Dup
StG
Skald - Yeah, but what kind of underwear are you wearing?
I really do know how to conjugate the verb. It was supposed to be funny.
StG
I know you know how to conjugate the verb; I was continuing your joke.
As for my underwear, I am forced to go commando on account of having the multiple penises.
Whew. What a theologically provocative question.
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I notice one significant criterion missing: is it specified if there is an afterlife that rewards people for being good people when they die, as often goes along with belief in gods and archangels? If so, it might make sense to do what some people think God does do, and strictly prioritise prayer which makes that person or someone else more likely to achieve heaven.
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Also note, in some way, we already HAVE this. Obviously the government can’t grant supernatural wishes – but they can cure diseases, give people millions of pounds, release the wrongly imprisoned, etc, etc, and already do decide how to prioritise those things.
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Before I read that it wasn’t allowed to do this, my first thought was something like “start with peace in the middle east, end corruption in legislature and judiciary in all countries, permanently cure aids and cancer, design a cheap source of unlimited renewable energy, provide clean water and basic healthcare to everywhere lacking it, and then start curing people who die young, etc, etc”. But that does sort of suggest my problem with the idea of God – if He/She answers prayers, why don’t those prayers get answered sooner? But some of that could apply to one city.
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If I am supposed to be granting individual prayer, and can’t just count quality-of-life-years, then I’m really not sure, I agree it’s hard to decide.
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Because a lot depends on the “limited resources”. Does that limit knowledge? Physical energy transfer? The number of people affected? If I do live in Tripoli, is it easier to sever his carotid artery than to turn him into a cockroach or not? Some of the things on my wishlist might not involve much energy, if my knowledge was sufficient, but would represent widespread social changes. Would something that affected only one person, but was otherwise really implausible, be easier? I know why these are left as guidelines in the rules, but I think that’s why when it comes to real theology, they’re interesting.
And then you venture FOOLISHLY into the realm of Unintended Consequences. Every fix creates two new problems. It’s the dialectic theory that keeps life worth living. When every problem has been solved, there is no more challenge, no more reason to live. You become vegetative, a plant, just existing.
For a mortal to resolve a wish, a problem, belong to another mortal, there are failings in the understanding of the greater picture, that can cause more grief than solace. Example; wishing your dead child back to life. How could a walking, living, rotting corpse bring any kind of joy? How do you anticipate EVERY single drawback?
Another example; somehow going back to 1933 and killing Hitler. WWII is prevented, millions of deaths averted, and all the technology born of desperate times goes undiscovered, leading to plagues and unlimited suffering throughout the 20th century.
Although extreme, this is exactly why wishes, or prayers, should never be answered. Certainly never by mere mortals with the capacity for more damage than repair. Life is all about adapting, not avoiding.
1. Nothing that removes another person’s Free Will.
You can’t pray someone into loving you, or giving you money, or giving you the job when they think you’re an incompetent shit. I’m not above influencing minds, I’m just not going to rewrite them for your benefit.
2. Nothing that benefits you by harming another.
“Dear God, please make Bill have a horrible accident so I don’t have to work with him”
“Dear God, please take my parents, I would inherit all their stuff and be happy”
No.
Not I didn’t say anything about wishing harm on others. I just ruled out cases where you’re doing it for your own benefit.
3. Nothing that is going to visibly defy the Laws of The Universe (physics, death, etc).
No magical effects like a sudden rainstorm popping out of nowhere (like Storm in X-men), or a passed football turning and hovering in mid air, or the dead returning to life, or arms suddenly reappearing, or shit like that.
That isn’t to say that Johnny might not suddenly throw a longer and more accurate pass than he has ever thrown in his life, or your name might not suddenly rise to the top of the donor list, or some hiring agent won’t just stumble across your resume when the wouldn’t otherwise have ever seen it. I’m just ruling out the highly visibly miraculous.
In the given scenario, you’ve become an agent of God, not a malevolent genie. If you bring someone back to life, clearly you’re expected to exercise common sense and reanimate them in the bloom of health, not as a rotted corpse.
That said, resurrection is probably verboten, since God has specifically ordered you to be discreet and not to encourage worship. If you resurrect anybody, it’ll be someone the paramedics gave up on 2 minutes ago, not a day’s-dead corpse.
I think that’d count as indiscreet. And I don’t think even God can change the past. Certainly her agents would have less power than She.
Maybe, but God clearly has a different opinion than you here. After all, if she wanted to prevent a given mortal, currently powerless, from performing wonders, all She has to do is nothing. Doing nothing is easy to work into even Her schedule.
Besides, your entire reaction just gets you eaten by a big fish and denied death, forced to sit in its belly until you submit to God’s will.
So, by the upgrading of the “rules” and “limitations”, it seems that if such power were forced upon me, I’d also have to carry a HUGE book of rules that I’d have to refer to each time to make sure I wasn’t in violation. Lawyers have paralegals to do that kind of research, and it takes time.
