Originally posted by Bardock42
How many prayers are said every day? How many do you say in a month sith? You work in a church, how much do people pray?
Cause you can tell. It's like living in a house with a smoker. Eventually the walls turn yellow and when you rehang a picture there's a clean spot on the wall. If you spend the evening in the house of someone who prays, you have to go home and immeadiately wash your clothes.
Originally posted by Devil KingAre you poking fun at me?
Cause you can tell. It's like living in a house with a smoker. Eventually the walls turn yellow and when you rehang a picture there's a clean spot on the wall. If you spend the evening in the house of someone who prays, you have to go home and immeadiately wash your clothes.
Originally posted by Robtardi follow pretty much the same philosophy.
My personal beliefs: I don't think God is the "all watchful and caring guy in the sky".I do believe in God though, as a beginning to everything, I just don't think God keeping tabs on us.
Edit: In other words, I belive the Bible and every other religious text was written/dictated by man.
What's your excuse?
Originally posted by Bardock42
How many prayers are said every day? How many do you say in a month sith? You work in a church, how much do people pray? Do you think it is possible that things like the stuff you said happens, and someone prayed and God didn't intervene? Like, he knew it was going to turn out well anyways, and just left it? If it is possible, do you think God would still get the credit from the person that prayed?
I say alot. I pray often. Shoot, an hour on Thursday morning, 1 1/2 hours on Friday, and an hour of Saturday night are PART of my work week. 😛
I see answers to prayers all the time.
In just the last month:
An answered prayer for a couple that on Sunday had until Friday afternoon to come up with 2 months worth of rent, had no work in 3 months, had gotten behind in bills, and within that Sunday-Friday time frame, had gotten 3 months worth of rent. (new jobs, a contractor)
A healing of asthma that literally had the 13 year old boys chest moving, waves pulsing up and down his shirt. (see my testimony thread in the religion forum.)
And just today, in our Thursday morning prayer, we'd taken the requests turned in on Sunday, and were praying for a young couple where the husband had been out of work since Christmas. I'm not lying when I tell you that we got a call as soon as prayer was over, and he'd been hired at 9:00 in the morning, right about the time that we were actually praying for him.
As far as people praying and not receiving an answer, I don't know what you mean. We pray for the needs that people turn in and I'd say that 3/4 of them are answered within a week or 2. The other 1/4 come to pass later on, and usually there was some good reasoning that God had.
Example: One young couple that lived in Yuba City, about 45 min. from our church in Roseville, had been praying and believing for a new job, and new place to live that would be much closer. They wanted to help and serve more at the church. The prayers didn't seem to be answered. In the meantime, the wife's younger sister (16) ended up having to leave the home of their other sister due to a divorce. (they had custody of her) So the younger sister came to live with this couple for a few months, until she ended up being placed with another family in our church, through social services. And what happened? JUST as she was moving, the husband got a job as a supervisor for a company that said they had no supervisor positions, living on site (apartment complex maintenance manager),when they said that they had no homes on site, and making more money than they ever had before.
The answer to the prayer wasn't "No", but it was "wait, because I have a reason for this." They were able to help the 16 year old sister, speak into her life and encourage her, and after she was put in a good home, the timing was right for them and they received even MORE than what they had asked God for.
Y'all showed up a little too late in the game to tell me that prayer doesn't work and that God isn't real. You give hypothetical examples of people :"Well what if so and so prayed for such and such and it didn't happen, where's God then?" but you don't know anybody, or have actual people telling you that.
Every testimony I've ever given, from my wife's father healed of Hepatitis C, to the healing of the boy with the torn and ruptured spleen, to the ones above, are real people who I know and talk to.
Their word of testimony trumps your unbelief, every time.
(a quick note: somebody who prays for something, but doesn't really believe it, or only half believes it isn't going to receive anything. The book of James talks about this saying: "How can any man expect to receive anything from God if he is of two minds?" So that may be the part of some peoples problems. I've yet to see anybody ask anything of God with TRUE faith, REALLY believing in HIM that He'll do it, then not see it happen. At least, not any people that I know.)
