Biff the unclean

Is there a type of prayer that is always answered either always yes or always no?
What I'm asking is, is there a pattern that is recognizable in answered prayers that would allow you to distinguish them from purely random events? If God is consistent then his will would be consistent and you would expect a pattern to develop.

Badfish

See? God already knows what you need before you ask for it, so if the prayer remains unanswered then it must be his will not to answer it. Consider the prophesies, I would imagine that some orchestration would have to occur in order for God's written will to come to pass.

There is a bigger picture, and that is eternal life. That's what we are promised, so death is really inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

winstonjen

Well then, does that mean we should kill everyone and then commit suicide? Is it god's grand plan for us to realise that this life is worthless and then to die? It's hard to figure it out when there are so many conflicting ideas in the bible and among his 'followers'.

Ronin

If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad.

The true 'original sin' found in the christian fable was not who ate of the Tree, but the fool who planted it.

schu

I don't know Ronin. It seems to me the priesthood who planted the idea are not so much the fools as the fertile ground of the believers in which it was planted. The priesthood is the parasite sucking the lifeblood from the foolish believers.

schu

So that is how it works? A child who believes in magic and prays for a piece of candy will get it, but the mother of a dying child who believes in JC but has a little uncertainty about the efficacy of prayer has a dead child on her hands? What if the child who prays for candy is the sister of the dying child? Then the dying child can live? Because the sister of the child believes in magic, but not because the mother believes in JC. Say the one child had died before the other got around to saying a prayer for it, can it be brought back from the dead? After all, JC sayd "ANYTHING, WHATSOEVER". If the child who believes in magic doesn't get around to praying until the other is in the coffin, it's veins full of embalming fluid can the dead child be brought back to life just as easily as getting a piece of candy?


Maybe it is your point of view that is tendentious nonsense and says volumes about the minds of believers.

Radorth

Mine won't. And what does that have to do with the discussion?

You are oversimplifying. People who pray regularly, in faith and importunely could be avoiding all kinds of problems. You have absolutely no way of knowing or proving otherwise. If we looked at all the details of these obscure cases you like to cite, I doubt we would find people who pray just as Jesus said to. I've tried it and it works. Why should I wipe out a lifetime of experience of God's blessings because you cite a case without any details and raise inane questions. In the case of severely abused children, for example, one would find that 95% of them had negligent parents.

What's interesting here is the assertion that we should take personal responsibility, but if we pray to God, he should absolve us of same, and fix whatever problems we have created. Thus if you agree with both, you have completely contradicted your own logic.

I hope you aren't this irrational when speaking to your boss. If so, you would be out of a job by now.

Still waiting to hear if you would choose to live here if God existed, and said this world was the best he could do (without wiping out free will). I believe most skeptics would, and so these indictments of God are specious by definition.

Rad

Biff the unclean

No, I don't see at all.
If prayers are answered that reflect God's will then all of a certain type of God's-will-reflecting prayer would be answered.
If all prayers that did not reflect God's will went unanswered then you would find another catagory that went consistently unanswered.
You should see a pattern.

But you don't. All you see is randomness--no sign of "God's will" at all.

luvluv

Golliath:

Okay, well if we cannot justify the notion that one world has a greater amount of good than another world then how would one attempt an argument from evil? If we can't say for sure that this world is worse than any alternative world that God is likely to create, why is the state of this world sufficient grounds for the idea that God does not exist?

So, behind door number one, I admit to you that we cannot know whether or not one world has a greater amount of good than another world, and therefore we have to drop both the argument from evil and my response to it. Without a sufficient notion of what is good, we cannot even say with a certainty that suffering is good or not good, so we cannot even consider suffering as an example of something which we should not expect from a "good" God.

Behind door number two, we assume that we have a notion of what goodness is. We assume that we have a right to believe that a room full of healthy, happy children entails more good than a room full of diseased and unhappy children. We have to assume this in order to make an argument from evil work.

But if we assume that there can be degrees of goodness, and that one state of affairs can have a greater degree of goodness than another, then it follows that there can be a state of affairs which includes suffering which could conceivably be better than a state of affairs which does not include suffering. If we believe that freedom is a definite good, then it would stand to reason that freely chosen virtues are more good than imposed virtues, since these virtues have the added attribute of freedom. This being the case, would we expect an completely benevolent God to create a world with the ultimate potential for goodness, or with the ultimate potential for prevention of suffering? That, I admit, is a judgement call, but one which we are justified in making either way, and under that consideration the argument from evil would equally fail as a disproof.

So, behind door number one, we have no notion of goodness or what would make one world better than another world. We therefore have to concede both the argument from evil and any defenses or theodicies offered against it. Behind door number two some states of affairs can entail more good than others, and a free world, if freedom is good, would entail more good than a world without freedom. But freedom entails the possibility of evil and suffering, and thus the argument from evil would fail as a disproof.

Let's make a deal.

lpetrich:

Well, IIRC, he was a little bit worse than "bored". He was miserable. (Is there anyway to order individual episodes of the Twilight Zone, btw?)

Perhaps it ought to make one wonder whether or not being in Heaven really means getting everything you want.

beth

Harsh as his replies can get, and even if it pains me to admit this, I think that Rad has given the most rational answers in this thread.