God Talk: Debates and Discussions with Believers

These are actual conversations that have taken place between religious believers and myself, through forums, email, dialogue, etc. This discussion has been kept in its original format, with spelling and grammatical errors in tact.

Desperately Craving a Miracle

Christian: Hey Taylor, my question is, if the bible was only written by men and all the parts about spirits, demons, and angels are superstition and nonsense, how can this video [link] and others be explained away? The video shows some people contact a demon through a Ouija board, then the glass they were using starts moving by itself and turns over. Clearly nothing was touching the glass so I don't get how that could have been faked. Check it out.

Rebuttal: You're really just desperately trying to come up with reasons to believe, based on what I can't answer, aren't you? As for the video, first of all, the channel is that of a self-proclaimed director and cinematographer, who has enough of a sense of humor that I wouldn't put a fake Ouija board video past him. He has the skills to make something like that believable and the motivation to do it.

Secondly, a couple things about it do look suspicious. At 08:52, you can see a blurry spot right over the center of the "Z", below the glass. It's in just the right position where you might pull the glass from the cameraman's angle, with something like a very thin piece of string. The interesting thing to me is that the blurry spot seems close to the color of the pizza box, which leads me to ask, why a pizza box for a Ouija board? Maybe that was part of the director's trick.

The other part that stood out to me was when the glass finally got tipped off the board. Suddenly the camera zooms in, just in time to cut the top of the glass out of frame. Then it budges a little, then falls. How do you know that one of the girls wasn't pushing on the top of the glass from off camera? It falls in the perfect angle for that too. If a demon were 'in the board' pushing the glass off, it shouldn't tilt over like someone pushed the top of the lid, it should slide right off as normal. But it doesn't.

Anyway, that's enough over-analysis, I think. The simple fact is that you've brought a YouTube video to me as 'evidence', and that's no more credible than using Ghost Hunters to argue for the existence of ghosts. TV shows and YouTube videos do not constitute independent, verifiable, or objective evidence. All you have here is a fallacy called an argument from ignorance ("I can't see how the video could have been faked, therefore it must be real").

Christian: I am trying to decide what to believe as far as the Bible being completely or partially god inspired, and whether the christian god is the one who inspired both the old and new testaments.

I suppose you could be right about the board being a trick, perhaps with advanced computer software he could have erased the string or whatever force made the glass move. Still, if you were to try using the board and it began to answer your questions or move objects what would you think then? I will never try it after hearing about the dangers from both religious and non-religious people.

Another question would be what about grandfather eagle feather? In this video [link], a native american woman is possessed by an evil spirit. My question is, how could she have possibly kept a straight face without laughing while making the sounds and voices. No matter how much money someone paid me, I would not be able to pull off a performance like this. It looks too convincing to be scripted.

I know you will probably say it is all mumbo jumbo and all the exorcised people are just paid actors who learn a script and use their demon voice to convince people. But why would any girl freak out this much just for being forced to sit in a chair [link]?

Rebuttal: To go from movements on a Ouija board to accepting the bible as truth is quite a leap. You do know that ghosts and spirits are spoken of in many other religions, don't you? To pretend that a video like that (if true) would be evidence for the bible or Christianity is just heavily biased speculation. Muslims would say it supports Islam, Mormons would say it supports Mormonism, and so on. You associate it with the bible and Christianity because it's how you've been raised, but if you gave it some thought, nothing in that video provides a link to any specific religion, or even to religion at all.

Seeing the glass move with my hands on it would not cause me alarm or thought in the slightest. The experience of watching it move and not feeling yourself push it is known as the ideomotor response, and you can look it up on Wiki and Google for more info. Basically, it's an illusion - because the movements are so slight, especially with multiple people, you're not even aware that you're doing it. Now if I saw a glass move off the board by itself, with no hands on it, that might cause me to wonder, but it wouldn't make me think 'demon' before anything else.

I'm not going to watch either of those videos you linked to. If you think possession videos are really so convincing, do you think Benny Hinn is really a healer? People in Hinn's audience psych themselves up a great deal and flop around on stage, fall off stage, and more. People are well known to act stupid and insane for attention, and sometimes the right circumstances bring it out for normally calm people. What's more is that if these people believe deeply in possession, they may convince themselves that they're possessed even when they're not, and then they put on a show, fully believing it's real.

