What does prayer do?

cvanwey

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I thought about it for a while.
How much evidence do you ask for before you trust someone?

I generally trust people first. The moment I have evidence to mistrust them only then I ask for evidence to bolster my trust in them again.

Let's start here...

I think I get what you are saying... When meeting people, you start all of them on an equal footing. And only when they 'wrong' you, lie to you, or other, do you begin to distrust them more and more? Based upon your prior response(s), I'm going to assume you believe God entertains, responds to, and/or answers intercessory prayer.

Now, let's go back to the (STEPS) case study, where you stated (paraphrased) - "God does not engage, when He knows He's being tested." Okay. Let's assume this is 100% true. And move forward...

I work with two colleagues, in particular. Both I have known for years. Both, which whom I deem very trust-worthy, very reliable, and as earnest as they can possibly be. Which is to say, they have never 'wronged' me personally; and we have spent countless hours together.

Here's where it gets interesting. One is a Christian. One is a Hindu. A patient, with a critical condition, and with temporary delusions, had pulled out all his line access. Thus, could not be treated with the necessary IV medications ordered. The patient was also considered a 'hard stick'. Meaning, due to the patient's comorbidities, seemed to virtually have 'no veins' for access. The primary RN asked both the Christian and the Hindu to attempt and regain IV access. They both failed. The nurse then asked me. As luck would have it, I was able to start a successful IV. The patient then received treatment, etc...

Afterwards, at differing times, both the Christian and the Hindu stated they prayed for me, after their failed attempt.

Moral of the story... You might want to re-think trust, as a viable mechanism :) As I trust they were both earnest in their convictions, in their petitionary prayer(s), etc... Getting back to the 'heart' of this thread, we have, what seems to be four viable conclusions:

1. Both nurse's god(s) answered the call
2. One nurse(s) god answered, while the other nurse was earnestly mistaken
3. The one true god optioned not to answer this particular prayer, for whatever reason
4. Neither claimed god(s) exist, and both such nurses merely accept the hits, and ignore the misses

And after you wrestle with the above 4 presented options, then, we can adjourn back to the OP...


If God stopped answering all prayers, would the above outcome had been any different?
 
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2PhiloVoid

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Let's start here...

I think I get what you are saying... When meeting people, you start all of them on an equal footing. And only when they 'wrong' you, lie to you, or other, do you begin to distrust them more and more? Based upon your prior response(s), I'm going to assume you believe God entertains, responds to, and/or answers intercessory prayer.

Now, let's go back to the (STEPS) case study, where you stated (paraphrased) - "God does not engage, when He knows He's being tested." Okay. Let's assume this is 100% true. And move forward...

I work with two colleagues, in particular. Both I have known for years. Both, which whom I deem very trust-worthy, very reliable, and as earnest as they can possibly be. Which is to say, they have never 'wronged' me personally; and we have spent countless hours together.

Here's where it gets interesting. One is a Christian. One is a Hindu. A patient, with a critical condition, and with temporary delusions, had pulled out all his line access. Thus, could not be treated with the necessary IV medications ordered. The patient was also considered a 'hard stick'. Meaning, due to the patient's comorbidities, seemed to virtually have 'no veins' for access. The primary RN asked both the Christian and the Hindu to attempt and regain IV access. They both failed. The nurse then asked me. As luck would have it, I was able to start a successful IV. The patient then received treatment, etc...

Afterwards, at differing times, both the Christian and the Hindu stated they prayed for me, after their failed attempt.

Moral of the story... You might want to re-think trust, as a viable mechanism :) As I trust they were both earnest in their convictions, in their petitionary prayer(s), etc... Getting back to the 'heart' of this thread, we have, what seems to be four viable conclusions:

1. Both nurse's god(s) answered the call
2. One nurse(s) god answered, while the other nurse was earnestly mistaken
3. The one true god optioned not to answer this particular prayer, for whatever reason
4. Neither claimed god(s) exist, and both such nurses merely accept the hits, and ignore the misses

And after you wrestle with the above 4 presented options, then, we can adjourn back to the OP...


If God stopped answering all prayers, would the above outcome had been any different?

