Partly_Warmer,
Omniscient means OMNISCIENT. It has nothing to do with potential. If God is omniscient then he MUST, by DEFINITION, have knowledge of everything that will happen in the future. He already KNOWS everything that he will do or not do. It is definitively impossible for an omniscient being to be UNDECIDED about anything because that would require a lack of KNOWLEDGE.
Eli Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He is NOT an atheist. He is one of the most respected religious writers in the world.
I’m not familiar with Eli Wiesel, but it sounds from what you’ve posted, that he’s an athiest who uses the Holocaust to justify his beliefs (or lack there of
Eli Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He is NOT an atheist. He is one of the most respected religious writers in the world.
What doesn’t make sense to me: Why would (insert favorite diety here) give/allow someone to get a horrible disease and then heal them because they (or others) pray? Wouldn’t (the diety of your choosing) have recognized that person’s faith/love/general zest for life in the first place and NOT given them the disease. I’m sure someone will claim it is a good test for faith…any other thoughts?
Also, what really irks me is people thanking dieties for mundane human stuff like 1-Sport players that claim the hand of God helped them win the game…does this mean the other team lacks faith or that God is mad at them? 2-Survivor with Sean winning the car. He thanked God over and over and over. Did God really want him to win that car or what? Anyway, that show really bothers me as God seems to choose to help different people each week with immunity and rewards and so forth. 3-The generals like praying for a good flight (make sure the pilpt isn’t drunk); Surgeries go well (make sure the doc isn’t drunk or hasn’t been up for 40+hours); Car trips are successful (bring flares).
I never tell people I’ll pray for them. I’ll think about them and try to actually DO something to help them…but I guess I reduce it to that one hand working is worth more than a thousand clasped in prayer…or however that goes.
partly warmer:
see, i think show of kinship is probably the most potent part of prayer.
prayers, if they work, they do so because of the belief that they will work in a self fullfiling prophecy kind of way.
so knowing that someone is praying for you helps your speedy recovery most likely because you now believe that one more person is asking god to be on your side, you believe that you are involved in something larger, more spiritual.
i think you expressed it best with: prayer= opening your mind up to …ideas you have been shutting out
or
in the case of the terminally ill, maybe at least one can die in an arena of support and make the transfer more peaceful
also, it allows the praying person to feel as though he has some power in a situation where he has none
again, the key words are belief, and self serving.
Of course I don’t believe any of this stuff, but assuming what the OP asks me to assume, maybe it’s like throwing yourself on the mercy of the court so you get a lighter sentence. If the big guy is the one who is going to judge you, maybe he’ll have sympathy if you accept your wrongdoings and ask him for mercy (during life and after death). Of course if he doesn’t think your sincere he’ll probably throw the Good Book at you.
Hopefully, through prayer, you can get a better deal then Pauly Walnuts.
DaLovin’ Dj
This isn’t exactly a hijack (ok maybe it is), so here goes…
You know what I hate? I hate the people that look on the misfortune of others and say that “There but by the grace of God go I” (or something similar) crap. Under the speaker’s way of thinking, WTF happened to the “grace of God” for the schmuck you’re talking about? I know it’s supposed to be “I recognize that I have it good because that could be me”, but it just comes across (to me) like “God must not like that guy too much”.
I managed to keep my mouth shut on this one:
Some friends had their first grandbaby. Baby catches virus in hospital, ruins heart valve. Baby will die without heart transplant - very rare to find infant donor.
Family prays - hard - for divine assistance. Some other baby dies in swimming pool accident. First baby gets new heart! Family rejoices that prayers were answered, thanks God, tells everone they know.
I’m happy for them, but damn, another baby and family had to suffer a gruesome death and these nutjobs think their prayers had something to do with it.
I resisted the urge to tell them that apparently God wanted the baby dead in the first place, but Medical science saved the baby. If this had happened five years ago - no miracle.
Hey, that’s just the way your description of what he thinks sounded. (I don’t mean to attack or blame you for that).
Anyway as Mr. Wiesel is Jewish and the book of Job is an Old Testament book, and since you ARE familiar with Mr. Wiesel’s thoughts; can you tell us his thoughts on God’s behavior (and explanation for said behavior) in that book?
Specifically, I mean his reaction to the premise that, as a human being, he cannot possibly understand God’s motives, much less conclude on whether or not they are good enough.
I’m no theologian – I wouldn’t even qualify as a mean amateur – but my thoughts regarding prayer were always that prayer could be a way to “change God’s mind” (yes, yes, who can truly understand the mind of God, etc.) through an act of virtue. F’rinstance, a cancer patient praying for a miraculous remission “because they’re worthy of recovery, darn it” would probably strike me as arrogance if I were an omnipotent deity, while a cancer patient praying for a miraculous remission “because they have so much more good to give to the world” or “because they want to spare their family from undue suffering” would surely tug a bit at my omnipotent heart strings. Prayer (in the case of a life-or-death situation, at least) might just be a last-minute way to get a few more points on your virtue-o-meter.
If belonging to a prayer chain increases your chances of being cured from a terrible affliction, would that mean that more popular people have a better chance of being cured than a loner? Doesn’t seem quite fair does it?
