Coincidences as signs

  • Thread starter Thread starter HN95
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
H

HN95

Guest
I am considering joining the catholic Church because the history and the Bible seem to suggest that it is the Church of Christ. I have a problem however.

I used to belong to a protestant sect that teaches that it alone is the only true church and that only its members can be saved. There is a story about a young woman who joined that sect. She told she was greatly distressed and cried because she wasn´t sure what to do and she prayed to God to show her if the sect was the true church and she claimed that then, a little illiterate kid who was playing with fridge magnets left the magnets and the magnets then coincidentally formed a word that encouraged her to join the sect and she taught that it could not be a coincidence because she had prayed.

If there is a God and the catholic Church is His church, how is it possible that He allowed that to happen?
 
HN95 said:
how is it possible
Click to expand...
2 Thessalonians 2:9. Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,

2 Thessalonians 2:10. And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

2 Thessalonians 2:11. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
Click to expand...
 
Nothing more necessary to say here. Just to reinforce, Satan can work wonders but not miracles.

Satan won’t heal the sick.
 
Yes, precisely. Satan can heal slowly, but say something like your body working as though it has a functioning liver when your liver is actually nonfunctional or even missing is more a supernatural miracle.
 
But I just cannot understand, if Satan was behind the coincidences, wouldn´t it be better for him to just keep people completely out of Christianity.
 
There are three levels to consider.
  1. Natural
  2. Præternatural
  3. Supernatural
    We can work wonders in the natural. Things like medicine, etc. Think the physical world. God can work wonders in the natural world, and so can angels, and so can we humans.
    We cannot work wonders in the præternatural. This is the realm of the angels, and also demons at least to some degree. God can also work wonders in this level, and so can angels. We cannot.
    Supernatural is the realm in which only God can cause it to occur.
Satan can tell you 999 truths just to slip in one lie.
 
Last edited:
We can’t go through life relying on some superstition or perceived coincidences. You might want to try to get more details BTW; these coincidences aren’t always as profound as the mind might prefer them to be.
 
HN95 said:
There is a story about a young woman who joined that sect.
Click to expand...
The most likely probability is that it never happened. If i had a pound for every one of these types of stories I’d heard from fundamentalist protestants then i wouldn’t be going to work in the morning.
 
Not if he can keep a few hundred more from the sacraments.

I’d say the 7 sacraments are Satan’s worst nightmare.

so, if he can lead a few hundred from the sacraments, it makes it easier for him to get some more souls for himself.
 
I´m living in a heavily lutheran country where most of the people are compleately secular. It´s hard to buy this hundreds of souls argument.
 
[Asking about the state of faith in an entire country is another thing that requires a complicated historical analyses. Same for being amidst a secularized society that brings specific pressures and a dominant discourse that is deleterious.]
 
But as I said, the history and the Bible seem to support the catholic Church and be very devastating for the sect so it´s very confusing. Altough I´m not sure if the Bible can prove anything if the private interpretation is impossible.
 
And also, it´s not like this is some kind of frontline story in the sect, I just saw it in one of the book that the sect published where this woman was telling it with her own name and it began to puzzle me now that I´m almost ready to join the Church.
 
And I can also recall one odd coincidence that happened more than hundred years ago that seems to support one of the doctrines that this religious group teaches.
 
HN95 said:
And I can also recall one odd coincidence that happened more than hundred years ago that seems to support one of the doctrines that this religious group teaches.
Click to expand...
Would it help if i sent you some links to YouTube conspiracy videos and then you can see how common coincidences are? Most people get fooled by probability, you need to internalise this logic: it’s strange that you would win the lottery, it’s not strange that somebody would win the lottery. If you have a big enough sample size, people within that sample will experience coincidences.
 
I experience coincidences quite often, but they don’t mean anything. For example I may be reading a post on a forum and at the exact moment I’m reading it I’ll hear words playing on the tv in the background that are related to what I"m reading. It happens all the time.
 
What was that word that she interpreted as encouragement? This story lacks details.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top