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Prayer and power

Meffy said:
@RandFan: *9_9* Well, it's so. People short-change themselves all the time, and I don't think that's good for the psyche. Miracles come from people, not gods.
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I couldn't agree more, but why the rolling eyes? My smile was sincere. I think your post outstanding. In fact I think it worthy of a :clap:.
 
Heh, that was blushing. You'd not think a skunk could blush. And thanks.

BTW, your sig material makes me think of Oolon Colluphid's disproof of God's existence... (the HHGG Oolon, not the JREF one)
 
elliotfc said:
What tight spots?

Why should God do whatever we tell him to do?

-Elliot
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He (and his son) should do what (they) supposedly promised to do. Nothing more or less:

Matthew 7:7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?
10 Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?
11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

Matthew 18:19 Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.

Matthew 21:22 And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.

There are plenty of others. The only requirement I can see in any of them is that the person praying should believe. "Believe what" is not specified. But you can cover the eventualities pretty easily:

I'm praying to God, because I believe in God. That's one.
I believe God can give me what I ask for, because he's God. That's two.
I believe God will give me what I ask for, because he said he would, see above. That's three.

So when I believe, and I ask for something over a period of decades and don't get it, and when I ask for different things and don't get them, either, what am I to think?

1. God lies.
2. I am asking for help from an imaginary being.

Now, you can make apologies for God, and you can invent all kinds of conditions. But the truth is, the promises are very simple, and have only one condition: belief. And yet time and again, the promises are not kept.

And to use parsimony, the simplest reason, that's because there is nothing there which made any promises, nor which can keep any promises.

Otherwise, God's real, but he's a big fat liar.
 
God's Guarantee: And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive. Matthew 21:22

Disclaimer: God reserves the right to answer your prayer with the answer he deems fit. God reserves the right of substitution. God reserves the right to substitute no answer for an answer because if you think about it "no" is an answer. Also if you pray for a puppy God has the right to substitute a lollipop given to you from your aunt in lieu of the puppy.
 
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elliotfc said:
3. When we pray, *we are rejecting power, not embracing it*. Prayer is different from, say, a superstition like the Ghost Dance. Various Indian groups performed the Ghost Dance because they believed in would exert power and control over God, who would then give benefits to them and resurrect their dead warriors and all that. Press the button, and X happens. *BUT CHRISTIANS DO NOT HAVE THIS EXPECTATION IN PRAYER*. Or, rather, they ought not to have that expectation. Christians reject superstition, the belief that God can be controlled if I just do A, B, and C. When we pray, we ask, we question, we praise, we think, we talk, all that. But it is not result orientated! If it was, *IT WOULD HAVE DISAPPEARED COMPELTELY, JUST AS THE GHOST DANCE DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY*.
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:confused:
This contradicts everything we see: faith healers, collective praying for the soldiers in Irak, prayers for the ill, etc. Christians pray because they expect results. Of course, when the results are favorable, it's God's miracle; when they aren't, God works in mysterious ways.

Ghost dances? Sunday mass is a the modern version. The only difference with the tribal rituals is that Christianity is the dominant religion. If and when Christianity loses its top spot, its rituals will be seen as superstition.

If we start talking about Catholicism, the examples multiply. I've seen pilgrims walk hundreds of miles to ask for special favors from God or the Virgin Mary. I've seen parents crawling on bloody knees up to a church, with their sick child in arms, begging for a miracle cure. I've heard endless rosaries in hospitals. And when the results are not what expected, they just try again, and again, and again, because the believe their prayers weren't good enough. These are the ghost dances of our times.
 
slingblade said:
He (and his son) should do what (they) supposedly promised to do. Nothing more or less:

Matthew 7:7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?
10 Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?
11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

Matthew 18:19 Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.

Matthew 21:22 And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.