Shah Jehan, Wiesel essentially argues that human suffering gives humans the right to question God’s motives. a major theme of his writings (and,indeed, Jewish tradition) is that humans have the right to argue with God, to Judge him, even to condemn him. It is not necessarily taken for granted in Jewish tradition that God always does the right thing. The attrocities of the holocaust were so profound and so unequivocally EVIL that God had an absolute moral obligation to act. The math is simple, God cannot impose a different standard of morality on people than he does on himself. If something is evil for a person to do, then it is evil for God to do. Having the power to stop evil, and not stopping it, is in ITSELF evil. If God is absolutely good, then he logically cannot do evil. If God is omnipotent, then he has the power to stop it, yet he did not. So one of the following must logically be concluded. God is not all powerful or god is not all good. To argue that the holocaust served some higher Godly purpose is not only insulting to the victims, but also implies that the nazis were doing God’s “will,” a reprehensible proposition by any standard
I realize that I forgot to addess your specific question about Job, and to honest, I don’t precisely remember Wiesel’s interpretation. He has written extensively about the Old Testament (as Christians call it- Jews just call it the Bible) and I believe he has written about Job, but I can’t quite recall his commentary on it. I CAN say that Wiesel typically takes a critical view of God’s motives in O.T. stories, and that he would not necessarily accept God’s actions in the book of Job as being justified, nor would he automatically accept God’s argument as being persuasive. His essays on these topics often take the form of midrashes (meditations) which may posit multiple angles or viewpoints on the same question.
I realize that I forgot to addess your specific question about Job, and to honest, I don’t precisely remember Wiesel’s interpretation. He has written extensively about the Old Testament (as Christians call it- Jews just call it the Bible) and I believe he has written about Job, but I can’t quite recall his commentary on it. I CAN say that Wiesel typically takes a critical view of God’s motives in O.T. stories, and that he would not necessarily accept God’s actions in the book of Job as being justified, nor would he automatically accept God’s argument as being persuasive. His essays on these topics often take the form of midrashes (meditations) which may posit multiple angles or viewpoints on the same question.
I realize that I forgot to addess your specific question about Job, and to honest, I don’t precisely remember Wiesel’s interpretation. He has written extensively about the Old Testament (as Christians call it- Jews just call it the Bible) and I believe he has written about Job, but I can’t quite recall his commentary on it. I CAN say that Wiesel typically takes a critical view of God’s motives in O.T. stories, and that he would not necessarily accept God’s actions in the book of Job as being justified, nor would he automatically accept God’s argument as being persuasive. His essays on these topics often take the form of midrashes (meditations) which may posit multiple angles or viewpoints on the same question.
sorry about the mutiple posts. I kept getting that “cannot find” page
Maybe some other Jews/Christians/Muslims/Buddhists should chime in here.
It’s extremely common for people who’ve watched others suffer to question why it happened. That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist/doesn’t listen to prayers, etc. Any more than the very widespread use of prayer by military people when they are under fire means that when people are shooting at you the purpose of the deity suddenly becomes clear.
These are strong emotions, but feeling is not the same as understanding.
Religions are looking for people who, over a long period of time, after study, reflection, and searching inward, come to a personal understanding of the meaning of spirituality. Emphasis on the word personal. What religions are not trying to do is answer every possible question completely. There are religious questions that have been asked for thousands of years, and will continue to be asked (presumably forever).
Demanding to know why God let somebody suffer, or demanding to know God’s purposes has proved ineffective in the past, and will continue to be.
When you demand that a religious person explain themselves, naturally they would like to. But when the essential part of the explanation is internal and personal, all a person can do is say: “This is as much as I know that I can explain. If you do X, Y, and Z, you’ll probably come to understand the personal part of religion that can’t be articulated.”
Prayer is, among other things, one of those Xs, Ys, and Zs – a way to put yourself in a receptive state for the personal part of spiritual discovery.
The OP was “Why would prayers work?” To answer is to claim to understand the reasoning and purpose of something God has apparently deigned not to explain fully. I.e., the question isn’t answerable.
Let’s be honest. When people use language like"…beyond logic…unanswerable…internal and personal," etc. they are essentially admitting that religion is basically fantasy and cannot be reconciled with reality. believing in Jesus or angels is really no different than believing in extraterrestrials or psychics. People are latching onto a fantasy view of the universe which seems like it would be better or more fun than the reality they actually live in. Prayer doesn’t work. We KNOW this. Whether or not people pray has no discernable effect on the eventual outcome. A lot of people keep talking about God “choosing” whether or not to answer prayers. All right then, you’re ADMITTING prayer is pointless. God’s “decisions” have nothing to do with whether or not you pray.
Oh, I’m pretty honest. I’ve been through more than the average bear in terms of the religious mill.
There are things that can’t be explained, but must be experienced. You agree? We can’t explain “red” absolutely, we can’t be sure that others see the same red we do. We can’t explain the important part of what it’s like to be in love to someone who’s never been in love. Yet no one denies that there’s something called “red” or that “love” exists.
The underlying problem with the “God is fantasy” approach is that billions of people – most of them unassociated with one another – describe largely similar experiences.
Compare that with beliefs about psychic phenomena – pick one part – ghosts. Do they exist? Can they speak? Can they touch things? Can they harm people? Can they be exorcised? What color are they? Can they fly? If they can, could they go into space? Have they explored the solar system? No common agreement whatsoever.
Nearly the opposite manifestation of what people experience in prayer and meditation.
Saying “prayer doesn’t work” implies that you know what prayer is for. As suggested, the grammar school idea that God is some kind of genie in a lamp who grants three wishes is about as far from the actual experience of prayer as it’s possible to get.
How else is one to obtain peace and understanding without seeking it, regardless of the method of search?
Yes. So? You’re not asking God to change the world, just asking Him to help you change yourself.
You imply that God’s perfection implies this is the best of all possible worlds. I thought that Voltaire dealt with that old chestnut four centuries ago. You also imply that since it is all God’s plan, there is no change, which itself implies no free will. But what if God’s plan is free will? Then might He not decide help you on your own spiritual path, if you but ask?
What God knows is irrelevant. It is what the petitioner knows and seeks to know that is the key. The Christian God seems quite big on free will to me. That brings with it a necessity to actively seek enlightenment if you wish to obtain it. Hence prayer.
pan