I left India in the early 90's. We had the same setup in Bangladesh. Although, I was told the reason for the buffalo and duck meat was the chickens and cows drowned during the frequent Bengal floods. Thailand had better food but I had learned the effectiveness of hunger strikes by then.

hunger


I am probably older than you (born early 70's), but I never even got a call for my birthday.

My answer to the original question here is that I was often hungry as a kid.

People in the 3rd world country where we were commented on how skinny us kids were. Once a man who passed by the coals where we were cooking our meal saw us. He turned right around and came back with a big bag of food.

When I was a preteen and was sent off to the leaders' combo, on one hand the adults started to get off on me way too young, but there was organized "provisioning" in the area and there was a greater volume of food, though low quality.

The highest quality food I ever saw in the cult was after a raid. The social workers were watching, and the home dipped into the emergency fund to buy milk, meat and other good foods.

miracle rice
Can't remember not having 3 meals a day. Not always meat & veges for every meal but we ate pretty good...can't really complain. The kids even had snacks which we made.

I remember amazing miracles when we ran out of food though. For instance, one time (at our school) we had run totally out of rice and we had 40 mouths to feed. I gathered the kids together and we prayed the Lord would provide us with rice. We had meat and veges..but the kids (and adults) loved their rice! (PI)

Anyway, I got up the next morning and popped outside to check on our dog and lo and behold there was a full bag of rice on the front doorstep!
No the 'angels' hadn't dropped it off, but it was a miracle. It turned out that a friend of ours had a friend who was a rice farmer. this man loved the Lord, and the night we had prayed he had thought to himself...."I will take a bag of rice to the missionaries tomorrow" and he did (even though he had only ever met us once and had never done it before). Our friend did not even know we needed it, and he hadn't said to his friend to bring it.

That was only ONE miracle the Lord did for us in our home with food, petrol, clothes, and many other things.....and He's still doing miracles in my life and the kids.

A miracle is usually defined as "a striking interposition of divine intervention by God in the universe by which the ordinary course and operation of Nature is overruled, suspended, or modified." [size=59][Wikipedia][/size] I am not sure how or why you define this story as a "miracle". You even described how it happened: You friend's friend brought over a bag of rice because he makes rice.

I am happy you were able to eat. I just find that "miracles" are defined too broadly, when normal explanations perfectly define the situation.

A miracle
To me, even before I joined the Family and even today, I believe that when one prays and God intervenes by 'speaking' to someone else on your behalf and that person is part and parcel of the answer to your prayer, then it IS a miracle.

I firmly believe in prayer, and I have seen many answers to prayer...yes, even when I was in the Family and when I was out - for my whole life in fact. I have prayed, things have happened. Not always the way I wanted, but the outome has always been for the best in the long run.

Now, that is not my teaching from being in the Family. I grew up that way without any formal Christian training. I just read my Bible, listened to my Sunday school teacher (who in my eyes was a great woman of God) and just simply believed that God was with me and would take care of me.

You may not see it as a miracle, Thorwald, but surely you have to admit it was God's intervention and not just a co-incidence.

Here's another miracle. My kids and I prayed for snow on a BOILING hot day at a time of year that it hadn't snowed for 10 years, and then it was only a thin smattering. The weather forecast said it would be very hot for the rest of the week. I had told my kids we would go to the snowies (where there was snow at the time), but we couldn't make it so I told them to pray for snow. We woke up the next morning and I thought it was raining. We went outside and it was SNOWING. It snowed for a few hours and was deep enough for the kids to play in and build snowmen.

The next day, the snow had gone and it was once again hot and remained hot and sunny.

The newscasters proclaimed it a MIRACLE.

I certainly do not nor will I. I find your story to be exactly that: a coincidence.



I'll give you the benefit of the doubt her and allow that this really happened the way you explained it. However, there is zero reason, in my mind, for this to be anything other than a freak occurrence. Situations like these happen all the time. Just because you prayed to an imaginary being does not mean he/she/it intervened; weather is rather random and very difficult to accurately predict.

Your definition of a "miracle" does not need to have anything to do with TFI's beliefs; any person of any faith for any time in any place can not successfully prove to me that their god answers there prayers (through miracles, or otherwise).

If you can consistently prove to me that your god answers your prayers by performing a simple experiment, then I might be interested. Can you pray to your god right now and ask him to make it snow in the next ten minutes? If he really is omnipotent, then it should be a cakewalk for him to answer this simple request. If he doesn't, I suspect you'll find some excuse for your god and claim that "He works in mysterious ways" or "it was not his will" or something.

