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Posted

Miracles have come up briefly in several posts - I'd love to discuss them.

 

I, for one, think that miracles happen frequently and we do our best to explain them away. How about you all? Do they have to be big? No other explanation? Do you have to know objectively or do you just know?

Posted

Everything exists by the same law that allows what we call miracles to happen. God intends the Universe into being. God is still intending the Universe into being. When we connect to this same field of intention with our own intent, we bring our intentions into being. This is how a miracle works.

 

The level of energy we do it with affects the level that it becomes manifest. Let's say Jesus lived at 1000 on the energy scale. Maybe we're trudging along at 100 hundred or so. We're got to accelerate and then connect to the source of all intention. It's not just a nice idea...I've witnessed it and participated in it. We all have on some level.

Posted (edited)

A book I'm reading has a section regarding divine intervention and God's relationship to the world. It gives a variety of possibilities:

 

1) First it discusses God as both the Creator and the Sustainer - God's continualling upholding the world in existence; God's involvement in absolutely everything that goes on in the world. It is not that God performs this miracle and that miracle, but is otherwise not involved. Rather, it is the case that nothing at all happens without his direct involvement.

 

2) One way, it says, that God can influence the world is thru the "butterfly effect" at the quantum level. (I hope this doesn't come across as hokey. It's actually quite interesting.)

 

Quantum uncertainty would allow God to "push" things in a required direction - while still staying within the probability limits allowed by the uncertainty relation. God's imput would remain undetectable.

 

3) It discusses the "mind over matter" approach, which is how most people think of miracles.

 

There are other views as well. Those are just a few.

 

So, do I think miracles happen? I'd say yes from a "persuasive" view, rather than an intercessory view.

 

Heck, I think "being" is a miracle. It would be much easier if there was nothing at all.

 

As a side note on miracles: Has anyone ever heard the view that the story of Jesus turning water to wine as told in John is actually referring to the Jewish law being fulfilled by Jesus?

Edited by AletheiaRivers
Posted

Yes, as I pointed out about the book "Ten Wrong Things I Learned In A Conservative Church." In this book, the author is a Progressive Christian he tells of seeing an angel and also holding a firm belief in the resurrection..yet, he considers all the other mircles of the Bible 'fairy tales.' I have experinced mircles and I have also had at least 5 prophetic dreams over a time period from 1996 to about a year ago.

 

Now i am not claiming that I have special powers that others don;t or can't. I think any spiritual person CAN have things like this happen. These 5 dreams I had confirmed to me that my father who had passed away in 1996 would be reunited with me and my whole family in the future. I have always been very grateful for these comforting and reasurring dreams.

Posted

I guess there are "miracles" and then there are "miracles". For example, the amazing "coincidence" fo the exact heat of the universe at the time of posited creation (ie perhaps the Big Bang, though I think that theory is kind of on the outs...). Still if the temperature was one degree cooler, the universe would not have coalsed. One degree hotter and it would never have formed but kept expanded out. So this teensy range of heat-- well kind of miraculous or at least mysterious. So I think that existence itself is a kind of miracle, though I might not normally use that word.

 

The problem I see with a lot of "miracles" in the Bible is that they range in the "magic tricks" department. Could Jesus have healed the sick? I think it likely he did. Or at least faith in him did. But some of them I see as having a wow- gee wiz effect, that to me indicates someone was trying to raise the person in question (Jesus, Moses, etc.) up as a really really really important person, and something of the idea of that game of telephone-- where stories repeated over and over in the oral tradition might become larger than life. Still *something* *special* was going on or the telephone would have dissolved into gibberish.

 

 

OTOH, Aletheia and Fatherman introduced some interesting concepts re: quantum effects (not sure if that can work except on a quantum level-- but of course we are talking God here. :-)) No, it didn't come off as hokey-- in fact, gets me to thinking.

Another was the idea of energy (in terms of spiritual or God energy), and that we are walking around with low energy and Jesus with very high energy. And here I thought it was

iron poor blood or maybe yuppie flu. :-)

 

 

--des

Posted

IMO, for many progressives, the alleged miracles performed by Jesus (or anyone esle in the Bible) are rather moot points; i.e. that the various opinions that people have about them are things that we feel shouldn't make or break one's faith in God or in Jesus the Christ.

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