Why do people pray even if their prayers arent answered?
Because it gives them hope. That may be all they need.
What was the “purpose” of the holocaust?
As much as I hate the deaths of a people that I consider to be my spiritual family…
the holocaust served several really good purposes:
The re-creation of the Isreali home-land that was stolen from the so long ago!
The reversal of hatred for Jews.
The growth of religious freedom and even more important religious understanding.
there are others, but hopefully, these are enough to help you understand.
I hate the fact that many of my “family” members were slaughtered by a psychopath as a scapegoat for all other problems, but I can also thank and praise God for the benefits that came out of that war. If the holocaust had never happened, Jews would have continued to be persecuted in large numbers simply for being Jewish, they would still be looking for their stolen homeland, and all of us would still be suffering under the heavy weight of world-wide religious persecution (which still continues, but is less than before.).
Do not always focus on the small and negative, look to God who is large and very positive.
:eek:
Oh, I see, God was doing the Jews a favor by allowing them to be slaughtered by the millions. :rolleyes:
When you see your own children being torn away from you, tortured and murdered, let’s see how you feel about the “positive” nature of God’s great plan. Do you have any idea at all how offensive your attitude is to those who survived that hell?
BTW, what do you mean that the Jews are your “spiritual family?” Do you extend this welcome to all religions or only to Judaism?
No, Diogenes, your Cynicism is showing! 
What Roy is saying is that God can bring good out of evil – a very different thing from saying that, e.g., “the Holocaust was good.” As for your question above, I have no idea what His perspective is and what criteria He uses for making His choices – but I’ve seen Him at work in subtle ways all my life.
To give you a quite personal example, from a post of mine earlier in this thread:
Now I am in no way justifying the uncle’s sexual predation. But the fact of what happened led to the boy (and his sister, also a victim – uncle was an equal opportunity molester:(), when older, molesting his little brother and sister, who found adult friends they could trust in my wife and me when for obvious reasons they wanted to spend little time at home, and who introduced me to their cousin, who felt an impulse, which he attributed to God, to come visit me the day I had my heart attack, and whose timely rushing for help meant that I lived through it with few long-term effects instead of dying in agony. And the sister ended up marrying the cousin’s best friend, whose life I ended up being instrumental in turning around and whose love and youthful wisdom brought me to a better understanding of who I was and what God wanted me to do – which, ultimately, led to my joining this board.
I suspect a lot of people will believe I have rose-colored glasses on in making this analysis – but I do also see long-term problems resulting from that sequence of molestations that have not yet played out in full. But I also see the good things that resulted.
I pray to God for the unity and peace it brings in my life. I know that God listens to what I have to say. When I ask for something in my prayers sometimes it’s answered immediately, other times it has been answered years in the future. The Bible says to pray but it doesn’t say when God will answer that prayer. For the ones that haven’t been answered I don’t lose faith that one day God will answer them. In comparing the ones answered and the ones unanswered I have found that God answered the most important ones to me.
Ok, but I was trying to get at the nature of God’s decisions vis-a-vis prayer. Why did God ignore the prayers of those in the concentration camps? If those petitions are not worthy of God’s intervention, then why would any petitions be worthy?
In the case of your personal anecdote, I would suggest that the positive results you describe came from your own heart and character as much as anything else. Your personality and interactions are enhanced by faith and prayer, and this allowed you to both help, and be helped by, another prerson. I hope you’re not saying (and I don’t think you are) that the molestation occurred so that the eventual positive results would grow out of it, and that gets by to my question-- which is the eternal theodocean question-- why is God silent to the prayers of so many who deserve an answer?
Well, Dio, one could speculate that God uses the available materials to work His miracles, be they an active volcano to rain brimstone upon Sodom and Gommorah, the U.S. armed forces to deluge Nazi Germany with HE and incendiary bombs, and the Dopers to lend a hand to someone deserving an entire arm.
One could also wonder why God does not see fit to simply miracle things into and out of existence, and save the lives of the Allied soldiers. But, if one presupposes that God is all-knowing, and that there is a darn good reason for suffering, then trying to second-guess His plan is a waste of effort.
On the gripping hand, ineffibility bites both ways. The universe has good and bad bits. The claim that God is directly responsible for the good bits and tangential to the bad is without evidence. For all we know, God is a twisted bastard who designed a universe with highs and lows just to laugh at how low we could bring ourselves, and has send lies about himself (that he loves us, etc.) to keep us deluded.
This is why atheism is comforting at times.
I apologise to anyone who mistook my words for saying that the holocaust was a good thing. That what not the intention, as I very clearly stated.
quote: As much as I hate the deaths of a people that I consider to be my spiritual family… quote:
However, even through adversity, something good has been formed.
The rain may bring floods and destroy homes, but down the river it gives lifesaving water to drought stricken fields of agriculture.
It is the same concept as “every cloud has a silver lining”.
If I were to dwell only on the bad of everything, what kind of a person would I be, and what kind of person would want to be around me?
But to accept the bad and look for the good, is the only way to maintain some sanity.
Maybe God did not ignore the prayers of those in the camps, but also considered the millions of other prayers that have been lifted up for the return of the Holy Land.
Why did my first child die in miscarriage in the second month?
Because he was malformed and would not have been able to carry on life on its own.
But we did not know that when we prayed for it to not be lost. We are now just weeks away from our second child being born, and this one will live.