Originally posted by sithsaber408Simple answer is he wasn’t brain dead. Just because doctors say that a person is (what ever) doesn’t mean they are always correct. Much of the medical community makes an educated guess at the problem and goes with the most likely cause. We only know a drop in the bucket about how the body works. People pray all the time for people to get better, FAR more don’t recover or get better.
By Mike Celizic
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 7:23 a.m. PT, Mon., March. 24, 2008Zack Dunlap doesn’t remember much from the day he died, but he does remember hearing a doctor declare him brain-dead. And he remembers being incredibly ticked off.
“I’m glad I couldn’t get up and do what I wanted to do,” the strapping Oklahoman said in a soft drawl in an exclusive appearance on Monday on TODAY in New York.
And what would he have done, asked TODAY’s Natalie Morales, who has followed Dunlap’s miraculous recovery from a Nov. 17 ATV accident that left him with a catastrophic head injury.
“Probably would have been a broken window they went out,” the 21-year-old said with a hint of a smile.
He’s been through months of rehab, and he’s getting better, but he still has issues with memory and emotional issues.
“I feel pretty good, but this is hard,” he said of all the excitement of being in New York and on national television. He is getting better, he agreed, but said the process is frustrating.
“I just ain’t got the patience,” he said quietly.
He was accompanied by his parents, Pam and Doug Dunlap, and his younger sister, Kacy, who are more than happy to wait while he recovers.
“He’s been doing amazingly well,” Pam Dunlap said. “He does still have a lot of memory issues. It just takes a long time for the brain to heal after such a traumatic injury. It may take a year or more before he completely recovers. But that’s OK. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. We’re just thankful and blessed that we have him here.”
‘There was no activity’
Doctors have no explanation for why Dunlap is alive.
He had been riding his souped-up ATV with some friends on that fateful Saturday, less than a week before Thanksgiving. They had participated in a parade that morning, popping wheelies and impressing the crowd, and then they had gone out riding on their machines. He did not wear a helmet.
Dunlap fell behind his friends on a highway just outside of Davidson, Okla., not far from his home in the ranching town of Frederick and near the Texas border. He gunned his machine to catch up, doing another wheelie on the back wheels. When he dropped the front wheels back to the pavement, he saw that he was going to crash into a friend’s machine that had stopped a short way up the road.
Dunlap tried to swerve, but flipped his machine and went flying, smashing headfirst and facedown on the asphalt. He remained there motionless, unresponsive to his friends, who quickly called 911.
Taken first to a local hospital, he was airlifted 50 miles away to United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, where there was a trauma unit that might be able to treat the severe damage he had done to his brain.
But 36 hours after the accident, doctors performed a PET scan of his brain and informed his parents, along with other family members who had gathered to keep vigil at the hospital, that there was no blood flowing to Zack’s brain; he was brain-dead.
Doctors showed the scan to Zack’s parents, and, Doug Dunlap told Morales, “There was no activity at all. No blood flow at all.”
‘They said he was brain-dead’
The devastated parents were faced with the horrible decision of either keeping their son hooked up to life-support equipment or pulling the plug and letting his body follow his brain into death.
“We didn’t want him as a vegetable,” Doug Dunlap said. “We didn’t know what he was going to be like. They said he was brain-dead and there would be no life, so we were preparing ourselves.”
Zack had declared on his driver’s license that he wanted to be an organ donor, so his parents gave permission for doctors to keep his body alive until the organs could be harvested.
“Zack has always been a giver. He always wanted to make sure everybody had things going their way,” Doug Dunlap continued. “He didn’t want to give up, and we didn’t want his organs to give up, either. And he didn’t, either.”
The decision made, there remained only a wait of several hours while an organ-harvesting team flew in by helicopter. The family spent the time saying goodbye.
