Well this discussion has had the benefit of showing me that miracles cannot be accepted.  I tended to say they are unlikely and need evidence, but actually we have to ask what would constitute a miracle.  God coming down and curing my medical problems might be called a miracle, but in a deeper sense it would be no such thing -- it would be God coming down and curing my medical problems.  It would seem God is a better doctor than those I've been seeing.

This is perhaps playing word games, as the sense of "miracle" is not something without cause, but where the cause is divine or spiritual and not mundane or human or physical.  Well in that case I don't think miracles occur.  It implies the existence of God, something that is counter to logic (another subject altogether) so that I am persuaded strongly he doesn't exist but is a human notion out of wishful thinking.  Given no God, then, no miracles.  Still, that begs the issue here, which is more of a "show me" situation -- if there are miracles, they don't get believed unless there is damn good evidence there is no other explanation, and even then they don't get believed because it could be simply a trick where I don't see the trick or some event I don't understand.  

There is also a theological problem with miracles -- they imply God interfering with the working of the world as He designed it.  This is certainly problematic -- the artist (in this case a perfect, infallible artist) going back and retouching his work.  And then there is the question of why God works miracles to prevent some evil or other (we assume that is his purpose) and yet allows all sorts of horrid things to go on and on and on -- like babies dying in the gutter.  Once we say God corrects some evils with special dispensations, we make God into an unjust, arbitrary, kind-of circus magician.

Skepticism is healthy, cynicism is not.  Skepticism is to demand evidence for things that are less than obviously true, and never accept things because they are "human." The universe is what it is regardless of our wishes and fantasies.

Anything is possible, that does not mean anything is real, nor does it mean we should accept explanations for things that do not fit with reality.  In such cases the appropriate response is just that we don't know.  I think miracles are impossible by definition -- anything we think is a miracle either has a more mundane explanation or is just a sample of technology we don't understand.  It is possible Santa Clause could pop into existence in my garage (according to what the quantum people tell us), and if he did so it would not be a miracle but just a quantum event.  If Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, it was not a miracle but just his ability to maneuver the universe to make him live -- a modern doctor might have been able to as well, or a future doctor.

All that said, the wise course is to withhold belief and wait for further evidence.  Odds are overwhelming a debunking will come along -- tricks and misunderstandings and delusions and pious frauds are far more common than violations of physics.

It is conceivable Jesus Christ could have gone unnoticed -- there were lots of miracle workers and would-be Messiahs about and the whole topic must have been something of a bore.  My attitude is that absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but it is damn good evidence.  The thing is that extraordinary claims (and the whole Jesus story surely is extraordinary) require extraordinary evidence, not just rationalization of absence of evidence.

The reason people persist in such irrational belief has to do with meme theory, at least this seems the most readily acceptable idea.  Once an idea gets hold -- and it can do so for reasons outside rationality (emotional appeal, childhood indoctrination, etc.), our minds leap at anything that allows keeping the notion in spite of anything -- at least some people's minds do -- hence Bigfoot, lake monsters, flying saucers, hollow earths, alien abductions, ghosts, demons, visions of the Virgin Mary, miracles, and on and on and on.

The religious memes also have a cute trick -- they make what is called "faith" into a virtue, sometimes near the paramount virtue, rather than the vice of superstition and believing what we want rather than what the evidence supports.  It is all feel nice stuff, and for sure believing makes us feel great.  I'm more interested in truth than joy, although I'll take joy when it doesn't require that I lie to myself.

Yes, Dorothy, there are truths in all religions -- this is probably unavoidable about any belief system of enough complexity.  I would also assert that that coin has an obverse -- that there are falsehoods in all religions.

One can reach one of two (at least two) conclusions from this.  One might be that religion in general is a waste of time and worrying about religious truth and untruth are even more a waste of time.  The other might be that revealing truth is not a valid function of religion, but instead religion serves other human needs, probably deriving from our need to serve and worship and be comforted by whatever straw we can grasp -- derived ultimately by the natural selection of our evolution.

