Manifestation vs Prayer

I only know about the Law of the 5-fingered Discount.

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I appreciate your good attitude. Every night, we read (currently “The Lord of the Rings”) together as a family with my 3 kids, and then do devotions and prayer. We start with what we are grateful to God for, prior to what we ask Him for (currently a bunny with a painful ear and a friend’s dad who is on a vent with Covid). Starting with what we are grateful for really does help our attitude. And we have a ton to be grateful for. That’s not to say we should not give more to those who don’t have anything; but thank you for your example

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Prayers for your friend’s dad. Covid has tapered of a lot here but still a lot of suffering throughout the world. I am still finding it hard to love those who minimize the impact.

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If your kids started to “come across” a bunch of useful things and bring them home what would you do? (Oh I know, you are going to say I lack faith, etc.)

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the placebo effect. Some things work because we want them to work.

However, that does not mean God does not answer some of those people’s “prayers” like he answers ours. He is a good father, even to the ignorant.

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And then there is the loving Father who intervenes providentially into his children’s lives*. Maggie, for instance.

 


*Including their DNA.

Thank you for sharing that. It is really as Jesus says: if you start with a little seed of faith and God moves into your life to reward your faith like the mustard seed it transforms into a great unshakable thing. Blessings to you and yours.

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I tried to place that last one under Randy’s reply. I’ll get the hang of this one day.

Well done Henry; you manifest purpose in your need and you’re honest about it all here. It’s natural to want, to need, to believe that God is that intimate that He arranges these things. It’s also natural for others - including me - to be initially suspicious of your claims; closets full of shoes remind some of Imelda Marcos and her disgusting abuse of privilege. And if it’s not conspicuous consumption, which it isn’t, then there will be some other natural explanation, like these are rejects from a shoe factory or shop. But you sought and you found, made the best of your situation. God bless you.

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I have difficulty believing God actually answers prayers as if He were a cosmic vending machine. When Jesus says we will get whatever we ask for in prayer, this is either flatly incorrect or there are three hundred and forty-nine hidden caveats. I’m not taking about people praying for wealth or personal gain. I’m taking about pain and suffering. No one would die of cancer if that statement were remotely true. The purpose of prayer is to communicate with God. Petitioning is only natural and can be healthy but prayer is about a relationship with God. We worship him, praise him, ask him for forgiveness, strength and guidance.

All prayer evidence is anecdotal, the vast majority of it easy to explain away, double-blind prayer studies are not usually kind to the believer and billions of things regularly happen that were prayed to not happen. Any actual answered prayers could just very well be coincidence, assuming they do happen.

Not to mention, when you claim God answered one prayer but let 500 babies be slaughtered during a genocide, petitionary prayer looks like a bunch of nonsense.

Prayer works in the sense that communicating with God and putting him first in our life orients us in the right direction. It’s one of the most important things we can do. Just don’t expect God to feed your kids if they are hungry and you have no money. Whether you ask him to or not.

A statement reported to have been said by Jesus in the Gospels is not enough to overturn what seems very obvious about the world to me.

Vinnie

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Confirmation bias, I agree, is a huge issue. It affects prayer, too. And the fact that we have more or less than others means nothing about whether God loves us differently.

I struggle, because I grew up as a missionary kid in what is currently the poorest region of the world in West Africa. During a famine, we knew those who were starving and, while the missionaries did what they could, I asked God sometimes to take my blanket or food and give it to someone who did not have one. I have no miraculous proof of God’s existence. There is just a huge need.

I struggle, in thinking about gratefulness, what to be grateful for. I am grateful for what I can learn in a difficult time, but not for the suffering itself.

This is an interesting g post about games we play…

I appreciate @Vinnie 's post above. Stacking our faith in “answered prayer” can be very misleading.

I agree with his description of a major purpose of prayer…to put God first in our lives.