No thanks. I might have to sit in the belly of a whale for eons, and that would suck. But not as much as carrying around a 50 million page book of therefores and whereases like a frigging’ Library of Congress. I’ll pass. (Besides, who buys the Jonah story when whales have such small throats that they’re limited to a diet of shrimp?)
You seem to be assuming that Jonah was swallowed whole. Being chewed into tiny pieces and magically kept alive & conscious would be much, much worse than that, I think.
If someone prays to lose weight, my subtle grant would be that all foods taste like liver after the Calorie quota for the day is reached. For the homeless of the community who are unhappy with their lot, drugs and alcohol will have no effect for them. After that, all the doctors at the local hospital will become geniuses, and researchers at the local uni will be successful.
For those with respiratory diseases, a sudden ordinance against smoke-belching trucks will be passed. After I rest up, pollinating trees will suddenly evolve to have lovely, bee pollinated flowers. No more wind-borne pollen allergies!
Often disastrously. Take flouridation of our drinking water, just for ONE minor example.
Or the State of Florida, for another, in which a prisoner was proven by DNA to be innocent, yet he was properly convicted by a jury, and there was no misapplication of justice in the trial, nor evidence deliberately kept from the jury. There is no such thing as “new” evidence since any evidence existed at the time of the trial, and it was the failure of the defense to offer it in testimony, even if such technology to do so was not available at that time. Essentially, the system worked, so he belongs in prison, even if he’s innocent.
The government is the LAST entity I’d want to entrust my prayers to! The government is a necessary evil, not a God or deity.
“I would help them, if I feel like it. And then they would owe me big!”
Sounds like a story about God deciding to end the world. So he appears to three of the most influential people in the world to advise them about warning the people. Those three people are President Barack Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and Microsoft President Bill Gates.
Immediately, Obama calls a press conference that interrupts all TV programming. He says, “My fellow citizens, there IS a God and he’s told me that he is bringing the world to an end. The good news is that he considers me to be one of the most important people in the world.”
In Russia, Medvedev also calls a national press conference, in which he states, “Comrades, I have been advised that the world will come to an end. The bad news is that there really is a God, and you are advised to make peace with him immediately.”
Out of Seattle comes Bill Gates with his pronouncement. “Fellow geeks, I’ve just spoken with God and he’s told me that he is going to destroy the world. But the good news is that you won’t have to worry about Windows 8.”
Aha! So there really IS a 3-peckered billygoat!
You know, I REALLY hate that bureaucratic, corporate phrase, “We’ll worry about crossing that bridge when we come to it.”
But in this case, I find it entirely apropos.
no harry-potter stuff. i think even gods have a tough time with math and physics so if you formulated those laws to govern the physical universe, i doubt if you’re inclined to break your own laws.
Has no one asked you to define “prayer”? Does it have to be specifically addressed to a deity? The “correct” deity? What is someone is praying to a false god?
What if someone is verbally expressing a wish without any particular intent to ask a god? What if someone is speaking to another person, or to their cat?
I’m tempted to immediately grant all the “I wish I were dead” wishes, and the “I wish you were dead” wishes, just to fuck with people minds.
Oh, and all of those “If I’m lying, may God strike me down with a bolt of lightning” wishes are gonna need a semi-permanent thunder storm.
My thought (which I edited out of the OP because it was too freaking long as it was) is that Ralph’s boss doesn’t care about names; She doesn’t care about being worshipped, remember. So any request to a supernatural entity would count as a prayer so long as it’s verbalized (i.e., spoken or written). That’d include wishes made at wishing wells at so forth, I expect.
Well, in that case expect Michael to put the smackdown on you! 
Am I working for the Old Testament God or the New Testament God? That would make a BIG difference. The former would mean that vengeance and retribution prayers get a higher priority.
Clearly it’s neither, as you’re told to passively discourage theism. When the OT God performed a miracle, it was because he wanted to inflict fear and awe. Hence his hardening of Pharaoh’s heart during the Plagues, which was done to make sure as much Egyptian blood was spilled as possible.
Jesus doesn’t seem as showy; he rarely does anything violent, and he never uses his powers to do so; moreover, he often tells the people he helps not to tell anyone about the wonder in question. But that seems to be a concern about timing to me, as he wanted the Passion to happen ona particular schedule and thus chose to slowly and methodically provoke the Sanhedrin and the Romans (both of whom, frankly, were his monkeys). Additionally, there’s at least one case – the blind man whose sight he restored – where it’s said straight out that the afflicted person’s problems were caused so that Christ might heal him for the glory of God. Clearly he wanted that story getting out. I think he dealt with Lazarus as he did for the same reason (and because he was provoking the Sanhedrin).
Anyway, it’s a Rhymer thread. Obviously if there’s a god in it, said god is female. 