THOU SHALL NOT MOCK THE LORD THY GOD, THORWALD


I am sorry Thorwald but you are starting to get on my nerves. Why are you so negative and chose to mock God and other peoples beliefs? What are you trying to accomplish? Discourage people to write?

To those who believe in prayer:



Sure, prayer sometimes "works". That is, what you pray for will occasionally occur. That's simply the law of probability.
If I pray for sunny weather tomorrow, it may well be sunny. There are after all finite possibilities for what the weather will be like tomorrow, and there's no reason why I couldn't pray for what will eventually and indeed happen tomorrow.

If I pray for something that has a lesser probability of occurring, it may seem more "miraculous"; however, it's bound to happen sometime, and you may just be fortunate enough to pray for it before it happens. When it happens, you attribute the result to the efficacy of your prayer - when, if truth be told, it would have happened whether you prayed for it or not.

Also, you must keep in mind the concept of counting the hits and ignoring the misses. You might pray several times during a day, and some of those things you pray for may occur - the frequency of which depends on what you generally pray for, mundane everyday stuff that generally happens anyway, or more unlikely things.
Most people will remember all the "answers" to their prayers - that is, the times they were lucky enough to want what was indeed going to happen. But what about all those prayers you prayed that went unanswered? No, "God said No or Wait" doesn't count. That's just a cop-out for unanswered prayers.

I'll bet that of all the more "unlikely" things you asked for, of all the more "unlikely" things you prayed for to happen, most didn't happen. I.e, praying for someone on the deathbed. Maybe for your aged father who is dying, to live longer? Maybe you prayed against a hurricane that was heading towards an area where a friend lived?
Of all the prayers you prayed, of the "bigger" things such as above, I'll bet most go unanswered. You can try that right now if you want. Ask God to reveal some great natural mystery to you. Ask God to lend us humans a hand. Maybe the cure for cancer, or AIDS? If God has enough time on his hands to be a fucking tooth fairy (http://www.christian-faith.com/html/page/gold_dust), maybe he can give us a hand with our real fucking problems.

Anyway as I was saying, you remember the times that your prayer was answered, and all the times you prayed for something that didn't happen, you either chalk it up to "not the Lord's will at the moment", or it just fades from your mind and all you're left with are all the times that you did get what you prayed for, and those reinforce your belief in prayer.

Me, my skepticism in prayer started when I was a teen. Never outright skepticism, but the thought was always in the back of my mind, occasionally entertained. We'd pray for fruitful provisioning, then we'd go provisioning, and come back with the stuff from those people. Answered prayer? Hardly. These people believed we were doing some sort of missionary work (complete lie), and were giving to what they thought was a good cause. Plus, they really only donated stuff they couldn't sell anymore, or stuff that was soon to go bad. Whether we prayed or not, these people were going to give their stuff when we came around.
And other times when we prayed, we hardly got anything. I used to think that that might have happened all the same whether we had prayed or not.

We'd also pray for "fruitful" fundraising, aka ballooning. I often thought that as we were selling stuff, the people were either going to buy a balloon or they weren't, depending on whether they wanted one or not, or whether they fell for our missionary sob story, regardless of whether we prayed. Would people not buy our balloons if we didn't pray? What about the times we prayed and the ballooning was shitty?

Some time after I left, I was trying to get a loan. I really wanted it, and decided to pray for it (need all the help you can get, right?) Plus, I still vaguely believed in God at that point. So I prayed and prayed, made deals with God, and the loan came through. My first thought was: "Wouldn't this have happened whether or not I prayed for it?" I mean, the bank was considering it, and they would give it to me based on my application's merit, not on whether God "touched their hearts".
I started doing this sort of thing more frequently, analyzing situations and philosophizing and wondering whether prayer really had any effect.

So I started testing God. When I wanted something to happen, I wouldn't pray for it. Then I'd see whether it happened or not. Things did happen at the same frequency as when I'd pray. So then I started making other tests. I'd say "God, if you're real, make x happen". Then I'd do y, and see if x happened. I'd also say "If x happens, God is/isn't real". "x" then either happened or didn't according to natural laws.

Anyway I didn't intend to make this about myself, so I'll stop here, but it's just an example of how one might go about testing prayer. I've found that if you want something to happen, you have to make it happen - praying to God doesn't make anything happen; and if it does happen, it will be because of some natural event, i.e. a person who does something. Your God didn't make that person do it, they did it for their own reasons.