There are plenty of others. The only requirement I can see in any of them is that the person praying should believe. "Believe what" is not specified. But you can cover the eventualities pretty easily:

I'm praying to God, because I believe in God. That's one.
I believe God can give me what I ask for, because he's God. That's two.
I believe God will give me what I ask for, because he said he would, see above. That's three.

So when I believe, and I ask for something over a period of decades and don't get it, and when I ask for different things and don't get them, either, what am I to think?

1. God lies.
2. I am asking for help from an imaginary being.

Now, you can make apologies for God, and you can invent all kinds of conditions. But the truth is, the promises are very simple, and have only one condition: belief. And yet time and again, the promises are not kept.

And to use parsimony, the simplest reason, that's because there is nothing there which made any promises, nor which can keep any promises.

Otherwise, God's real, but he's a big fat liar.
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Exactly! All of the excuses and cop-outs are just that.
 
Eliot,

We do not ask that God answers ALL prayers (despite the biblical verses quoted above). Or even most. That's not the point of the amputee website.

The point the amputee website makes is that God never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever (ever) answers an amputee's prayers regarding amputation. Yet there are all kinds of claims that God answers prayers to cure cancer, save miners, etc.


So, either God really hate amputees, or people are mistaken about God is answering prayers to cure cancer, etc.

I'm guessing you fall into the latter camp?
 
elliotfc said:
Pardon me for saying so...but I think this is all basic Christianity and I'm surprised that individuals think they've had some major epiphany by realizing that God doesn't heal amputees or that people would waste time conducting scientific studies on prayer efficacy. When we pray, we are embracing our weakness, and we are not exerting any power over God at all. Christ told us not to put him to the test, and expecting prayer to "work" is doing just that.

-Elliot
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Well, this sounds like your opinion on the matter. Here are some links, from major and minor Christian sources, which take a different tack. This is why we are confused - major Christian sources claim that God answers prayers.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2002/001/1.11.html
http://www.newlightministries.com/gary.html
http://www.biblebelievers.com/moody_sermons/m3.html
http://www.everystudent.com/wires/prayers.html
http://www.christianwomentoday.com/prayer/2ways.html
http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?event=AFF&p=1023817&item_no=15875
http://www.raptureready.com/resource/anonymous/kc8.html
http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/prayansw.html
http://www.watchtower.org/library/w/2000/3/1/article_02.htm

I could just keep linking, but that would be annoying to both of us, and you get the idea. None of these links claim that all prayers are answered, or that the answer is what we want, but that it sometimes work (for convuluted reasons that I don't personally buy).

Yet amputees never get their prayers answered. Weird, huh?
 
Maybe somebody that god really loves is praying every day for amputees not to be healed.

You could wrestle god and make him tap out like Jacob did. God can be made to serve your will with physical force. Who needs prayer when you can get better results from a perfected abdominal stretch. Genesis 32:22-30
 
*ponder*

Can 2000-pound leg presses, or rather fake 2000-pound leg presses, make God serve your will?
 
roger said:
Eliot,

We do not ask that God answers ALL prayers (despite the biblical verses quoted above). Or even most. That's not the point of the amputee website.

The point the amputee website makes is that God never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever (ever) answers an amputee's prayers regarding amputation. Yet there are all kinds of claims that God answers prayers to cure cancer, save miners, etc.


So, either God really hate amputees, or people are mistaken about God is answering prayers to cure cancer, etc.

I'm guessing you fall into the latter camp?
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Thanks Roger. Yes, this really is the salient point and it is easy to lose focus as to this point.

That which is otherwise impossible to heal without god is also impossible to heal with god.
 
Darat said:
An interesting site that may provide you with a good starting point to explore the fascinating history of the Lord's prayer and some of the debates about what it actually means can be found at this site: http://www.thenazareneway.com/lords_prayer.htm
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That is indeed interesting. I wish I knew how reflective it was of mainstream scholarship. The website as a whole seems to be somewhat preoccupied with fringe theories of the Da Vinci Code variety.
 
