Shut up and supplicate.
I’d rather genuflect; it’s easier on the knees than full supplication.
Also, I’d prefer to direct my genuflection to the guy who invented M&Ms. Is that okay? Sure he’s dead, but I figure that just means he has divine power now. Chocolatey divine power.
I just hope all these people who believe prayer works realise what an awesome power they have, and don’t just limit to friends and relatives. Now, I don’t think it works, but that’s my problem. There are people who really believe that mumbling some vague ‘Make him Better’ platitudes is a path to healing. Well, don’t be so bloody selfish!
They should be in the hospitals, curing all those sick people! They should be forming large prayer vigils for the approximately half-a-million people who die of malaria every year.
Or is their god rather feeble these days - reduced to the same level of Peter Cook’s devil in Bedazzled?
The trouble I have with prayer is that if God is all-knowing, he already knows what you’re going to ask for in prayer, so why bother? You’re just asking God for what he already knows you want.
I agree with Spinoza, that God is the universe, causing everything and thinking to Itself. So, you see, God’s in total control because we’re part of God. But regardless of your conception of God, He clearly lets us change the world by our actions.
I think the real value of prayer is its ability to give an individual faith, enabling his/her survival mechanisms to keep pushing him/her through difficult circumstances. An individual who believes that life is worth fighting for has a better chance of survival than an individual who has given up. Even if we’re not talking about life and death stuff, if someone has an optimistic outlook and has hope that there’s a chance things might turn out alright in the end, such an outlook enables them to function better and to be more productive than someone who assumes that they have no control over their own fate.
Prayer can also be a social activity as well, a call to friends and family for social support during difficult circumstances. People who have social support and who have a network of like-minded people operating with the shared purpose of seeing that an individual overcomes difficult circumstances probably has a better survival rate than the individual who tries to face these circumstances alone. Obviously, a person can have social support without prayer, but maybe prayer provides a shared focus for everyone who contributes, and maybe it operates as a kind of spiritual guide or framework to operate from.
And maybe that is what “God” is, and how “God” operates.
It doesn’t have to change the value of a person’s life. You’re getting bogged down in small picture things. Firstly, if you believe in an eternal soul which encapsulates a person’s essence, then the physical body isn’t particularly valuable anyway. Not that it’s worthless, but its value is severely diminished. We place more value on life because to us the afterlife is a gamble. If we had certain knowledge of it, then value on physical life would be much less-though again, certainly not worthless.
The second is that there are an infinite (or perhaps more accurately very, very large) number of considerations that stretch an infinite (or at least very far) distance into the future. Prayer under my conjecture would be a butterfly in China as would the life of that person. We exist where we are right now because of 1000 or so ancestors that we have had since the beginning of recorded history and around 30000 since the beginning of homo sapiens who didn’t die and managed to find exactly the ‘right’ person to mate with at exactly the ‘right’ time for begbert to end up with this precise set of genes in this precise place. If Ayla’s clan hadn’t been attacked and she found by Iza 150 thousand years ago, you might not be here. If Gronk hadn’t been gored by that mammoth allowing his brother Grunk to mate with Gronkette, maybe society collapses 50 thousand years later.
What prayer might conjecturally do is change the best outcome. Possibly not in large ways and possibly not in the direction that the one who is praying wants it to go, but still change things. If we’re looking at God as a deterministic being, then changing the conditions of the decision have the capability of changing the outcome. The rotors on your brakes could be just slightly flawed and that could be the difference between hitting the bumper of the car in front of you and missing it by half a millimeter. Prayer could simply be resurfacing your rotors. Most of the time it has very little impact on anything, but that one time, maybe it does.
Maybe prayer is God’s form of cable TV. He sits on his recliner, flipping through all the channels (prayers) and when he stumbles across one that sounds interesting, he puts the remote down and listens.
I believe we already have a word that means “universe”, and that word is “universe”.
Prayers use powerful rosary beads, while spells use silly black cat bones.
Duh.
This assumes that there are things God doesn’t know until he sees it on the “TV”.
Isn’t that why God gave us free will? He got bored of knowing everything so he created humans and gave us free will just to see what the fuck we would do with it.
The way I see it, God already knows what all of us want, and already knows what’s best, and is going to do what’s best. But E likes it when we talk to Em. It’s not going to change Es mind, but after all E’s done for us, it’s only polite.
I’m cool with that.
“Hey God, I thought you knew everything?”
“Well, I CAN know everything, but it’s more fun not to and see what happens!”
Prayer per se is not harmful, but the belief that all you may do is pray is harmful. I’m sure they rationalized this was God’s will, and I think fatalism *can *be harmful.
So this all-powerful, all-knowledgeable and all-benevolent entity won’t do the right thing, which would take no effort whatsoever, unless people constantly beg it to do so?
Why does an all-powerful god need constant worship from what is essentially already a part of it?
Because he is man’s creation.
So, obviously there are gonna be some flaws.
Or, “I do, but I really don’t care. Do U?”
Presuming that you have an even somewhat omniscient God, it already knows who’s sick and who’s not, better than the people themselves do.
Presuming an even moderately omnipotent god (and yes, it hurts my nonexistent soul to write “moderately omnipotent”), the god can cure everyone of all disease instantly. (If the god was fully omnipotent then could cure everyone instantly without effort and without any undesired consequences, even butterfly ones.)
So if you have a god that’s both omniscient and omnipotent then it’s a logical certainty that the god doesn’t want to cure the sick people. And if the god is even slightly worthy of the label ‘omnipotent’ then it’s not for reasons, either; there is no reason to leave people sick that the god couldn’t dismiss with a casual wave of the hand. No, people are sick because he wants them sick - or, at best, doesn’t give a flying fart about their health, comfort, or happiness one way or the other.
Again, this is a logical certainty - at best the god is apathetic, or worse, sadistic. If people are suffering, it’s because the god doesn’t care enough to help them, or likes that they’re suffering.
Prayer, then, would be an attempt to change the god’s mind. But it can’t do this by informing the god of anything, because the god already knows what’s going on. It can’t do this by informing the god of your opinions or concerns, either - the god already knows those too. The delivery of information to the god cannot possibly help persuade it of anything.
No, the only thing prayer could possibly do to change the god’s mind is to directly effect its feelings on the matter, via something other than informing it of things. So, ego stroking, obediently acting in a way it wants you to, or maybe the god’s just lonely and likes being talked to. Things like that could work - things that effect his mood directly.
Nothing else could effect the outcome. Logically speaking, I mean - if the god wants Nana to die, nothing can help her until you change its mind.
“Thou art God, and I am God, and all that groks is God.”