Who cares! You got the IV started again, prayer or no prayer. :dontcare:
 
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I also believe this, but Jesus will sort this out, I believe.
Seems to me He might have set it up a bit better in the first place.
Still, He was only an all-knowing, all-powerful entity of pure love. How could He have known His religion was going to go corrupt and fractured?
 
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Tomorrow doesn't need to come if yesterday already has ...
O...kay...
So, because Jesus has come already what you're saying is He doesn't need to come again.
Cool! Of course, totally opposed to Christianity, but you've got my vote.

I think you got a bit mixed up in your analogies there, Philo. That's the kind of thing that can happen when you're only interested in scoring rhetorical points, rather than contributing to a discussion in order to actually lead to better understadnding.
 
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True, but those things are universal. They may seem more obvious in relation to some beliefs or kinds of belief, but their application is wider than that, once you get through the layers to the most basic premises.
Sorry? Didn't quite catch that.
 
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2PhiloVoid

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O...kay...
So, because Jesus has come already what you're saying is He doesn't need to come again.
Cool! Of course, totally opposed to Christianity, but you've got my vote.
I don't think this is what I actually said, let alone implied. But I understand. You're probably not up to speed on the various views on Eschatology that are 'out there' for our mutual consumption and thought, are you?

I think you got a bit mixed up in your analogies there, Philo. That's the kind of thing that can happen when you're only interested in scoring rhetorical points, rather than contributing to a discussion in order to actually lead to better understadnding.
And what is it you think you're doing here on CF? Leading everyone to understand 'how' to be 'more' reasonable?

But here's the thing: If I really thought you were here on CF to pursue an honest quest to better understand Christianity rather than to constantly demote it, in full, and rather than pandering to my PARANOIA that folks like you are really closet Satanists of the more athiestic and anarchic kind (or maybe just an old fashioned, iron-clad Communist) you instead offered an olive branch to show the moral superiority and kindness of atheism (such as it is), then I'd be more than happy to actually drop the rhetoric since I wouldn't think I'd have to attempt to 'burn' the atheistic polemics.

So, if you'll drop the Elymas act, then I'll drop the Ghost Rider act ... although I won't be able to drop my being an Existentialist since, well, that's not an act.
 
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I don't think this is what I actually said, let alone implied.
Yes. It is.
Thomas said Jesus would sort out the problems.
Tinker Gray said "tomorrow never comes."
You said tomorrow doesn't need to come.

And what is it you think you're doing here on CF? Leading everyone to understand 'how' to be 'more' reasonable?
Yes.

If I really thought you were here on an honest quest to better understand Christianity rather than to constantly demote it in full
False dilemma fallacy.
I'm here on an honest quest to explore the contradictions in Christianity, with the intention of showing people its mistakes. As are most non-Christians on this debating forum.

rather than pandering to my PARANOIA that folks like you are really closet Satanists of the more athiestic and anarchic kind (or maybe just an iron-clad Communist)
That actually does sound pretty much like paranoia.

then I'd be more than happy to actually drop the rhetoric since I wouldn't think I'd have to attempt to 'burn' the atheistic polemics.
I don't think you would, Philo. If you dropped the rhetoric, you'd have to give straight answers, and then you'd find yourself in difficulties.
 
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Tom 1

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Sorry? Didn't quite catch that.

Aka ‘you have to believe something’. A world view can be based a few things you have evidence for, but people tend to not see the gap between ‘x or y is true as far as I can tell’ and ‘everything else more or less is how I think it is’. I don’t think we can see that gap, our brains wouldn’t have it, they constantly work to create an illusion of at least some degree of certainty. In other words I’ve yet to see any difference between the basic thinking behind any worldview, it’s all ‘I know this stuff, so everything else must fit with what I know’ with a broad range of misconceptions about other world views mixed in there.
 
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Tom 1

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Sorry? Didn't quite catch that.

