[scienceguy]

Originally Posted by outlawl

Too bad God isnt powerful enough to give crunchberries to starving African Christians.

True,

But god (the universe or whatever) also gives you lots of extra crunch berries and the power to distribute them as you see fit.

For relatively little effort, you can make someone's day (or year) in Africa. Sending a useful person's kid to school for $150 (uniform and fees) a year frees their time up to get a job and then eventually get off your aid.

The trick is to try to be smart about it. Giving blindly can make the sotuation worse. You have ro treat t like an investment and check in on them regularly. Read something like "crisis caravan" to get a basic understanding about how mega charities and MONGOS work. Western union is everywhere.

[wavesport001]

If the odds of this type of thing are one in a million, then it HAS to happen 7,000 times because there are 7 billion people on the planet. The number of people on the planet makes this type of coincidence inevitable. The real miracle, statistically speaking, would be if you went through life NEVER having an experience like this. Cool story though!

[Treghc]

Reminds me of when I bought my first hookah. It was some off-name blue one from a hookah shop in town. We used to go to the hookah bars to smoke hookah, but now we didn't (I was living in a dorm with a roommate at the time). While the drunken escapades to the hookah bar were very fun, it was nice to have the option to just sit at home and smoke.

So, spring break came and I went back home to be with my girlfriend for the week. My roommate stayed in the apartment and used the hookah while I was gone. One night, he smoked (bare in mind, these things are not allowed in the dorms) and eventually went to bed with the hookah right in front of his bed.

The RA's did a random inspection the next morning and my roommate woke up to a slamming on the door, then a forced entry. The RA found the hookah, labeled it as a fire hazard, and threw the hookah in the trash. Broken the glass and everything. **** sucked cuz I had it for maybe 3 weeks after spending the $120 I scrounged up for it.

So, fastforward a week, my cousin is showing me his new house he has with a buddy of his. We're all walking around and he shows me the hot tub area. Laying next to it was a hookah bag. I asked him if he smokes and he replied with "We did for a bit, but it never gets used anymore. You want it?"

"Hell yeah I want it, I just had mine taken..." blah blah blah.

I get back to my apartment and, low and behold, it's the exact same hookah I had bought before, only with a different hose.

Was this God? No. It was the odd chance that a mass-produced item appeared somewhere else in my life when I didn't expect it to. I certainly didn't deserve the item, for I was a terrible person at the time, using my parents money for alcohol and drugs on a daily basis while I started flunking classes.

**** happens. If it pleases you to try and place a purpose in those events as some divine intervention, then good for you. I'll take the more likely odds and say it was just chance. Pretty cool coincidence, but still chance.

I'd be much more inclined to believe in divine intervention if I had survived a gunshot to the head or something actually miraculous.

edit -

Old thread is old.