Not trying to rile any Christians, I genuinely want to understand this. I think my logic is pretty solid here, so if not, someone please point out where I am not understanding Chrisitianity.
OK, the current tragedy, I hear some people say they are praying for the injured to get well, or for the relatives of the dead, etc. I don’t get this- sort of like Rod or Todd saying “God, thank you for sending Lisa to save us from the bug you sent after us”, but not quite. I don’t exactly know how to phrase it, but if you believe in God, you believe that anything that happens on Earth is his doing, and thus any tragedy is his making. God doesn’t make mistakes. Therefore, to pray for him to end or ease the suffering that he has casued to me seems kind of strange. Am I missing something? How do Christians explain this apparent contradiction? In the midst of a tragedy, you would be in effect asking God to stop doing something, which seems out of order for a mere human. Praying in the aftermath seems equally odd.
I would say that the tragedy is not His making, that it’s not His doing. Yes, he allows free will, and yes, some people are mentally ill and will act on it. (not saying that’s the case or not with the shootings) God has not caused the suffering.
Turning to Him in time of need for healing and peace only seems natural.
I understand this position, but then I don’t get, if God gives you free will and you believe he does not control what goes in the world, then why pray to him to provide comfort for someone on Earth, when if you believe in free will he does not intervene in events on earth?
If people act out of mental illness, how can it be said that their will is free? And didn’t God give them the illness with full knowledge of how it would affect them?
I wonder if some Christians view prayer less like addressing God and more like a compassion practice. That is through contemplation of a tragedy and how it affects others, one’s own compassion or empathy grows. And from there good works grow. In this view, prayer and meditation are the same thing except one has a more metaphysical tint.
Prayer is one way people cope with tragedy. No, a lot of the rationalizations people try to make about the role of God aren’t particularly sensible in retrospect (and frankly, smack of spending time trying to prop up a theology rather than mourn a loss, which is an odd thing to be compelled to do), but in my opinion, people need to cope in the way that seems best to them.
Some people DO believe that everything that happens on Earth is part of God’s plan and this is pretty clearly the view of the majority of the Bible.
Some people believe that reality isn’t real, and that when you rape someone, it’s not bad because it causes suffering (because suffering isn’t real) but because it’s aesthetically displeasing to someone’s abstraction of fine artistic sensibilities. That’s because if suffering were real, then people dying in earthquakes or being horribly maimed by diseases wouldn’t make much sense.
But I think MOST Christians around today believe in the free will version of things. Now is that also completely incoherent and nonsensical? Sure.
I forgot what my point was.
Ah yes, anyway it was that people need to, and are going to, believe what they need to cope with tragedy in all sorts of ways, many of them not very rational utterly regardless of whether they believe in God or not, or any particular version of God. The way people talk to God is not that much different than how a child talks to a parent: asking for answers and consolation and trying to contemplate things.
I doubt if people get all philosophical with themselves about things like this. Whether or not free will exists, and what a deity might be up to don’t factor in. It’s simply that some things seem to big for the human mind to contain, and they want an outlet.
Although I don’t believe in a god, sometimes I feel, for example, overwhelmingly thankful. Philosophically it doesn’t make sense for me to feel that way, but I do, and if I did believe in a god, I’d pray. Same thing for tragedies.
Most people don’t really believe there is this omnipotent guy sitting at the controls of the Universe, deciding the fate of everyone. Most people need to direct their emotions at something and God makes a convienient target.
I mean when I stub my toe and yell “GOD DAMN IT!!!”, I don’t really believe God has smote my toe for some sacrilege it has committed. I’m just pissed off that my toe hurts and it doesn’t make sense to yell at either my toe or the rock I stepped on.
The thing is, that’s not what free will means. Free will merely means that human beings have the capacity to make moral decisions. This does not preclude a deity from occasionally intervening in the course of human events.
What **gigi ** said. It is not mom’s fault that junior hurts his arm. She can provide comfort (in the form of “there, there”, bandaids, hot cocoa or whatever). Junior is still free to take comfort in them or reject them or try or whatever.
It is a common error to blame God for the misfortunes in this world. Theists do it as well as atheists. Physical life is like school, we are here to learn to do the right thing in spite of what others do. It is man that screws up the world, not God. Yes, you have free will to act anyway you want, but if your actions harm others you have harmed yourself also. That is how we learn not to do hurtful things to others. The spiritual principal of “you reap what you sow” works for all, all the time.
There is a kind of safety net that allows you to try again if you screw up, since you are spiritual you don’t die, so whatever you do continues to play out over eternity. Sometimes through reincarnation and sometimes not, but you can never escape the spiritual principle. Eventually you and I will learn to do only those things that are good for us and subsequently for others also. All this is called spiritual growth.
Prayer is a way to helping others through positive thought, it is natural to want to comfort others in their time of grief and suffering. Yes, it does work.
What he said. The excluded middle here is between God micro-managing the universe, and not being involved at all.
If I am helping my child learn to ride a bike, is it my will that he fall off? Falling off is part of the process of learning, and it is my will that he learn to ride a bike. So on some level, it is in accordance with my will that he fall off, but that doesn’t mean I pushed him. And it might even be the case that I would do it if my son asks me, “Daddy, I think I got it, but would you run alongside me for a while longer just in case?” And of course I would comfort him if he fell.
It doesn’t always mean the same thing to say that such-and-such is “God’s will”.
But God is Omnipotent and Omniscient, so it is logically impossible for anything to occur which is not hs will.
The free will defense doesn’t work for why God allows humans to do bad things because God created them with full knowledge of how they would exercise that so-called “free will” and could have just as easily chosen not to create them. God could easily choose not to create people he knows will become psycho killers and unnecessarily creates them anyway. Choosing not to create them would not violate anyone’s free will, since people who never existed can’t be deprived of anything.
For those who believe that free will is the reason that a benevolent God allows bad things to happen to good people when a person causes the bad thing to happen, what about things like tsunamis? No person with free will causing the harm in these cases.
Sorry, I meant, when a killer goes nuts, God did not directly do that- he made the crazy person, but the persons actions were of his own free will. But God does cause natural disasters, or not?
What’s weird to me is that a lot of the people I grew up with might think like that on the one hand, but on the other hand they believe in a kind of blind, unquestioning faith and also in hell for unbelievers, which totally screws with the kindly helping, teaching god for me. If your child never learns to ride the bike properly or just doesn’t like the bike, you don’t punish him in eternal torment, do you?
You have hit on a very telling point: prayer of any kind is a worthless waste of time.
There’s a modern-day addendum to a saying that makes the point better:
Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime; give a man religion and he’ll starve to death praying for a fish. - Anonymous