I don't have a lot of time to write any more than shorthand answers, but maybe this will explain it better:

What the bible claims for itself is 'experiential' evidence of its claims to be worth reading, and reasoning based on the experience of trying to do things in one way as opposed to another way, sometimes very specific things, as in lists of what are called acts of the sinful nature, and more generally as in try living this way, let's reason about what went wrong in this or that situation, and so on. There's plenty of scholarship on (increasingly accessible) writings from the ancient world on the kinds of things people were preoccupied with that can enable you to some extent to get inside their heads and see the bible, and society in general, from their perspective, which provides a better basis for judging it on its own merits. That is a discussion that could go on for a long time, but as one obvious example the whole idea of how man came to be man - in a practical, biological sense - was of zero interest to the writers of genesis. Their interests were varied, and included things like who has authority, who has what responsiblities, what kinds of behaviours are destructive and which promote life, how can these behaviours be worked into a system that provides a 'best possible' society, how does that society then establish and maintain it's unique identity - and a load of other stuff. These are the kind of things the bible is about, entwining aspects of the character of a super-intelligent being who embodies both the best and the most terrible aspects of the possibilities of life, the life in tune with this spirit that brings life, and the life out of tune that destroys itself, and so on. The only way to understand what this is all about is through knowledge of what the bible is on its own terms and through the experience of living in accordance with that. Questions like 'well surely there should be something about God we can test scientifically' are nonsense questions, or inappropriate questions, like saying 'well, a teaspoon is a tool so I should be able to fix my car with a teaspoon'. The writers of the bible had no interest whatsoever in the nature of nature, there is plenty of scholarship to demonstrate that plainly. The whole proof of the bible - i.e. does applying it have beneficial results - is wrapped up in the 'thinking' of the bible - you have to meet it on its own terms, and either accept it or reject it on its own terms. Anything else is nonsense, like saying that a car cannot be a machine since it can't be fixed with your teaspoon, or the teaspoon must be faulty because it can't fix the car. I was going to say something about how Christianity looks in practice but I'm running out of time so maybe that's something for another post.

Science or scientific thinking is of course about testing and applying ideas about the physical world. It has its own set of rules and ways of thinking etc, containing evidence for many things about the world we live in. So far, it has not yet successfully addressed the same issues the bible does. There have been attempts to 'scientifically engineer' societies but they haven't worked very well, I suppose the soft sciences might be said to sit somewhere between hard science and the kind of thing much of the bible is about. In any case, for the sake of brevity what the bible is concerned with and what hard science is concerned with are entirely different domains from the ground up. The idea of whether or not they are compatible is irrelevant, neither one attempts to approach any issue in a comparable way. Each carries it's own way of thinking, a person who has a primarily scientific mind will tend to see things in that way, and perhaps conclude that the universe must be entirely material, a person with a primarily experience based way of thinking will rely on their own experiences. Ideas that come from within one or other of these or other ways of thinking tend to be consistent with and support those ways of thinking, all well and good. The problem as in what leads to silo mentalities is that on the one hand we only have so much brain space and holding conflicting world views is hard, so we tend to go with whichever one seems to make most sense to us for whatever reason, and on the other we simply have no way of knowing what all the stuff we don't know anything about (aka pretty much everything) is. As I see it there is simply no starting point for us to make grandiose claims of knowledge far beyond what we actually have. I am sure that how people 2,000 yrs from now will think about the universe will be so radically different from how we conceive of it now that we can't even begin to imagine imagining anything about it . But, we still have an inbuilt imperative to be sure about something, so we delude ourselves that knowing a,b and c must mean that everything from d to z is just waiting to fall in line with what we already think.
 
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Seems to me He might have set it up a bit better in the first place.
Still, He was only an all-knowing, all-powerful entity of pure love. How could He have known His religion was going to go corrupt and fractured?
No that's the nature of Christianity as disigned.
He chose a Christianity in which His Christians have power. True power. Matthew 16:19. And he predicted that Christianity would have problems stemming from the inside, Galatians 5:15 - this refers to dangers stemming from the inside of Christianity against themselves, but I think it could be easily referred to as a proof verse that Christians would endanger other folks, also.
Whereas God never fails, man does. But this is true for Christians also. So... when Christians get the power, things might go wrong and Christianity ends up endangering others. My opinion.
Thomas said Jesus would sort out the problems.
Tinker Gray said "tomorrow never comes."
You said tomorrow doesn't need to come.
Yes I said so indeed. Jesus did come already, here @2PhiloVoid and I agree. This should be enough (until his second coming), 2PhiloVoid agree again.
However, when man's proneness to sin comes into play, this is what you get.
 
