Can you name one thing positive about religion that can't happen without religion?
At a personal request to join this thread, I will attempt to answer this question with my own personal experiences and with testimonies given just to my husband and me, with as many as I can think of:
#1 answers to prayers, ( my husband and I began praying the prayer of Jabez
1 Chronicles 4:10
Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, "Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain." And God granted his request. (NIV)
and after 1 month: my husband told me to remove our names from future church offices and functions;
after 4 months: I typed up our resumes and before I typed the final draft of his, he received information of a job opening but we would have to reply soon. We stared at each other and I stayed up until it was perfect, my husband is a perfectionist...
after 2-3 weeks after mailing off the resume, he was called and interview #1 was set up.
after 5-6 weeks his 3rd interview was completed but now he still had to pass the test, with a time limit and had to be error free!
Timeline so far has been January, now it was July and we still didn't know if he would pass this test for another 6-8 weeks. This turned out to be a good time for me to start packing while he studied. The year was 2001. He passed the test and was told so on the day he took it, the waiting was over and all of the prayer, tension, packing, pacing was answered and paid in full!
I was training my replacement at my job on 9/11/01, she was deaf and I typed out what I was hearing over the radio to her by using her little translator that looks like a big calculator with the same size paper roll. I had to change that roll twice before I was finished.
Everyone in the office stopped and prayed and I prayed for all of the orphans since my heart went out to all the school children who had to evacuate just across the street from the twin towers.
We found our house, much the same way because trying "our way" wasn't working until we started praying. By mid December 02 we were moving in!
#2 miracles, (e.g. entire cancerous tumors disappear after the church prays and prior to chemo, or any other treatment)
#3 food will be spontaneously delivered to your home when you don't have any money to buy groceries and all you did was pray about, being too embarrassed to ask anyone for help. I use the word spontaneous because the person or people who bring food they have prepared didn't know who they were cooking for until they loaded it up in the car.
#4 rent, mortgages will be paid by the generosity of others and much like the food mentioned above, the people giving didn't know who was getting the money until they were driving.
I think I'll stop for now.