ok i would like to begin by stating that im not trying to convert anyone with this topic, i would just like to hear some of your opinions(sp?)

on to the point! over the years i have heard from first hand whitnesses and also whitnessed myself several instances in which man seems to have "controlled" nature in what i would say seem to be supernatural ways.

the first two instances could be written off as freak occurences by skeptics the third would be more difficult though... so here they are:

1) this last summer my parents went on a missions trip to africa on a mission trip. thie purpose of the trip is to over several years RE-forest one streatch of mountain range to stop the desertification(sp again?) of the region. the run into a problem the region is going thu a dry spell and the seedlings they have planted so far are in danger of dying. basically what happens is the entire group gets together and begins to pray for rain, lo and behold it rains. i know what everyone is thinking "coincidence" i would have thought so to except this happened on at least 8 different occasions. it ONLY rained on the days they prayed for it, and it did not on the days they didnt.

2) while on the same trip one of the men from my parents church went out on a hike with one of the elders of a small village where they were staying. they had been walking for a bit when they came upon a lion and several female lions eating a fresh kill. the male immediatly jumps up and begins moving towards them, the african man quicky said a few words in his native language to the lion and it imediatly turned around and began eating again, when he was asked what he had told the lion he said "i told him, 'it is not time for you to hunt, it is time for you to eat, now go back and finish what you have killed."

3) this is the event that i whitnesed first hand, and probably the most difficult to explain. when i was younger i lived in klamath california, which is also home to a large population of native Yurok indians. one particular family, the jensaw's, lived on a hill next to the mouth of the klamath river for many generations. the oldest member of the family was an old man everyone called old man jensaw or wild bill jensaw. two years after we moved there old man jensaw was close to dying and made it know to his family and lots of other people (my dad being one of them) that after he died he was going to come back as a whale and spent the summer in the klamath river. he died shortly after and amazingly, that summer a whale swam up the mouth of the river and stayed for the whole summer and left at the beginning of the fall, i saw this whale with my own eyes.

so anyways what are some of your guys oppinions on this sort of stuff?

My opinion is that you see what you want to see. A religious man watches people pray for rain, and when rain follows he believes he witnessed a miracle or the power of God because that's what he wants to believe.

No commentary on the first example.
Seond one, that doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. The lions has a fresh kill and so no need to pursue more meat at the moment. Granted, I don't have a problem with certain people having an understanding with animals.
Third, how common is it for whales to come into the river each year?

1) Someone watched the forecasts
2) Lions are commonly less dangerous when they've eaten
3) Without knowing the usual bahavior of whales and places they tend to stay it's hard to really tell if that can be worth much. They might stay there often and it might've been more than one whale leading you to think it was a single whale.

Just thoughts.

2) Could've gotten up to guard his kill, and after no move was made for it, it returned to his meal

lol whew

ok, no whales do not commonly stay in that river, in fact as far as anyone there knew it never happened before and has never happened since, and as ive said that family has lived in the area and fished in the river for MANY generations, so im sure if it had happened before they would have known. and it was only one whale, it was actually tagged by a marine biologist that worked at an aquarium in cresent city.

best demonstrated in Indonesia and Southeast Asia and the Gulf Coast of America

Dude... They were in native africa.. It's not like they could just flip on the channel 6 news. Further that would require that that specific person suggest praying for rain each time, and preventing prayer for rain on the days it wouldn't be raining. Plus, forecasts aren't always accurate. Seems a bit of a stretch to me for this to have occured on 8 seperate occaisions and for it to be just coincidence, or for someone to have so totally controlled a large group of people such that they only prayed on the specific occasions he/she wanted them to pray on.

Possibly. This issue's really hard to pinpoint, because we can't tell what was going through the lion's head. But, while it may be true that lions are less dangerous *after* they've eaten, I would think that lions would be significantly more dangerous *while* they are eating. Isn't it true also that lions, perticularily male lions, are *very* territorial, especially when it comes to their kill. I doubt a lion would just leave a human alone when there is food to protect. But then, I'm not an expert on lion psychology, so this is mainly speculation... Maybe I'll do some research and see if I can back this up.

I don't know so much about this one myself... If it's a common occurance for whales to appear in the rivers than big deal. We've got a coincidence... But we don't know what kind of whale it was, or how said whales typically act... Too many variables.

Perhaps.. But you left out the second half of that. A non-religious man watches a man pray for rain, and the rain follows and he immediately looks for natural explanations while outright refusing to believe that there could be anything supernatural involved. This is evident in this thread. Look at all the people trying to come up with explanations of how these things happened. Darth makes a suggestion, and rather than people doing research to specifically determine if his suggestion has any validity, they are throwing it out immediately and trying to conceive of any other possible explanation that even remotely makes sense. The fact is, as much as we try, we humans are not capable of looking at a situation without bias, or at least presupposition.