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I don't have a lot of time to write any more than shorthand answers, but maybe this will explain it better:

What the bible claims for itself is 'experiential' evidence of its claims to be worth reading, and reasoning based on the experience of trying to do things in one way as opposed to another way, sometimes very specific things, as in lists of what are called acts of the sinful nature, and more generally as in try living this way, let's reason about what went wrong in this or that situation, and so on. There's plenty of scholarship on (increasingly accessible) writings from the ancient world on the kinds of things people were preoccupied with that can enable you to some extent to get inside their heads and see the bible, and society in general, from their perspective, which provides a better basis for judging it on its own merits. That is a discussion that could go on for a long time, but as one obvious example the whole idea of how man came to be man - in a practical, biological sense - was of zero interest to the writers of genesis. Their interests were varied, and included things like who has authority, who has what responsiblities, what kinds of behaviours are destructive and which promote life, how can these behaviours be worked into a system that provides a 'best possible' society, how does that society then establish and maintain it's unique identity - and a load of other stuff. These are the kind of things the bible is about, entwining aspects of the character of a super-intelligent being who embodies both the best and the most terrible aspects of the possibilities of life, the life in tune with this spirit that brings life, and the life out of tune that destroys itself, and so on. The only way to understand what this is all about is through knowledge of what the bible is on its own terms and through the experience of living in accordance with that. Questions like 'well surely there should be something about God we can test scientifically' are nonsense questions, or inappropriate questions, like saying 'well, a teaspoon is a tool so I should be able to fix my car with a teaspoon'. The writers of the bible had no interest whatsoever in the nature of nature, there is plenty of scholarship to demonstrate that plainly. The whole proof of the bible - i.e. does applying it have beneficial results - is wrapped up in the 'thinking' of the bible - you have to meet it on its own terms, and either accept it or reject it on its own terms. Anything else is nonsense, like saying that a car cannot be a machine since it can't be fixed with your teaspoon, or the teaspoon must be faulty because it can't fix the car. I was going to say something about how Christianity looks in practice but I'm running out of time so maybe that's something for another post.

Science or scientific thinking is of course about testing and applying ideas about the physical world. It has its own set of rules and ways of thinking etc, containing evidence for many things about the world we live in. So far, it has not yet successfully addressed the same issues the bible does. There have been attempts to 'scientifically engineer' societies but they haven't worked very well, I suppose the soft sciences might be said to sit somewhere between hard science and the kind of thing much of the bible is about. In any case, for the sake of brevity what the bible is concerned with and what hard science is concerned with are entirely different domains from the ground up. The idea of whether or not they are compatible is irrelevant, neither one attempts to approach any issue in a comparable way. Each carries it's own way of thinking, a person who has a primarily scientific mind will tend to see things in that way, and perhaps conclude that the universe must be entirely material, a person with a primarily experience based way of thinking will rely on their own experiences. Ideas that come from within one or other of these or other ways of thinking tend to be consistent with and support those ways of thinking, all well and good. The problem as in what leads to silo mentalities is that on the one hand we only have so much brain space and holding conflicting world views is hard, so we tend to go with whichever one seems to make most sense for whatever reason, and on the other we simply have no way of knowing what all the stuff we don't know anything about (aka pretty much everything) is. As I see it there is simply no starting point for us to make grandiose claims of knowledge far beyond what we actually have. I am sure that how people 2,000 yrs from now will think about the universe will be so radically different from how we conceive of it now that we can't even begin to imagine imagining anything about it . But, we still have an inbuilt imperative to be sure about something, so we delude ourselves that knowing a,b and c must mean that everything from d to z is just waiting to fall in line with what we already think.
Well, Tom, I read through all of that and considered it very carefully. I decided not to respond point by point, because that might be a rather lengthy business, and not even necessary.

