Stories about prayer

It has been said that prayer is for our benefit. It is a conduit towards accepting God at that moment. Some would argue that it does nothing. Personally, I would disagree. I believe that all prayers were answered that day. Everyone who ultimately died and who prayed lives today in another realm...a good realm. Anyone foolish enough to simply ignore their impending death would be judged accordingly...according to what they have done with their lives, what they could have done, and the reasons for their choices. I realize that prayer has been "proven" to have no effect in life, but if God is the energy that answers the prayer, He is not simply going to allow Himself to be measured---and judged---by wee little human piss ants. And I know the counter-arguments. I can hear them now! How a good God should be impartial and simply answer all prayers if he has the power and ability...assuming once again that humans desire a God whom they create. Hence why we have so many imposters and wannabe Deities. Finally, I believe that altruistic prayers (for others) get answered more often than simple selfish ones, such as praying for money. All this being said, I have no evidence to back any of it up. But why would I?

Good one! Actually, 9/11/2001 is a well known and documented day.The larger question is whether:
1) God exists...and if so, hears and/or cares about prayer.
2)A praying individual has a better probability of survival than one who is silent or simply screams
3)Addressing the larger question as to why God only answers *some* prayers.

Are you suggesting that there should be some sort of rule about the method and intention for answered prayer? Sorta like how you feel that God should protect us at all times from all plagues, accidents, and disasters if He in fact had the ability??

I believe that they did. Granted their remaining lifetime was a matter of minutes. I believe that prayers made before September 11th would get answered. I believe that prayers made on September 11th, at the moment of awareness of mortality were earnest prayers and would be answered. It could well be that the people especially who jumped had the bolstered confidence of an answered prayer to give them the strength to do that. Of course, a room full of fire would drive anyone out. What makes you think that even atheists didn't have a desperate hope and belief of salvation...or leaving peace with family---milliseconds before they perished? Wghat else would one think about when their death was all but certain? Which leads to a rhetorical question: Are there atheists in foxholes? What do they think about should death come knocking? I would go so far as to argue that whatever is uttered in those final seconds resembles a prayer more than normal daily conversation.

That's why you are currently an atheist. You can't wrap your mind around the belief in a God Who doesn't answer each and every prayer by rescuing the individual. My belief is that Gods primary concern for each and every one of us is that we make it to the next level on the road to eternity. In order to make it to this level, it is obviously entirely Gods decision. Some argue that it is based entirely on works--on what we have done versus what we could have done, how we related and responded to each individual we encountered during our lives and how we treated them. The argument here is that we are charged to do what Jesus commanded us to do and how well we respond to this call shows our value towards graduating.A good man (or woman) dies in a tragedy. God foresees the tragedy as it unfolds, perhaps. He watches the terrorists as they sow a plan to bring about destruction towards the entrenched power and greed of their enemy. He sees each and every one of their family members and the needs thereof. Similarly, He sees the eventual victims. He sees who they interact with on a daily basis and how their lives are important in these relationships. To God, all people on both sides of a war have value. One government or the other may be the more evil of the two in that the nation sows more strife globally. But God looks at the hearts of the individual people and sees the reasons why they act the way they do and their impact on those individuals around them.

How is a prayer answered?

What options might God have?
Keep in mind that God would know many things that we humans couldn't. He may know, perhaps, that a Father's untimely death may save the lives of many of those close to them down the road. Despite what jar preaches, I don't believe that humans have the responsibility to correct God. It may well be, however, that our behavior and our individual efforts play a role in how He responds to events directly connected to us...and others....in the timeline of life.

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Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. ~RC Sproul
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." ~Mark Twain "
~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith

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You can "get answers" by watching the ducks. That doesn't mean the answers are coming from them.~Ringo

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Subjectivism may very well undermine Christianity.
In the same way that "allowing people to choose what they want to be when they grow up" undermines communism.~Stile

For some, they got out alive. For others, their family would find peace in the midst of the tragedy of their death. Perhaps the ones who died were ready for the next level. It was metaphorically their time. Perhaps even some who died were foreseen to have caused greater problems in the future toward others and thus were taken now. Bottom line? Neither I nor anyone else knows what God was thinking as a human tragedy unfolded. One thing I don't believe, and that is that God is like a giant rescuer Who appears, diverts the path of the airplane, and saves the greatest number of people which he can. It's too simplistic and insults the knowledge which such a Deity knows.

So in other words, despite the unbelief in the God described by many, you think that in your mind you can envision a better God. Interesting how minds work! Let me guess...in a perfect world governed by the God of your imagination, nobody would ever kill, steal, or slander their parents. Nobody would ever desire anything that anyone else had. We would all be happy little people scratching each other back as this God taught us to do...giving more than we received and paying it forward. And should a natural disaster arise, this God would divert it from our path.Which is why you simply see the utopian people behaving like altruistic socialists without need for a God. Great dream! No God needed.Perhaps your God would have been in the hearts of the firefighters who risked their own lives to save others. That God I can respect and agree with.