And finally, a word about hospitalized people. A great source of "miracles", people often claim their prayers for their injured loved one were answered when that loved one, in a serious (perhaps life-threatening) condition recovers. Is it thanks to God, or thanks to the doctors who worked tirelessly on the person, and the marvels of modern medicine and a scientific understanding of the human body? Here's another test for you then:
Take 100 people with the same serious injuries, send 50 of them to the hospital, and put the other 50 in a room where you have a prayer group to pray for them, and let God take care of them. Which group has the best chance of survival?
Better yet, when your son gets hit by a car and has a fractured skull, prove your belief in prayer by whisking him home and holding a prayer vigil by his bedside, instead of calling an ambulance.
I'm sure God will be pleased with your faith. (Your son won't, if he at all lives to regret the day.)

Fact is that when it matters, prayer just doesn't save the day.

Well, you are sceptical aren't you?

Actually, I have prayed for the weather (hurricanes, floods) that I and my children have been involved in and the prayers were answered within minutes. We've prayed for a car that was totally out of petrol and stuck on a hill facing up the hill (petrol down) to go and at least get us to our appointment on time. The car started on the hill, no pushing, and got us to right in the parking space before it conked out (5kms).

I've been involved in prayed for 4 women to become pregnant who the doctors had said would most probably never get pregnant and they were all pregnant within 2 months.

I could go on, but even if I pointed out hundreds of what I would call answers to prayer, there would still be some who would say they were just co-incidences.

All I know is, I love the Lord and I believe in prayer.

As for praying right now just to prove a point - forget it. When something comes up in my life or someone else's then I will pray for that situation. But just to pray so that YOU may, might, could perhaps believe....forget it. You don't have to believe, it's your choice.

There is a verse in the Bible that says, 'BELIEVE and you shall receive'. You don't believe, so you can't expect anything...unless it really is a coincidence.

It is not "negative" to challenge someones belief. I am, by no means, mocking this Guest's belief in God or miracles. I am, however, very much trying to challenge what anybody puts forth as fact that is not scientifically validated.

What is negative is religious people telling me that I will burn forever in a lake of fire for not believing in their silly god. All I do is challenge that belief and you call me out?! Sorry if I am getting on your "nerves" . . . talk about nerves; telling someone they are headed for eternal torture and almost saying it with glee to atheists (like me) . . . that gets on my nerves!

With our background in religion, I would think you would be more sensitive to my reasons for challenging people.

to Thorwald
I think I understand where you are coming from and I know what you mean about people telling you what God is going to do to you because of your choices . I can't stand thoes types of religiuos freaks either and they more than get on my nerves. I just believe that everyone has an opinion and the right to believe what they want and I respect that in life. I think atheists like yourself should not try so hard to prove peoples experiences by facts and remember there are many unexplained things that happen in life. I respect facts and your job on this site but sometimes you are offensive and tend to put down thoes who believe in God. Jason

There is one slight problem with the whole "live and let live" mantra: Religious people vote and, more often than not, they vote for things according to their faith and beliefs and these things interfere with my life. The vote in laws that tell me how to live my life according to their beliefs (which I find crazy and silly and do not apologise for calling them that).

I am not trying to prove anything to these religious people. As far as I am concerned, if someone wishes to believe the world rests on top of an elephant who is supported by a bunch of turtles (I am not making this up), fine with me. Believe whatever the hell you want. The problem is when you start trying to tell me that I should believe in your insanity as well.

Democracy almost demands that I challenge people's beliefs wherever and whenever I can. An example of this is the fundamentalist Christian's trying to get Creation taught in schools and, if they could, outlaw the teaching of evolution. Do you understand why I demand scientific facts, why they are so important to me? Do you understand why I go out of my way to challenge what I see as utter lunacy?

As Christopher Hitchens says: "We have to stop being so respectful of religious belief". There is a double-standard going on here. Religious people are allowed to say anything they want about my lack of belief (including ridicule it, mock it, call me evil, send me to hell, pray against me, etc., etc.). However, if I even respectfully question their beliefs, I have crossed the line. Enough of that!

Read this to see an in-depth look at what I am getting at.



Please provide specific examples of me being "offensive" and "[putting] [people] down".

forget it Thorwald
I am not going to waste any more time on this with you. I will just say that you are not being asked to believe as others believe and you should not reply to posts about God like the poster is trying to convince YOU personaly or even talking to YOU personaly. Lighten up a bit and maybe you will be a happier person. Jason

Re: miracle rice
Rofl. I read that story in a True Comics or somewhere. Is it the same story?