In short, this is what I think of what you said:

You say that there are some things that the Bible (and, I suppose, religion) deals with that science can't. I have no trouble agreeing with you on this.

You also say that the kind of questions I am asking were not ones which the people who wrote the Bible cared about. Again, I have no problem agreeing with this.

Now I want to propose some ideas to you in response, and I hope you will give them the consideration I gave yours.

Let us imagine a much simpler world. We agree that the world is much more complex than the one I'm about to describe, but that doesn't mean the same principles don't apply, just that we have to be more careful in accounting for different factors at play.

So let's imagine a much simpler world. A world in which God did answer the prayers of any Christian. To save this from being a world wildly different from our own, let's just say that God only answered prayers on relatively "minor" matters. Through trial and error, Christians would soon find out what these were.
What would this world be like? Well, one thing that would immediately be apparent that prayers work. Non-Christians might not be able to see God or feel his presence, but they would see that prayers to Him were always answered, and prayers to other Gods weren't. Moreover, the prayers would be reproducible any time anybody wanted proof. The flood of healed injuries, improving weather, patched-up quarrels and so on and so forth would provide proof of a very high quality.

Now, as I'm sure you're thinking, life isn't that simple. Some complicating factors that might occur? First, God always doesn't answer prayers. The prayer might be made in the wrong spirit. The prayer might be for something displeasing to God. God might have a different plan for you. Two people might be praying for two different things to happen. To be sure, these are complicating factors.

But in principle, we should still be able to see effects of God's prayers, especially if we were able to take a sufficiently wide view. On average, Christians ought to be luckier than non-Christians - to find lost things, to recover from injuries, to get through difficult situations. Because atheists will not be praying to God anyway, and God will not listen to the prayers of non-Christians.

You said that my question was a nonsensical one. But why? Because all we are doing is taking the Christian beliefs seriously - looking at them, and saying if this is true, then these things should be happening, and we should see certain effects.

But do we? Only in individual, anecdotal, unreliable forms. If all of these anecdotes are true, then it should show up as reliable data across the population. But it doesn't, does it?
 
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No that's the nature of Christianity as disigned.
He chose a Christianity in which His Christians have power. True power.
Intervening to offer advice and even orders is in no way a contradiction of free will.
The Bible demonstrates this. God intervenes and gives orders all the time. Why isn't He fixing things now? Why does He only appear in stories a long, long time ago?
If you believe that God actually exists, it's a mystery. If you don't, the reason is because God is nothing more than a character in a story.
Yes I said so indeed. Jesus did come already, here @2PhiloVoid and I agree. This should be enough (until his second coming), 2PhiloVoid agree again.
I wasn't talking to you there; I was talking to Philo.
Are you agreeing with him that Jesus Christ will never come? Because that's what he said, even if he didn't mean it.
 
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2PhiloVoid

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Yes. It is.
Thomas said Jesus would sort out the problems.
Tinker Gray said "tomorrow never comes."
You said tomorrow doesn't need to come.


Yes.


False dilemma fallacy.
I'm here on an honest quest to explore the contradictions in Christianity, with the intention of showing people its mistakes. As are most non-Christians on this debating forum.


That actually does sound pretty much like paranoia.


I don't think you would, Philo. If you dropped the rhetoric, you'd have to give straight answers, and then you'd find yourself in difficulties.

What difficulties are there besides the ones I've already pointed out for the the last 10+ years I've been on CF? :dontcare:
 
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False dilemma fallacy.
I'm here on an honest quest to explore the contradictions in Christianity, with the intention of showing people its mistakes. As are most non-Christians on this debating forum.
And I'm here on a quest to explore the essence of Existence ... as a human being with rational capability.


That actually does sound pretty much like paranoia.
Oh, you don't know the half of it (i.e. what you might think of as 'my paranoia'). But thanks to the Devil, I don't think that most people do or will ever know the half of it. ;)

Then again, I could be wrong about my view on Biblical Eschatology; in fact, as I've said elsewhere on CF, I rather hope that I am wrong!