God is an accomplice in every human decision ever made. He is aware of the decision. So arrest Him.

Many of our prayers are for others and ourselves to have the heart and wisdom to do just that. And I know what you will say....something along the lines of "stop praying and just get out and DO it!" But the Lord helps change our heart.(grow it stronger) He helps me to let go of my extra dollar for the stinky guy on the corner. Even if the guy stole from my store yesterday.

The point we are trying to make regarding our belief is that there is One God and that yes, we just happen to have been found by Him. Which supports the idea that He chooses the reproachable things to shame the wise (in their own eyes). Faith and I hardly represent the strongest or "best" Christians, but we do understand what we have been taught about scripture. You, predictably, along with jar use scripture to refute what the mainstream church and apologetics have taught and come up with an entirely different way of defining scripture. Which I disagree with but which makes for some interesting conversations.You *do* have a point in that the best critics of Christianity(modern dogma) are best represented by atheists/agnostics/secular humanists who claim membership in the club yet continually question and redefine its by-laws.I suppose that we are forever stuck debating you. And I suppose that you will always throw up evidence as the only valid standard with which to score points in such a debate.My only evidence is my character. It varies day by day but hopefully is getting more stable.

I think that under the most pressing circumstances, any human is capable of murder..yet most of us have a strong enough sense of right and wrong to suppress the urge. Heck, I've gotten mad enough at idiots in traffic to nearly ramming them yet I've never initiated such acts of road rage...though the thoughts briefly occur. Whether I need God to keep me sane or not, I believe that I need Him. Critics will say that we believers would be reprobates without Him...whereas *they* would still do the right thing....but how would we ever know whether or not Gods presence in the world keeps everybody from being reprobates...even non-believers?

In this case, the critics I was referring to were other believers.And there is no collective *we*. Everyone has different ideas as to what's real. You are starting to sound like Stile. Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.

remind us of the construct again?

I wouldn't go patting myself on the back just yet. Unbelievers have a higher opinion of humanity-at-large because that is the future they believe in. They will claim that this is all that anyone has...believers included. I reject though cannot objectively prove my counter-position. This is what frustrates me to no end about jar. Though claiming to belong to a recognized Christian Church, he forever argues that humanity creates its own Gods....which makes a conversation with him regarding GOD rather difficult. Its all more Jewish than Episcopalian, in my mind... Look at Spinoza, for example. Spinozas ReligionSome snippets:

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Lately, atheists have gone on a publishing offensive. Although wishing to give the impression that their highbrow books buck the trend, in reality, they preach to the converted. For casual and confident disbelief in religious faith is the dominant view at our major newspapers, national tv networks and radio stations, and certainly at our leading universities. However strong faith may be in the heartland, few and far between are the reporters and editors, correspondents and anchors and producers, professors and university administrators who take seriously the idea of a mysterious and commanding God, creator of the heavens and earth, who has formed human beings in His image and who demands justice, kindness, and humility from humanity.

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Nevertheless, best-selling author Sam Harris in The End of Faith and Letters to a Christian Nation, distinguished Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, and all-star journalist and irrepressible man-of-letters Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great are mad as hell about the persistence of belief in God, and they don’t want to take it anymore. Religion, for them, is the root of a great portion of the evil in the world. They decry faith as certainly false and clearly irrational, sustained today, as ever, by ignorance, obscurantism, credulity, cowardice, and, not least, the sinister skill with which crafty clerics exploit the all-too-human craving for the comforting illusion that the suffering and injustices of this world will be corrected in another. Our sophisticated and outspoken atheists, suffused with anti-theological ire, are, in short, faithful heirs of Voltaire’s call craser l’infme! to crush traditional religious belief.

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And this is what I see. Atheists are getting ever more bold in using logic, reason, and reality to build an aggressive case against the rationality of belief.
Of course, it is easy to blame it all on a spiritual war, but I unabashedly do so, aware of the impossibility of proving that either. More:

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Of course, there are secular Republicans and believing Democrats. But scratch the surface of the opinions of men and women of the left and you will find, more often than not, the conviction that though we are alas obliged to tolerate it, religion and particularly biblical faith is at its core intolerant and a menace to liberty and democracy.

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Unfortunately, our neo-Voltaireans ill-serve toleration, liberty, and democracy. Nor do they advance the cause of knowledge. Their heavy reliance on scorn, mockery, and ridicule to defeat, once and for all, their self-proclaimed enemy contravenes the commitment to rational argument, grounded in observation and experience, in whose name they would consign religion to the dustbin of history. Moreover, our militant atheists distort or render invisible religious believers’ self-understanding.

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I'm still reading...nore comments later.

The just shall live by faith...not evidence. If you had a rich uncle, how do you know that people were not only being nice to him because he had money?