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Everyone dies. Jesus also suffered horribly and died. You should be asking not why certain prayers don't seem to be answered, but why it is that people get sick, people get in terrible accidents, and even if there is temporary healing, they all die in the end.
You're missing my point. I'm not asking for everyone I love to live forever. I get this kind of beside-the-point reply so often it astounds me. I guess it's an attempt to diminish what was being asked for as irrelevant or unworthy. But then I guess that's all ya got.
Quote:
Originally Posted by saibot
You are suggesting putting God to the test. Jesus quoted Moses, who said, do not put God to the test.
You're missing my point. I'm not asking for everyone I love to live forever. I get this kind of beside-the-point reply so often it astounds me. I guess it's an attempt to diminish what was being asked for as irrelevant or unworthy. But then I guess that's all ya got.
Like I said -- being a god is a terrific gig.
But that is all what you are saying. That even after praying for a sick child the child dies. It is a heartbreaking tragedy for the family of course, but so many children die, we all die. Death is a fact of life the moment we are born. Why should my child alone be spared, when kindergarten kids get shot in their classroom? How do we EVER get over that heartache? There are no good answers to the question why did these children die, none. They were shot, that is the only true answer and that is something we CAN do something about.
Prayers only help the person who prays, and how that help arrives is uncertain and is also undeniable - for that person. It is an inner transformation. There is no other reason to pray, or any right way to pray, nor are there any guarantees in life. There are no bargains to be made with the Divinity. If you were taught that you can as a child, that is because you were a child. Now as an adult it is time to revisit the real reason for prayer.
There are two general kinds of prayer. One might be called meditative prayer. This is the "I'm not asking for anything, Thy will be done" sort of prayer. If the objective is letting go, releasing control, letting things be as they are, this kind of prayer is perfectly effective. It is the Christian analog to mindfulness meditation, in a sense. Its objective is acceptance, equanimity and peace, not some kind of particular outcome.
That's not the sort of prayer under discussion here. What we're talking about here is "According to your word I'm coming to you with a specific request because of a personal need" sort of prayer. And for the sake of argument we are assuming the "ask" is not somehow selfish or unreasonable or frivolous. "So and so is suffering terribly, please deliver them from this terrible disease" is not a selfish or wrong or frivolous or unreasonable request. It is other-directed and represents precisely the kind of compassion that I suspect most here can agree Jesus would approve of. Indeed, it's claimed in the gospels that Jesus frequently answered precisely such requests without a lot of fuss or equivocation or the need for the supplicant to fill out a form in triplicate to determine if the claim would be denied or not. He even is supposed to have raised the dead, resolving the request after the fact.
One productive avenue of discussion might be to debate whether it is ever god's will for someone to, for example, suffer terribly from a horrible disease. The general argument is that god, who knows all, sometimes achieves greater overall good from a particular evil. This is of course situational ethics, which Christians generally decry, but I have actually even heard the argument that god alone can engage in situational ethics because he alone is perfectly good and wise, knows the end from the beginning, etc etc.
If something like this is your argument, then it comes back to how would you ever distinguish answered prayer from the background noise of random happenstance? If god has the option to answer "no" or "later" or to deem a prayer unworthy without any useful feedback to help a sincere person to make more approved requests going forward, then there is no objective way to either give god glory for answered prayer or to say that god has not answered, or has answered badly. What WOULD work is for unselfish prayers for legitimate needs to be answered at least significantly more often than not. This could be measured as better health and longevity outcomes for Christians than for non-Christians; in less incarceration of Christians for crimes, vs non-Christians (think of all the worried parents praying for their troubled children to See The Light), and any number of other measures. That's still kind of a weak-sauce endorsement for this type of prayer, but it is at least something.
All I know is that I have observed extraordinarily virtuous and good people, beloved and treasured people, suffer terribly from horrible disease, and even die in the end, despite dozens of Christians, including so-called "prayer warriors" being in agreement together to pray for the person's deliverance. Afterwards there was no assessment as to what went wrong (or right), the tragic outcome and the resulting suffering of the bereaved was just assumed to be god's will somehow, although no one could even be arsed to speculate about what that will actually was. The attitude was really just a big shrug, in a sense. Oh well -- you win some, you lose some! It wasn't presented insensitively (usually) but that is the net-net of the thing.
There was of course the comfort that the person was now beyond the reach of their suffering, but that doesn't require a god to explain it or take credit for it. I could have put a bullet through their head and achieved the same effect -- except with greater mercy.
At the end of the day, non-meditative prayer, if you will, ends up being a constantly moving goalpost. The Bible will say things like, "ask and see if I don't open the storehouse of heaven and shower blessings down upon you", suggesting that the bar to worthiness and correctness is pretty low; it will say that your prayers don't work because you just aren't doing it right; and it will say pretty much everything in between. That leaves plenty of wiggle room to (1) offer up the promise of obtaining god's assistance with requesting prayers as one of the benefits of being god's child and (2) explain away all the times it doesn't produce desired or needed results and (3) still laud god for every time there's even a partial answer or an answer that has a totally naturalistic explanation, like doctors.
God's got a pretty good gig there! All the credit for success, none of the blame for failure. Failure is all YOUR fault somehow.
To what I bolded: Yes, the Bible says that...in part. But you have to read the WHOLE passage. I understand that the OP doesn't really want any Bible verses quoted, so I won't. But once you read the whole passage, you'll see that the bar isn't as low as you think.
I will say this: It seems that the passage you're thinking about is from Malachi. What is said BEFORE what you quoted is that the Lord is not happy with the people who have turned away from Him. He's imploring them to turn back to Him, so He can turn back to them. He wants to bless them, but not if they're going to be disobedient to Him. This is a two-way street.