Further, I can corroberate (sp) his stories with many stories of my own where men or women have taken mastery over nature through prayer. If such was one or two isolated events then it would definately not stand up to criticism, but these sort of things happening is a daily occurance. Do some research, and you'll find it to be true. I've seen people with broken bones be fully healed after only 2 days. I've seen peoples' teeth turn to gold and back again. I've seen an item left on a table before a trip end up in our hotel room when we first walked in the door. (no one had been in there to put the item there. We just showed up, having already discovered we'd left it at home, only to see it sitting there on the bed) These are not things that can be explained by natural means and thus I am forced to conclude that there are supernatural forces at work in our universe.

I think people whose survival is directly tied to the land they live on are going to be in much better touch with the state of land. I think its an instinct most people have lost touch with on account of city living.

They prayed for rain when it had been a while since the last rainstorm.

Does it ever rain when they don't pray? If it were raining and they prayed for a drought, would it stop raining?

Think about probability for a second. Let's say it's 95% likely that it will rain after, say, 2 weeks in this happy little desert. After 13 days the people are getting pretty thirsty, their crops are dying, and they're losing hope. So they pray. And lo and behold, it rains the next morning. Why is that? Because it was 95% likely that it would rain by the 14th day? Or was it because they prayed for it?

I'll tell you what: I'll believe in this prayer thing when you get a group of people in a room and tell them to pray that every time I flip a coin it lands heads. Get it right 100% of the time for a statistically significant number of flips and you'll have made a sale.

The male lion doesn't hunt, the female lion does. I can understand you or your father not knowing this, but their guide damn well should have.
The male only kills when it's being threatened or when it's hungry; otherwise it's rather lethargic. They do not hunt for sport. Only three exceptions to this rule are on record, and all of them involve lions with mental illnesses.

A quick Google search indicates there are "scenic whale watching" sites no less than 3 km away from the Klamath River. Nice one, Sherlock.

I believe in God, but your grasp of logic is feeble and it's causing you to draw conclusions when none really exist.
God works in mysterious ways, right? So how do you expect to understand those ways? Are you godlike? This nonsense above is nothing more than a retarded attempt at resurrecting Theurgy, which made Jesus pretty mad when it happened in the Bible.

I believe your stories have some supernatural power behind them. (God)

I've been on several mission trips myself and I've seen some interesting things that were very out-of-the-normal.

And healings like the ones mentioned by Sarn_Cadrill are not uncommon at my church.

Then expect to be disappointed, because God has better things to do than do magician's tricks or fulfill selfish requests.

I mean really, if you were God, and someone didn't believe in you (in essence they are mocking you by disbelieving), and challenged you to do a miricle for them? I would hope God would prefer to perform miracles for people who deserved them.

Let's say he did do this for you though. I'm willing to bet you would write off the 100% heads to luck or a trick coin.

Some passage in the Bible states that those who are set against God won't believe him no matter how many acts of God they witness, no matter how impossible (resurrection of the dead, etc). I'm afraid I can't quote it exactly because I have no clue on whether it's even in the OT or NT.

And this ties nicely into another point... those who disbelieve in God will naturally tend to write off his miracles as coincidence.

If God does a miracle for YOU, other people's opinions of what happened are moot. If you KNOW God was involved in it, there is no issue.

Myself, I believe that miracles happen. I believe the USA has been blessed by God (although we are quickly ridding ourselves of this blessing by trying to erase God from our history). Our founding fathers established this nation as one under God. I do believe God has not ignored that. Our history has been relatively peaceful, only one or two wars fought on our land? And we have become a (the?) major world power although we are younger than any European power.

Some people think 9/11 was God's wake up call to America, to remind us we weren't invulnerable, especially when we start removing God from America and try to constrain him to churches.

I can only say that there the big picture we won't completely know about until the afterlife. We can get a good view of the past, but not of the present or future.

Bleh I got a little off track. I should stop now.

It's been awhile since I've had a Stats class, but I would have thought that praying for rain and getting it on 8 different occasions would have been statistically significant. But like I said, Stats is a mere memory....

sorry to ressurect an old thread, buttt...



like i said in my post... they prayed for rain on 8 different ocasions and it rained EVERY time, and it ONLY raind when they prayed for it.



they accidently came on a group of lions with a FRESH kill, they were not FINISHED eating and lying around LETHARGICLY.
the guid may not have have had a vast scientific knoledge of lions, but he had lived in the area his entire life so OF COURSE HE HAS A BASIC KNOLEDGE OF LIONS, perhaps you should stop attacking my feeble grasp of logic, and use some common sense for yourself.





good grief, i never said that there were no whales in the area, i said that there had never been a case of a whale going into the klamath river, and there has not been another case of it happening since! the klamath is not an especially deep river, there is no logical reason for a whale to travel into the river.

im not upset about anything you are saying here because i did ask for peoples "oppinion", but my goodness! oh, and my name is not Sherlock :p

Hmm...might be best to say this.