When one gets deep into a study of some place and time in history, it becomes clear we know really very little of what actually happened and even less of the reasons why.  That is no reason, however, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with fantasies and guesses and fictions.  When we die what we know dies with us, so the vast majority of human memory is lost forever, and we only have the little that gets written down, and it is filled with biases and omissions and exaggerations and so on.

People of the future will have a slightly, but only slightly, better time of it studying us than we have studying what went on in, say, ancient Rome.  We do have a somewhat more objective discipline of reporting history, but there is still plenty written that is untrue or misleading, and of course we will leave film and so on, but selection effects here too will prevent anything like a completely accurate record.

Thinking about it, it is amazing we know as much as we know and can see an overall picture regardless.  I would only say a great deal of care and humility is called for if we are to draw lessons from this history.

People claim miracles all the time; I doubt a real divinity would stoop to such performances, but even if so the burden of proof (that it is the truth) for a real miracle is virtually insurmountable, and given that we have no independent contemporary testimony the stories of Jesus are easily discounted.  

As far as "belief" goes, this is foolish of anything.  The best we can honestly do is hold the opinion that something is almost certainly true, and this level of confidence needs to be held in reserve for things like the sun rising tomorrow.  Religions make a virtue of "faith," when in fact it is a vice -- a giving in to our desire that something -- usually something we were taught as children while we were still uncritical -- be true.  

The value judgments we make (right versus wrong, beautiful versus ugly, interesting versus tiresome, valuable versus worthless, etc.), are hard to pin down and there is an old question as to whether they are human abstractions or have a real existence outside the human sphere.  For example, 2 + 2 = 5 is "wrong," so also is beating a child.  Does "wrong" mean the same thing is both of these cases?  Most people think not but in fact we don't really know -- there are schools of thought (Asian karmic notions being the one I'm familiar with) that would say both are errors in the "wrongness" sense -- they both go against something that consists of "right."

We can't, however, depend entirely on our feelings in these things -- people can be wrong about mathematical calculaitons as much as wrong about their behavior and what is good and bad behavior.  We instead have to check our calculations -- in the end see if they stand up under deductive scrutiny from basic principles -- axioms or postulates or whatever.

With behavior I think the fundamental postulate is the "golden rule" or concept of compassion for all sentient beings.  How does violence and inflicting hurt or pain on someone stand in the light of this postulate?  Obvious.  That doesn't mean one is a total absolutist in such things -- scenarios can be imagined where the failure to inflict pain does more harm than not -- but such scenarios are usually far-fetched and uncommon.

Our evolution was a different matter.  Here we managed largely by killing and being strongest and so on.  But evolution was simple biology -- in the end just a blind natural process without moral standing -- and is therefore misleading to use as a guide for behavior.  Out instincts bring us to strike out, to "defend" ourselves, to get revenge, to judge -- and this leads us into morally wrong behavior.

To my mind, then, any claim that it is better to inflict pain and hurt than not to has the burden of proof -- that the correct, moral response is always to avoid conflict and only with a huge preponderance of the evidence does one behave otherwise.

To be dogmatic here for a moment, it seems to be obvious that we have no soul, no "self."  Just sit quietly and "watch" your thoughts (be mindful).  You can see that all it is is a process of one thought after another, loosely connected, sometimes branching and going in circles, sometimes starting off on a new track, sometimes influenced by an uprising emotion or memory or an external stimulus. 

There is a difference between things that.are processes (where each event occurs in sequence and pushes itself along) and material of even spiritual objects, that have tangible stasis and properties.  A wave is like our mind -- it generally pushes itself along but still is influenced by the lay of the land, by the wind, by passing objects, by interaction with other waves, and so on.  The water that is the medium of the wave moves in little circles as the wave passes, but is not the wave.

What happens at death is of course that the medium the mind has for this process -- brain we suppose -- stops functioning and decays.  What then can possible happen to mind?  It is hard to imagine it continuing elsewhere, without a medium, but of course this is the foundation idea of rebirth teachings.