But to reiterate what I last told you, these are YouTube videos we're talking about. They're not documented cases, they're not verifiable evidence... they're little more than cheap entertainment.

Christian: If the spirit of grandfather eagle feather will not convince you, then I guess nothing will. Since youtube videos are not sufficient for evidence, I would like to share from my own experience one reason I cannot deny the existence of God.

Maybe I already told you before but when I was 18 I prayed that God would send me a girl named Kara I really liked. Even though she wasn't a Christian I still wanted her more than any other girl. She is a year and 3 months older me. As that summer went on, I learned from Kara's sister that she was getting married. Naturally, that really sucked for me.

I forgot about that prayer, thinking God didn't care. Then, a 17 year old girl named Kara started working at the same grocery store as me. I was going to quit the grocery store job and on my last day I went to punch my card and leave. I turned around and Kara was there. She asked me if I wanted to go on a date with her so we went. I could have said no, but Kara was decent looking so I figured why not.

Thinking back, I didn't get what I had really wanted. But the odds of a girl named Kara around my age becoming interested in me in that short of a time are extremely low, considering I lived in a town of 16,000 people with no girls in my high school named Kara. I ask myself what are the odds that a girl from another school district, in another town, named Kara, would work at the same place as me, and ask me for a date? If you knew how little success I had with girls, you would know it would have to be nothing less than a miracle.

In the two years I worked there, not one other girl at that grocery store ever asked me for a date. In fact, so far that was the only time in my life a girl asked me to go on a date with her and I am 25 now. So could it have been only a coincidence? A random happening just by chance? You may say it wasn't really an answer to prayer because I didn't get the specific girl I wanted. But I learned through myspace that after Kara got married her first baby died because of complications. So you never know what can happen in life. Maybe it would have been my child that died if I had married her. Maybe I would have missed out on another girl even better than her.

Rebuttal: Two things come to mind with this story you've told me. First of all, I can relate to it because back when I was a believer I prayed for God to set me up with a girl too. Her name was Kristen and she was a next door neighbor, a classmate, and a fairly religious person, not to mention that she was very attractive. Nothing ever developed though, and since then I have never dated any girl named Kristen (and think how common that name is). My experience is virtually identical to yours, except the results were somewhat different. So if you are justified in assuming that your experience points to a god, am I justified in assuming that mine points to there being no god? This is the issue I keep running into with believers: they want to count the hits and ignore all the misses.

And this brings me to my second thought. Think about what it is that you're labeling a miracle. You asked God to set you up with this specific girl named Kara. But he didn't. He set you up with a different girl named Kara. Was there some kind of prayer line interference when you asked God? "Kara" was all he caught and so he comically fixed you up with the wrong Kara? You also say that you "really liked" this original Kara, but version 2.0 was just "decent looking", so you "figured why not". So not only did God fail to send you the specific person you prayed for, but he sent you someone you weren't quite as impressed with, it sounds like. I don't mean to be harsh, but look at the facts you've told me... your prayer was not answered. This is significant in name only (pun intended).

Considering how common of a name Kara is, I would absolutely say it can fall under coincidence. Notice that you mention your town is only 16,000 people and no one in your high school was named Kara... and then you go right on to mention that this Kara who asked you out was both from another school district and another town. That opens up the odds a lot more than you suggest.

I occasionally think of what might have been if Kristen had fallen for me. It wouldn't have lasted long, I imagine, and I would've become miserable very quickly once I lost my faith. Or maybe I would've inspired her to reject faith too. You never know what can happen in life, as you say. The point is that my experiences are no less valid than yours for determining if a god exists. But experience is not evidence, because we often misinterpret our experiences, and as I've just shown you, contradictory experiences pose a problem for assessing truth on the basis of experience alone.

Once again, you're showing me something mundane and perfectly within natural explanations, asking me to believe it's a miracle. Can I ask how you feel about calling such trivial coincidences 'miracles'? When the Judeo-Christian god once parted seas, sent down fire from heaven, and raised people from the dead, why does he now seem to perform miracles that are as commonplace and unremarkable as finding your car keys? Perhaps it's because those little events are all that we've got (and ever had), and for those who are eager to believe, even superficial 'miracles' will do.