Well common sense would say even a lion would rather feast on what's already there than to attack something that's not even threatening it.

What about someone who prays for rain and does not recieve rain? His family is dieing of dehydration and their last chance of hope is to pray for rain. It does not rain. Why?

Sarn, the logical thing to do when observing something is to find a logical explanation for it. Otherwise I could flick a switch on in my house, turn on a lightbulb and go "God did that". When I'm confronted with something I can't personally explain to myself, I'm not going to suddenly believe that a higher power did it. It just means that I personally do not know how something works. Even if all of humanity hasn't figured out how something happens it still doesn't mean that a higher power did it.
Throughout the course of your life the odds are that you will come across the occasional coincidence, every once in a while even far fetched coincidences can occur.
Yes, I know, you're going to argue, that I'm not looking for God in these things, but please explain to me why I should be? The only reason I'd be looking for God's influence is if I believed in his existence in the first place.

And MZZT, c'mon, not believing in God doesn't mean I'm intentionally slapping him in the face, it's not like I choose not to believe in him. I could go to church, get baptised , call myself a Christian yadda yadda and deep down not truthfully believe in him. I think we can agree that'd be worse. If it happens to me, it'll happen, but I'm not going to suddenly say one day "I choose to believe in God" and somehow force myself to do so.
I have to agree if God does come to me or performs some sort of miracle in front of me then of course I'll believe because I'll personally know it was him, similarly I don't refute those who make such claims, it's way too subjective and personal for me to disagree with. But see it from my point of view, in my own personal experience I have never felt, heard, seen or experienced God in anyway. My only knowledge that he might exist is by a bunch of people telling me that he's out there. They all disagree on all sorts of different points and all seem to expect me to believe based on their own experiences. Then these people start to tell me what I can or can not do according to their beliefs.
As for the relative peace thing for the US? I'm English so my knowledge of US history isn't quite the best but as far as I recall there's been the War of Independence, War of 1812, War with Mexico, the Civil War, the various American Indian wars and the consequent subjugation of those people, involvement in both World Wars, Korean War, Vietnam War, both Gulf Wars, the CIA was involved in usurping several Central and South American governments, militarily backed various sides in all sorts of wars including the Iran-Iraq war, the Angolan civil war and the mujahideen in Afghanistan vs the Soviets. And that's just off the top of my head. Hardly bloodless and peaceful. If any land is God's land it's the entire world. Belief that God backs up your country is what some people use to legitimise wars. I used to be a churchgoer as a child, I thought everyone was God's children and that he loved everyone, including the sinner. Or have I totally misinterpreted the ideals behind Christianity here? Either way if God is judgemental and backs up one group of people based on geographical boundaries, it's not someone I'd want to spend eternity with.

As for the lion kill thing, the male will be mostly intent on keeping his food and eating as much as possible. He may have been startled and did a brief charge to scare away your parents. But he's not going to run too far or he'll lose his meal to some other scavenger or the rest of his pride while he's not eating. Watch how hyenas aggravate lions around a kill, they surround it and attack and harrass from different directions, grabbing a bite whenever they can.

And the whale? According to this it happens occasionally thanks to concentrations of some form of plankton. I guess every once in a while a whale will risk the shallow waters for some easy food. Just because you haven't seen a whale up the river before, you still can't tell whether they normally visit at night when there's less boat activity to disturb them.

gah, I've rambled on, my apologies if it stopped making sense along the way...

The rain dance/prayer/sacrifice always works when you do it until it rains.

Everything else in your post is nonsensical noise so I'm only responding to this:

Right, they prayed for rain when they needed rain. Probably when it was hot outside, all of the ground sources of water had evaporated and they were getting mighty thirsty and stuffy from the high pressure front that was coming in.

Golly. I wonder why it rained after that.

Do or do not there is no try. *Does rain dance*

http://www.randi.org/research/

Then they can be millionaires...

Quiet, Commander Poppin'-Fresh! I think they're talking about your golden, flaky crust!

Humans are so fed up with themselves to think they're above nature. We're natural. Just as natural as any other being. We have the exact same physical limits. We just happen to excell. "Nature" isn't everything humans are not, it's EVERYTHING.

No. Humans defy nature constantly--we don't adapt, we control. We continually get weaker as a result of two things--opposable thumbs and intelligence. If it weren't for either, we'd be nowhere close to where we are right now.