I don't think you would, Philo. If you dropped the rhetoric, you'd have to give straight answers, and then you'd find yourself in difficulties.
Yes, the difficulties would very quickly become like those which the early apostles encountered, I suppose, and this is a problem for me since my wife would rather that I not press for that kind of situation. She says she'd like to have a peaceful life without me 'poking the stick' at the wolves in the shadows. Let's also just say, I'd rather avoid living out my own edgy replay of the movie, "The Grey." :rolleyes: But then I tell her, "Don't worry, that's not the Liam Neeson movie I have in mind ... " And then she says, "Sure, but you're neither prophet nor apostle ..." And then I say, "Yeah, you're right. Drats!"
 
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Tom 1

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You said that my question was a nonsensical one. But why? Because all we are doing is taking the Christian beliefs seriously - looking at them, and saying if this is true, then these things should be happening, and we should see certain effects.

But do we? Only in individual, anecdotal, unreliable forms. If all of these anecdotes are true, then it should show up as reliable data across the population. But it doesn't, does it?


Here, @InterestedAtheist I’ve edited it for you with some basic summaries. You can let me know what you think each part means and I’ll let you know if you’re getting it or not. Try switching off your preconceptions.


Maybe I said that in an earlier post...I don't remember without looking through them. In the post you responded to though I don't mean that your question is a nonsense question as such, but that you are approaching it in a way that is unlikely to coincide with any understanding of the topic. Something like someone who doesn't believe in evolution and doesn't want to study the whole topic picking some details as a way of demonstrating why the whole idea must be false. These details seem major if looked at from that perspective - questions about eyes and that kind of thing, details people seize on in the belief that they disprove evolution, without realising that the only thing revealed is that they don't understand the claims made about evolution.
PEOPLE ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT EVOLUTION WHICH SHOW THEY DON’t UNDERSTAND EVOLUTION. PEOPLE ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT BIBLE RELATED TOPICS THAT SHOW THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND THE BIBLE.


It starts with understanding what is meant by 'ask and you will recieve'. Like any other idea in the bible, that phrase is one part of a whole, a whole that needs to be understood so that you can understand what the individual parts mean. From my study I take the recieve part to refer to less tangible things like guidance, understanding, personal growth and learning in a spiritual sense, things like that. You can study the same things too, and see what conclusions you come to, so long as you are prepared to put the time in and take the text as it is, rather than trying to make it fit into some other mold. For my part, in my experience, I'm satisfied that prayers regarding those kind of things have, at times, been effective for me.
TO UNDERSTAND ANYTHING IN THE BIBLE YOU NEED A DECENT GRASP OF THE WHOLE BOOK.


The only way to test that idea is to do it yourself - that really is the whole point, the whole thing about the bible is that people are supposed to be living it, individually and together. It is all about experience, mostly shared experience, application, the results of that which can be seen over time. To grasp that you really have to get it into your head that it is not a biological, technical or other testable system in the terms you use - spending some years as an active member of a church that functions as a community (in my experience churches differ greatly in terms of how 'authentic' the experience can be) would give you something to accept or reject, handing out some questionaires wouldn't tell you anything much. If you're thinking about prayer in terms of things like 'God, give me a flaming sword!' or 'heal my disease' I really have no idea if prayers of that sort are directly answered or not, you'd need to investigate some cases if you wanted a definitive answer to that.
SOME THINGS CAN BE TESTED EMPIRICALLY WITH USEFUL RESULTS. SOME THINGS CAN’T. SOME THINGS CAN ONLY BE UNDERSTOOD BY A CONTEXTUAL EXPERIENCE.


I know from experience it's a difficult thing for some people to grasp, I'll always remember someone saying to me, when I suggested that if he wanted to understand Christianity he would need to see it in action, to which he said 'so, you're saying that if I want to know if it's true I have to see it?' (or something similar) - well, to me that obvious answer was 'yes, clearly' but he seemed to think this was a ridiculous idea, and that if it couldn't be 'proven' using some easy to explain formula then it must be untrue. To me that seemed strange, maybe our brains are just wired differently - ?
DON’T MAKE THE MISTAKE OF BELIEVING THAT BECAUSE YOU THINK SOMETHING IT IS OBJECTIVELY TRUE.
 
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