I doubt there is any meaning in life, and good things we do end up working good largely by accident.  Indeed, there is probably no meaning in the universe.  Only existence, and it is something of a trap.  I express this all as probable, not sure, since on something so significant any kind of assurance is out of reach.

In the meantime we can be compassionate, try to avoid hurting others, and help where we are sure our help will really help.

Of course there are truths in the Bible -- no one doubts for example that there existed a city of Jerusalem or a country of Egypt.  That is like saying there are truths in the Iliad -- but that doesn't prove much -- few today believe in Apollo and Athena and so on.

All texts, even modern ones but even more those from ancient times, need to be read skeptically (not cynically), and texts that refer to outlandish things like talking asses and fire and brimstone from the sky and divine voices from burning bushes need a particular skepticism -- one that says the more "out" a statement is, the more evidence is needed.  Basically whenever an ancient text speaks of miraculous happenings, it should be doubted -- not just the miraculous parts but all of it -- until there is independent non-miraculous support.

This doesn't mean the ancient authors were deliberately lying, but only that they were recording stories that had come down to them in their culture -- just as the stories of Robin Hood or King Arthur came down to the Middle Ages in European cultures and later got written down as fact, when in fact they were myths.

A simple rule I wish everyone would practice, especially myself: one's personal experiences are proof of nothing and extremely weak evidence, and if they are self-flattering to boot they will only produce scorn.

That doesn't mean it is bad to tell personal stories, but only as entertainment or as illustration to help with understanding.  In short they should be treated as anologies.

On its surface banning harmful things sounds like a good idea, and it is always possible to think of things everyone will concede has to be at least very strictly regulated.

However, this requires restricting personal freedom, hiring police and judges and prison guards.  It also requires spying on the public, putting innocent people in jail, or maybe just naive kids and thereby ruining their futures.

In short although it seems bans are the first reaction to harmful things, it should in fact be an absolute last resort in any society that calls itself free.

Self awareness or mindfulness is something we can teach ourselves, but it doesn't hurt to get advice or read up on it.  So many people I fear go through life with little or no self-examination, or when they do examine themselves it is against irrational or even harmful standards, and full of rationalizations to enable them to excuse themselves or to continue doing and believing things that are not rationally based, but instead come from indoctrination or desires.  Religions are a major offender here, in particular when they encourage irrational beliefs based on their authority or tradition or some divine claim or another.

We tend to refer to spiritually advanced people as "old souls"(although of course all souls are really the same age, probably unlimited).  It is something about their personality and their approach to things.

It isn't or at least is not entirely a matter of interest in religion; indeed they may even be anti-religious in the usual sense of organizations.  Nor is it gullibility (those who tend to think "belief" and faith are important, or who want so much for the universe to be a big kindly teddy bear).  They tend to know and do the right thing automatically, without thinking about it and without goodness motives.  They tend to nod and find something in whatever you say that they can agree with, and reinforce that rather than getting negative.  Indeed they seem inherently happy no matter what.

I don't know if I am being too fussy or not, but the "dark side" of the moon is not dark and gets as much light as the side facing us.  The moon is not illuminated by the earth but by the sun, and it rotates relative to the sun.  We would be better calling the "sides" of the moon the front and back sides.

Seems to me anyone who has been in a country long enough to put down firm roots should be deemed legal.  The whole business of rules as to who can enter and who cannot is at root racism anyway and Trump is playing a racist card if he not not actually a racist himself.

If you insist on "justice" and therefore a penalty for the illegal entry, then impose a reasonable fine (let the punishment fit the crime).  America has, just as it also has with things like drugs and gambling, created a criminal class of non-criminals.  If they commit real crimes put them in jail, whether they were born in the States or not.  Twenty to forty million people just cannot be deported, and cannot be allowed to continue festering as a permanent under-class subject to exploitation by real criminals.  Have some sense, Americans, and stop being so self-righteous.

What or who is going to win a given struggle is only in a small way determined by how the forces look on paper.  Motivation, skill, training, leadership, domestic support, what the locals think, and all sorts of other things, including luck, enter into it.  It's the course of wisdom to avoid conflict even if one feels oneself significantly stronger.