We are above nature, and that's what will eventually destroy us.

http://www.randi.org/research/

I noticed the prophet Yahweh was on that website. He's in the process of actually making the million dollars.

(by the way, there weren't mass UFO sightings over the summer as predicted. The skys here were all blue and empty.)

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]No. Humans defy nature constantly--we don't adapt, we control. We continually get weaker as a result of two things--opposable thumbs and intelligence. If it weren't for either, we'd be nowhere close to where we are right now.

We are above nature, and that's what will eventually destroy us.[/QUOTE]

Opposable thumbs and intelligence are both the result of a 'natural' process, so those features and the effects of those features are just as 'natural' as the photosynthesis in plants.

And it is only sensible for any organism to consider itself superior to all other organisms, as that ensures the survival of itself and its own kind.

And it's a gift that nature granted us that put us above all. Trust me, I know that we're lucky to have gotten these gifts, but that doesn't change the fact that they put us above nature. There's no organism on this planet better than us (except some forms of virus and bacteria, ironically enough), because if given the right tools...one man can kill ANY animal on the planet.

Being at the top of the food chain doesn't mean you're above nature or anything. And since apes and monkeys all have opposable thumbs, that's really got bugger all to do with anything. If global climate conditions did change massively we'd be affected just as much, our global population would be decimated because despite all our technology we wouldn't be able to protect everyone. If our technology is not sufficiently self-supporting in the situation then eventually it will fail and if we can't evolve or adapt we'll all die. The reason we are so succesful is because we can and do adapt far more quickly than an animal that requires a physical biological change. When the first people ventured out into colder climes they figured out how to kill furry creatures, then skin them and clothe themselves. We figured out eventually how to adapt our environment to suit ourselves, initially with the advent of farming methods and now as we construct entire cities. We're a part of nature that controls other parts of nature just as predators control the population of their prey, invasive species out compete the native ones or as changes in environment affect all those species living in it.

Being at the top of the food chain doesn't, alone, mean that we are above nature. That combined with the fact that we can change nature (cloning, gene splicing), are invasive and do not adapt, but rather make our environments adapt to us, and the intelligence we have that keeps pushing further the boundaries of science and physics as we know it, does.

Apes have opposable thumbs, true. But you take that alone as if it alone will make one become great. I said opposable thumbs AND intelligence, not one or the other.

Fair point, on the opposable thumb issue, i just misinterpreted that. I guess it all boils down to what you consider to be a part of nature. Why do we consider the a chimp using a pointy stick to collect termites to be part of nature, but early homo sapiens using sharpened bits of flint is to be considered unnatural or even "above nature"? You could technically say we've merely refined the whole pointy stick technology to a higher level.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Being at the top of the food chain doesn't, alone, mean that we are above nature. That combined with the fact that we can change nature (cloning, gene splicing), are invasive and do not adapt, but rather make our environments adapt to us, and the intelligence we have that keeps pushing further the boundaries of science and physics as we know it, does.

Apes have opposable thumbs, true. But you take that alone as if it alone will make one become great. I said opposable thumbs AND intelligence, not one or the other.[/QUOTE]

Haven't you ever seen Planet of the Apes? OPPOSABLE THUMBS = GREATNESS.

i would honestly have to say i respect you tons for this statement. no joking. like i said im not trying to convert anyone on these boards, i dont even have a set "religion" per say, so of course im not going to.





well damn! :p finally someone can shut me up. kudos for that one!

I think I shut you up with my comments on basic meteorology, since you seem to be adverse to contradicting my statements.

ok mr. c.

it was the rainy season, however it was not raining the conditions stayed the same the entire time, it should have been raing the entire time, but it didnt, i could see it being merely coincidence the first 2, or maybee even three times, but eight seperate times. again only raining when they prayed and not when they didnt. a simple "oh they were just overdue for a storm" doesnt quite cover that. Recusant gave a wonderful direct example of something exactly the same happening in the past, that quite frankly would have put anyones foot in their mouth. i could see if there was some weird weather cycle that causes no rain when there should be rain then suddenly rain in random patches, but you didnt provide any evidence like that did you? im not saying it could not have been a freak occurance(sp?) im just saying you didnt do much to show that it may have been other than just being contradictory.

And you haven't provided any evidence that the 'praying' caused the rain.

Again: Hot conditions, all ground water sources have evaporated, they're thirsty -> They start praying -> They don't stop until it starts to rain -> It rains

What REALLY happened:

Hot conditions, all ground water sources have evaporated -> It rains some time later

This is no more 'proof of divine powers' than believing that a certain pair of wool socks will help your team win the superbowl. Yeah, eventually they will win the superbowl if you wear the same pair of socks every year.