should try prospecting in the foothills of Nepal. :-)
Then of course there's the earth dam that burst & let in the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, likely giving rise to a certain myth about a guy named Noah...
Uh, myth? Myths dont create fossils. Nor do bodies of things laying around. That creates stink. I have seen a lot of dead deer and other critters in water and out of it. Never saw a fossil in progress, just maggots. You know maggots stir feathers? What ever makes fossils is faster than maggots or keeps flys away.
What are you talking about? There are plenty of cases of local flash floods, lahars, local lava & ash flows, not to mention anoxic bottoms of lakes with slow & steady silt deposition gently covering up the dead bodies that sunk there. That's what happened to Archaeopteryx, IIRC.
OH THANKS A LOT. If it works, you will be hearing from my lawyer! >:-O
NO NO NO! First do the leg length test and if one is SHORT let me know. Trying to curse someone in Gods name is like trying to fly with lead baloons. Don't work, never will.
Seriously, if you think you're getting consistent results with faith healing, then I can point you to someone who could set up a blind test. They're offering a million $$$ if you can show results.
Hmmm, I think they should try to go see it happen themselves, would be much cheaper.
It sounds like it is a progressive process that starts off in just that way. Whattajoke already mentioned it's the Randi Foudation challenge. You can read all about the procedure here.
I don't have much use for a million bucks, but what is the point? Is it to heal someone or to put a silly test on God? If it is to play with Gods mind I don't think it would work, I or the child were not the healers, we were just the messengers. I don't like trying to force God's hand. He lets me sometimes when I am being stupid, but you have to understand that I love God. This is not a game to me, and I feel pretty bad if I misuse his grace. Kinda like finding out you took advantage of someone you love. You feel loved but feel icky at the same time. I don't like icky.God is pretty smart, don't think anybody has ever pulled the wool over his eyes. There is a lot of healing in the Church, it seems the person who is willing to risk a million bucks at this point is a pretty even bet that they got heart problems that would prevent them from using their eyes to see. My bet is that it is a waste of time.
I'm very disappointed with where you're going here. This is also the standard rationalization of every psuedoscientific quack science claim: No double-blind test ever seems to work, because of the presence of skeptical people messing up the "energy field", etc.
Look: If you've found the methodology that makes faith healing work (commanding the demons out in Jesus' name instead of asking Jesus to remove the demons, etc.), then you've found something that should become standard medical practice. It should, because real people are living miserable lives because of their maladies, right now as we type! But modern medicine does not follow therapies that aren't verifiable thru some kind of objective criteria. If such an amazingly powerful healing practice as yours will utterly fail if your motivation for performing the healing is the least bit tainted by any intention of objectively verifying that this is a true phenomenon and not some kind of psuedoscientific delusion, then that would be a great pity. (And it wouldn't say much for the personality of God either!)
Here's an example you really should read about: Several years ago there was a movement among caregivers of autistic & CP sufferers called Facilitated Communication (FC). An assistant would lightly guide the patient's hand around a keyboard, and lo & behold, the severely autistic person was able to type coherent sentences! (Sometimes more coherent than F. Christian's!) Parents were overjoyed to discover that their child had a normal intelligence beneath that frustrating blank exterior. Some patients went to regular schools, with their facilitators, & IIRC even college in some cases.
It wasn't until years later that controlled experiments by dispassionate researchers were done on these people & their facilitators, and they proved that it was usually the facilitators, not the patients, who were doing the communicating. The facilitators were devastated - they were completely sincere in their desire to help the patients, and completely sincere in their conviction that they really were being neutral and merely helping the patients communicate their own thoughts.
You could approach a controlled experiment of your healing powers from a defensive posture if you want, but if you really want to help people you should approach it from a genuine desire to find out the truth.
(Off topic? Eh, I guess so. But that's all I have to say about your faith healing. If you continue to be convinced that it works, I sincerely think the world would be served by you putting it to an objective test as above.)