Also, to follow up on the amputee website. It is, of course, a bit of a glib argument. A soundbite for a soundbite age. Let's not mistake that glibness, however, for absense of a very serious argument.

That argument, with less soundbite appeal, is that in cases where we can't possibly mistake whether God answered the prayer or not, he never has answered. Not once. Please provide a reference if you disagree (there's a million in it for you if you can do that, btw).

Yet where we can make that mistake, where it is entirely possible that God, if he exists, didn't answer that specific prayer, we have millions of cases where people, looking for that pattern, shout out "God answered my prayer". Refer to my links above for just a few examples.

It doesn't roll of the tongue so easily when put that way. So we ask, with the weight of those serious questions behind us, "why doesn't God answer the prayers of amputees?"
 
ceo_esq said:
That is indeed interesting. I wish I knew how reflective it was of mainstream scholarship. The website as a whole seems to be somewhat preoccupied with fringe theories of the Da Vinci Code variety.
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I found the site a little while ago when I was searching for info about the translation of the Lord's Prayer, I never checked if you like the scholarship of the site. I did however find quite a few other sites with similar styles of translations but that one was good in having a potted a history of the different ways it could be and has been translated. (The spoken prayer audio which I think sounds wonderful probably helped keep that particular site in mind.)
 
empeake said:
:confused:
This contradicts everything we see: faith healers, collective praying for the soldiers in Irak, prayers for the ill, etc. Christians pray because they expect results. Of course, when the results are favorable, it's God's miracle; when they aren't, God works in mysterious ways.
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Yes, they expect the results that God will provide.

They do not expect the results that they want, unless, what they want is in line with what God wants.

You have faith, basically, that Christians are out of their minds. I don't share that faith. Why not just say that. Christians just don't make sense when it comes to the topic of prayer (let's just stick with that singular point, I'm sure you'd like to nominate other things). Fine. Then I can have one less person to respond to.

To you, you see Christians making specific petitions, those petitions not being fulfilled in our result-oriented thinking, and you actually believe that Christians ignore this fact, and just keep on praying, pretending that unfilled petitions...what, never happened? My point is that Christians understand, better than you do apparently, that God's will ought to be done, and not our will. *This distinction, which I don't think anybody here is willing to accept, is what enables prayer, and is what makes prayer something that will continue to happen*. Now, if you're not willing to grant Christianity this nuance, and if your stance is that we're just all completely daft, please say that explicitly, so I can weed you out of the group of people in this thread. I'm not going to be able to keep up with every response the way things are going on, please help me out here. Tell me that you think Christians are complete morons when it comes to prayer...if you think that, if you don't mind.

-Elliot
 
roger said:
So, either God really hate amputees, or people are mistaken about God is answering prayers to cure cancer, etc.

I'm guessing you fall into the latter camp?
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This sounds like a false dilemma to me. Isn't it possible that God sometimes cures cancer, but doesn't choose to regrow limbs (or grow an extra limb, for that matter)?

roger said:
Well, this sounds like your opinion on the matter. Here are some links, from major and minor Christian sources, which take a different tack. This is why we are confused - major Christian sources claim that God answers prayers.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2002/001/1.11.html
http://www.newlightministries.com/gary.html
http://www.biblebelievers.com/moody_sermons/m3.html
http://www.everystudent.com/wires/prayers.html
http://www.christianwomentoday.com/prayer/2ways.html
http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?event=AFF&p=1023817&item_no=15875
http://www.raptureready.com/resource/anonymous/kc8.html
http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/prayansw.html
http://www.watchtower.org/library/w/2000/3/1/article_02.htm
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God not granting all prayers would seem only to be a problem for anyone interpreting those Bible passages that were posted as meaning that God grants all prayers. I'm not sure how many people would fall into that category. I couldn't find any such beliefs on any of the links posted.

-Bri
 
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