Pay no attention to the Magic 8 Ball behind the pulpit!
Little Nemo said this:
I have a problem with this. From what I have always been told by believers in a Christian God, God is always right and God knows everything. So, if God knew I was going to vote for Obama ten million years before I was even born (since He knows EVERYTHING), there is no way I could NOT vote for Obama. Otherwise, God would have been wrong, and He’s NEVER WRONG. Whether I know the outcome or not does not change the fact that under an omniscient god, we do not really have free will. Nor do we have free will when “everything works according to God’s plan.”
Seriously… prayer sounds like a bad lottery/gambling system.
It’s as if I were to say, I have this great system for winning the slots. Just before you pull the lever, shout “Whoopee!” and you will win EVERY time! And if you don’t win, well, you just didn’t believe you could win. And if you do win, then my system works!! Yay!
However, if you are honest with yourself, you can see that if you take away the “Whoopee!” yelling, you’d get the same exact results from pulling a slot machine lever.
Regardless, I have never felt the need to pray a day in my life and don’t see the point.
Have you ever closed your eyes and made a wish ?
Do you not believe that there’s a difference between foreknowledge and predestination? If you jump off the Empire State Building, I know that you’re going to die. My knowledge of the outcome doesn’t cause it to come about.
Causality isn’t the point - it’s the level of freedom. You know, ‘free’ will, and all that. While plummetting your knowledge may not be the cause of your eminent demise, but nonetheless your demise is eminent for some reason and you have zip-all freedom to avoid it (either that or your knowledge was fautly, which God’s is asserted not to be).
Yeah, but you’re not an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God. What’s the difference, practically speaking, between God’s foreknowledge and predestination?
We see God’s will as through a glass [del]dark[/del] dimly.
God is punishing us for our sins.
God made Obama win to punish the gays. (Jury is still out on this one.)
God made Obama win because [insert rabid froth about Jews].
Take your pick.
Looks like our worst fears are confirmed. Hindu Buddha and Allah are more powerful gods
There’s a difference between knowledge of an event and control of the event. An ominiscient God would have known ten million years ago who you were going to vote for in this year’s election but you were still the person who made the decision.
For mercy’s sake: the person in the video who said that appears to believe that “Hindu” is the name of a deity. Wonder if he also thinks that “Jewish” is a god!
Again, there’s a difference between knowledge of an event and control of the event for ordinary mortals. God is said to be not only omniscient but omnipotent, and everything that happens is said to be according to His will. It seems pretty meaningless to argue in the face of that that He’s not somehow “controlling” the decisions of individuals, even if they imagine they are choosing for themselves.
If it was not possible for you to make any choice about whom to vote for except the choice that God already knew ten million years ago you were going to make—and it wasn’t, because if so then God would have been wrong, which is impossible—then it doesn’t really make sense to say that you were the one who made the decision.
No, a truly devout person would just pray “Thy will be done” without needing to know what God’s will is. Admittedly there are plenty of people who seem to feel God needs their advice.
As I said, there’s a difference between his moral will and his sovereign will. He can allow a great many things and know their outcome without specifically forcing these things to occur.
That distinction doesn’t really make any sense to me. If He’s omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, then there’s no meaningful difference between His “allowing” something and “forcing” something to occur.
To attempt to understand the doctrine of free will at all I pretty much have to fall back on super-rational rather than rational thinking. I’m willing to accept that there may conceivably exist a sort of divine state of quantum uncertainty where a thing can be simultaneously foreordained and undetermined, but AFAICT it is not satisfactorily comprehensible by ordinary human logic.
Of course there is. Knowing that something will happen is not the same as forcing it to happen – especially when events occur as the result of human volition, i.e. free will.
Well, if you have perfect knowledge and are also designing the system, everything that happens inside the system is a result of your choice to have it happen. Because, see, you made it happen by designing it so that it would.
Now, I can say that if something happens as a result of my actions that I didn’t expect to happen, “Oopsie! That wasn’t my intention!”
But God can’t say, “Oopsie! That wasn’t my intention!” because if God doesn’t intend it, it can’t happen in the first place, never having been set in motion.
So, omnipotent, omniscient God created the butterfly that flaps its wings and starts the typhoon. Omnipotent, omniscient God created humanity to create the specific humans who created Jeffrey Dahmer to eat people.
If you know that by doing X you will cause/allow/begin Y and Y sucks, well, don’t do X.
I think you’re begging the question here. My point is precisely that the concept of human “free will” is meaningless if we posit an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God whose will is the cause of everything that happens.
For God, although not for you and me, knowing that something will happen is the same thing as forcing it to happen, because nothing happens that God didn’t intend. If He knew it was going to turn out a certain way, then He meant it to turn out that way, and He is responsible for its turning out that way.
If that’s not the case, then either God is not perfectly omniscient (didn’t know how it was going to turn out), or not perfectly omnibenevolent (knew how it was going to turn out but didn’t mean it to), or not perfectly omnipotent (meant it to turn out that way but it didn’t).
As I said, I think you can argue against this position by invoking some kind of super-rational hypothesis about the incomprehensibility of divine powers and intentions to the mortal mind, but ordinary human logic isn’t enough. It’s just not logically consistent in the context of our merely human concepts of “knowledge” and “will”.
A lot of Christians, while praying, forgot that usually the purpose is to be reminded of what God wants, not what they want. It’s also a process unlike “asking” but more of “petitioning”. Like a petition, one may be heard but doesn’t necessary meant he will get what he want. This is the textbook answer I got while I was into evangelism.
You’re in a cleft stick. Either:
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you are merely praying that your deity does his own will which is pointless since he’s going to do that anyway (it being his will), as **Shawn1767 **says, or
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you are praying that others do what your deity wants them to do, when (a) they can’t hear you since you are praying to your deity not to them and (b) those others have been given free will by your deity so he’s not going to intervene, so your prayers are pointless.
It’s pointless either way.
To the OP: My prayers for Obama cancelled out all the McCain prayers. Well, me and Anne Neville. PM me for my address if you would like to send a fruit basket.
More seriously: I think the problem that a lot of folks here are having is failure to transcend the false dichotomy between “human will” and “God’s will”. With the caveat that all speculations about God’s nature are necessarily imperfect, I think it is less accurate to think of us as God’s *creations *than as God’s emanations.
In other words, we are not autonomous entities that God creates with free will and then sends out into the world to fend for ourselves…we are the way that God manifests Her existence in our particular time and place. So, we do have free will, but our free will is not separate from God’s free will. Each of our (perceived) individual wills is merely one aspect of God’s will…including those whose most fervent hope is that people would stop praying and believing in God!
In the case of this election, people who were channeling God’s merciful and loving nature overcame those who were channeling His vengeful and wrathful nature. Neither is inherently less Godly, and we need both of them to keep the world going. Mind you, IMO, this particular shift in emphasis was long overdue!!
To the implied question of “what good does prayer do?”, I personally find that it makes it easier for me personally to keep in touch with the merciful and loving aspects of my own personality, so that I more frequently manifest those qualities and help make the world just a little easier place for which others to manifest those qualities. If you have honestly tried it and found it doesn’t work that way for you, then I would say there is no good reason for you to pray. If you haven’t tried it, I would suggest giving it a try. You just might be surprised.
And I certainly agree, in case it wasn’t clear, that folks who do take the “magic vending machine” approach to religion and pray with the expectation that their prayer will directly alter the behavior of people they don’t have any direct contact with are, shall we say, manifesting some of God’s sillier and less intelligent aspects!