How does that work actually though? Because most of the time it doesnt

Prayer was is and will be a somewhat uselless tool for me.Ive turned away from it a long time ago.Actually im kind in agreement with the Deistic statement that “God doesnt care for his creation anymore”.Because it really seems that it is like that most of the time

The deistic statement is tough. Natural evil certainly gives it credence. Yet I think prayer is the greatest and most useful tool a Christian possesses.Without it we will always feel empty and off a little bit. Our lives should be grounded in God. For me, this is where faith comes into play. At some point we must trust God despite the way things may be going in the world. Bad things happen. They happened to Jesus. As Dorothy Sayers wrote:

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself."

I actually came back to faith because of suffering. Pain and suffering makes life too senseless without God. It strips everything of genuine meaning in my life. A worldview is not about only what we can put in a test tube and prove, but must also be something we can live by. It must address the issue of how now shall we live?

Vinnie

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All these has nothing to do with prayer.Prayer is uselles.It worked for Jesus and the apostles for some reason.It doesnt work for anyone else.If you believe prayer "gave you strenght"you have to thank your brain for that (like the placebo effect)it doesnt mean prayer worked.
The deistic argument finds me in agreement .God doesnt really care anymore.

This is true if you believe God to be a sadistic fu@@@ .I dont

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Well, it makes sense in the light of cessation.
The verses were Jesus promises everything to believers if they pray have been mentioned more than once recently. It made me think that if it were true, the world simply wouldn’t function. So you just pray and it happens? Then everyone would be a believer to get what they want, and why make any effort in life if you just pray and good stuff happens? That’s why I don’t understand why Jesus said that, if it’s clearly nonsense either way.

I feel exactly the same Nick, in fact I used to be 100% deist as a teenager. Even now I have very strong deistic tendency. Yes, I know they say it’s wrong but I can’t see how that is not at least partly true.

I have changed my beliefs about the bible and such many times trough conversation here.But this deistic argument i figured it out myself.It seems logical to me at least

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If our prayers are answered and we scratch our heads and wonder is it of God or just random chance then we’re missing something very important. There is no random chance with God. See the Gospel of Luke, chapter 13, starting with verse 1. If our prayers are answered then they’re answered and we can only thank God.

By care you mean intervene and suspend the laws of physics? No, He only ever does that in and around incarnating, for the first circle, personal disciples. He can’t not care in an omnipathic way 80 odd circles, ripples down the line. He cares that we exercise faith in love, which we’re only just starting to see is all that matters again. He cares back. He cares that we care and that we can’t and, like you, are honest about it. He cares that we care together.

You are assuming petitionary prayer worked for Jesus and the disciples based on an incorrect and outdated understanding of Biblical inspiration. The stories in the Gospels and Acts cannot demonstrate that miraculous answers to prayer occurred two-thousand years ago. I am not sure how you can pretend to be skeptical about “brains and prayer” yet somehow think the Gospel stories are all true. Your epistemology is all over the place and inconsistent. If you want to be a skeptic then be a skeptic. And even if did work for them, many might just say the Holy Spirit was in over-drive at the time since there was a new dispensation and knowledge of Jesus was meant to spread. While this seems reasonable, I believe people suffered and died, despite their prayers the same in antiquity as today. Cessationism and the cosmic-vending machine God are equally as silly as the other. Both stem from too conservative a view on scripture.

It has everything to do with prayer. Your statement that prayer is useless is demonstrably false as hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, benefit from the practice. The mechanism of that communication with God is also irrelevant to that communication actually taking place. You cannot demonstrate that personal experience with God is not real. You appear to operate under the silly assumption that if you can come up with a naturalistic explanation for something it rules out God. That is a non sequitur. It is skeptical fundamentalism and intellectually bankrupt.Equally likely is God would design a system where prayer would axiomatically lead to spiritual benefits whether he was actively answering or not. The issues can be treated separately but for many of us, tying part of prayer into the brain presents no problems. We believe in divine imminence and that God created and designed the universe.

Do you also believe you can prove love is only the product of the meat computers in our head? Or that truth is just brain chemistry? This is a slippery slope and this level of disconnecting experience from reality might cause us to become solipsists.

Vinnie

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