tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11422779.post-1128094996495773672005-09-30T11:31:00.000-04:002005-09-30T11:43:16.566-04:00Many people feel grateful when they pray for something and believe that their prayers have been answered. Some questions:<br /><br />Are all prayers equally spiritual, religious - or realistic?<br /><br /><strong>Would you pray for:</strong><br /><br />A winning lottery ticket?<br />A new car?<br />A better paying job?<br />Finding Mister or Miss Right?<br />Good health?<br />Averting a hurricane?<br />Someone else’s soul?<br />Inner strength?<br />Victory in war?<br />World peace?<br />The long term survival of our species on this planet?<br /><br /><strong>Thoughts</strong><br /><br />If you believe in the power of petitionary prayer (making specific requests of God), have you thought about how it works? In what manner do our prayers influence God’s decision? Or, if we don’t feel that we can influence God, and our bottom line is, “Thy will be done,” then why are we praying?<br /><br />Sometimes good things happen that we didn’t pray for and may never even have anticipated. So when we do pray for something and get it, what makes us think that we received a special answer to our prayer – as opposed to another good thing just happening?<br /><br />Do some people or groups of people have more prayer power than others? Do children or elderly people have more prayer power? If we’ve been especially good lately, does this increase the effectiveness of our prayers?<br /><br />Usually what I hear is that people who believe in the power of prayer have the most prayer power; and that when people’s prayers don’t come true, it’s because they don’t believe sufficiently in the power of prayer. A couple thoughts:<br /><br />Has anyone ever checked this out? It seems like it would be easy enough to have two groups of people, one skeptical about prayer and the other believing in it, each pray for the same thing to find out whether the believers got better results. Of course nowadays everyone doing a study seems to be a special interest group of one kind of another, so it might be hard to trust the results...<br /><br />On the other hand, some people may object to even trying to test whether petitionary prayer works. Isn’t there a biblical verse about not “testing” God? Or perhaps the word is “tempting…? Either way, it’s hard to see how this word could have referred to applying the scientific method to prayer, since the Bible was written so long before science came along.<br /><br /><strong>Problems</strong><br /><br />Even if we refrain from trying to test whether petitionary prayer really works, and just accept that it does, I still see a few potential problems with a scenario in which God respectively rewards and punishes believers and disbelievers for their belief or disbelief in the power of prayer by granting prayers only or primarily to believers.<br /><br />First: Assuming God wants us to believe in the power of prayer, then granting prayers to those who already believe in it while not granting prayers to those who harbor doubts concerning its efficacy, seems an odd way for God to promote belief in prayer. I say “odd” rather than “mysterious” because although I, like many of us, find God mysterious, I also find that people often use the word mysterious to refer to things that are simply illogical or contradicted by experience. To me, mystery is very deep, and has to do with the nature of being itself – something entirely different than riddles, word play, or logical contradictions that are transparently products of the human mind.<br /><br />Second: Consider the verse, “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.” Maybe this justifies why God doesn’t tend to grant prayers to those with little belief in prayer’s power? And yet everyone I’ve ever spoken to who’s convinced of the power of prayer believes in it <em>precisely because they think they’ve seen it work…<br /></em><br />Third: A scenario in which God respectively rewards and punishes believers/disbelievers in the power of prayer for their belief/disbelief would seem to presuppose that God feels that those who don’t believe in the power of petitionary prayer are doing something wrong or sinful by being as honest and conscientious as they can be about the matter. For some of us are incapable of “choosing” our beliefs. Whatever we may want to believe, we believe what appears to be true. The best that some of us could ever do in terms of affirming that we believe in the power of prayer would be to lie and tell others that we do, even though we would know that in fact we doubted. It is hard to – believe… that God would want us to lie, or would punish us for something that’s not a choice.Paulnoreply@blogger.com