If God says, "Follow my commandments and I will bless you..." and we DON'T follow His Commandments, should we really expect ANY blessings from God? See, one of the reasons why we may not be getting the response we want is because we're not doing our part.
I know you don't want to hear that "you might be doing something wrong", but quite often that's exactly what it is.
But that is all what you are saying. That even after praying for a sick child the child dies. It is a heartbreaking tragedy for the family of course, but so many children die, we all die. Death is a fact of life the moment we are born. Why should my child alone be spared, when kindergarten kids get shot in their classroom? How do we EVER get over that heartache? There are no good answers to the question why did these children die, none. They were shot, that is the only true answer and that is something we CAN do something about.
Prayers only help the person who prays, and how that help arrives is uncertain and is also undeniable - for that person. It is an inner transformation. There is no other reason to pray, or any right way to pray, nor are there any guarantees in life. There are no bargains to be made with the Divinity. If you were taught that you can as a child, that is because you were a child. Now as an adult it is time to revisit the real reason for prayer.
What's bolded isn't true. I've said plenty of prayers for others without telling them I'd be praying for them. I've seen God work in their lives.
To what I bolded: Yes, the Bible says that...in part. But you have to read the WHOLE passage. I understand that the OP doesn't really want any Bible verses quoted, so I won't. But once you read the whole passage, you'll see that the bar isn't as low as you think.
I will say this: It seems that the passage you're thinking about is from Malachi. What is said BEFORE what you quoted is that the Lord is not happy with the people who have turned away from Him. He's imploring them to turn back to Him, so He can turn back to them. He wants to bless them, but not if they're going to be disobedient to Him. This is a two-way street.
If God says, "Follow my commandments and I will bless you..." and we DON'T follow His Commandments, should we really expect ANY blessings from God? See, one of the reasons why we may not be getting the response we want is because we're not doing our part.
I know you don't want to hear that "you might be doing something wrong", but quite often that's exactly what it is.
It seems to me what your describing is virtual slavery.
I have been on both sides of stories like that. One time I was driving down the road to visit my mom when she was in long-term care. I was at a stoplight when I saw a homeless man standing on the sidewalk, holding up his sign. I honked my horn and motioned for the man to come to me. He did, and I rolled down my window and gave him $10. The guy almost fell backwards. He said, "You're not going to believe this, but this is the exact amount I just finished praying for!"
I can't even tell you how many times I've been on the receiving end of those kinds of prayers...
That homeless dude should pray for a cool million next time.
To what I bolded: Yes, the Bible says that...in part. But you have to read the WHOLE passage. I understand that the OP doesn't really want any Bible verses quoted, so I won't. But once you read the whole passage, you'll see that the bar isn't as low as you think.
I will say this: It seems that the passage you're thinking about is from Malachi. What is said BEFORE what you quoted is that the Lord is not happy with the people who have turned away from Him. He's imploring them to turn back to Him, so He can turn back to them. He wants to bless them, but not if they're going to be disobedient to Him. This is a two-way street.
If God says, "Follow my commandments and I will bless you..." and we DON'T follow His Commandments, should we really expect ANY blessings from God? See, one of the reasons why we may not be getting the response we want is because we're not doing our part.
I know you don't want to hear that "you might be doing something wrong", but quite often that's exactly what it is.
To me, the condition, "follow my commandments" was actually part of the promise, as I most certainly did so. I knew that verse is often quoted out of context by "prosperity gospel" types but I didn't use it in that way. In fact oddly I don't recall ever asking for financial largesse from god, although I ended up doing relatively well in that regard anyway, as it turned out.
Now we are in the problem part of these discussions because whatever I or someone else didn't get from prayer, whatever tragedy or catastrophe befell them cannot be god's fault and therefore is either that of the requestor or just the inevitable knock-on effects of living in a fallen world which overrides or limits god's desire to help. There's nowhere else to go with it. So accepting that for the sake of argument, again I ask: how would one ever know that god did or did not answer any particular prayer, since it's so chock-a-block full of if's and's & but's? Conditions up the wing-wang and so if hypothetically things HAD gone my way, how would I even celebrate it as answered prayer? It might have been that god answered "meh" and circumstances just went my way. I mean people do go into remission from disease, they do sometimes hit on the right combination of skilled doctors and just the right medication. Sometimes there's a really expeditious recovery from horrible injuries. And people like me sometimes have fantastic things happen without asking god or anyone else for it.
My father was a one pack a day Camel man through most of his adult life. Around the age of 50 he stopped cold turkey after asking god for help with it, and he did so, no problem. He liked to preen about that a little bit in fact. But the truth is he had fallen asleep on the couch while smoking and set it on fire. My mother would not abide the destruction of "her" couch. Ultimatums were issued. So was it the fear of god or the fear of my mother? Also years later I read about the dynamics of nicotine addiction and my father's ability to quit fit perfectly with the fact that the "tipping point" of nicotine addiction can in many people be quite high, and a pack a day habit doesn't equal physical addiction for everyone. I suspect my Dad was able to quit because he wasn't an addict, but merely habituated. I could be wrong of course; god might have tipped the scales in his favor as he thought. Who could say? And that is my entire point. Whatever requests god grants or even unasked-for blessings he bestows are seldom un-explainable apart from god. There are people who are determined to credit god, but to an outside observer with no skin in the game, I just don't see what people seem to so often want or need to see.
Life is far more easily explained, in my view, as a series of impersonal things happening, some of which you like, some of which you don't, some of which you have partial influence over, some of which you don't. Some of which are at the end of causal chains you aren't even aware of or didn't anticipate, some of which it's easy to see cause and effect.
What's bolded isn't true. I've said plenty of prayers for others without telling them I'd be praying for them. I've seen God work in their lives.
Sure. That is your experience of your prayer working in their lives.
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