During her time with him, Zack’s grandmother, Naomi, prayed. Her request was straightforward — “just a miracle,” she told Morales. “He was too young for God to take him.”
Some four hours after doctors declared Zack dead, a nurse began to remove tubes from Dunlap. His cousins, Dan and Christy Coffin, both of whom are nurses, were also in the room. Something about Zack’s appearance made them think that he wasn’t as dead as the doctors said.
On a hunch, Dan pulled out his bone-handled pocket knife and ran the blade up the sole of one of Zack’s feet.
‘Our son is still alive!’
The foot yanked away, but the other nurse said it was a reflex action.
So Dan Coffin then dug a fingernail under one of Zack’s nails. Zack yanked his arm away and across his body, and that, the other nurse agreed, wasn’t a reflex action. It was a sign of life.
“We went from the lowest possible moment to, ‘Oh, my gosh, our son is still alive!’ ” said his mother. “That was the most miraculous feeling. We had gone from the lowest possible emotion that a parent could feel to the top of the mountains again. We were still very guarded, because we weren’t sure what his prognosis would be, but just to hear the words that he was back with us is something we’ll remember forever.”
Doctors warned the family that Zack could have profound brain damage that would prevent his leading anything resembling an active life. But within five days he opened his eyes, and 48 days after the accident, he walked out of a rehab center and returned home, where the entire town gave him a hero’s welcome.
He’s working to regain his memories and to control his emotions, and he’d like to go back to his job as a warehouse worker. He also wants to get his driver’s license back.
“I’ve been wanting to drive [from] about the day I was back from rehab,” he said.
At Morales’ request, Zack reached in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the pocket knife his cousin had used to prove he was still alive. Dan Coffin had given it to him as a gift and a memento.
“It makes me thankful that they didn’t give up,” Zack said, turning the knife over in his hand. “Don’t let the good die young.”
Link: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/23775873/?GT1=43001
Obviously I italicized the part about the grandma, and for good reason. How many times is it gonna be "just a coincidence" when people are healed, brought back from the dead, and other miraculous things happening that doctors can't explain?
(see my testimony thread in the religion forum for the story of little 2 year old Jesse, who fell from a 2nd story balcony, had a ruptured spleen and internal bleeding, and was taken by helicopter from Roseville Sutter Hopsital to UC Davis Medical Center, and as his grandmother prayed during the flight, the child was healed completely and no tear on the spleen, nor internal bleeding.)
I find it interesting, when in the regular news there are so many occurrences that point straight to God... that people can continue to turn a blind eye and call it "coincidence, phenomena, etc.." when even the best professionals in the field can't explain it.
And every time? Somebody praying for that healing, praying for that miracle. When does the law of averages step in and say that these people praying are obviously tapped in to something because the prayers are being answered?
Originally posted by Alpha Centauri
Did anyone pray on Sept 10th 2001?Someone must have.
-AC
Yeah, but they were praying to the wrong god. Some of them were catholic, hindu and muslim gods. What a waste of effort.
Originally posted by sithsaber408
I say alot. I pray often. Shoot, an hour on Thursday morning, 1 1/2 hours on Friday, and an hour of Saturday night are PART of my work week. 😛
You're special because god pencils you in to his schedule 3 times a week. And for over an hour each time, no less!
What the hell do you pray for that it takes an hour? And isn't praying really a waste of god's time? I mean, if he knows everything, isn't prayer redundant? Isn't it kind of like spam mail?
Originally posted by sithsaber408So you are saying that you never prayed for a terminally ill patient and they didn't get healed? Or don't you take that request.
I say alot. I pray often. Shoot, an hour on Thursday morning, 1 1/2 hours on Friday, and an hour of Saturday night are PART of my work week. 😛I see answers to prayers all the time.
In just the last month:
An answered prayer for a couple that on Sunday had until Friday afternoon to come up with 2 months worth of rent, had no work in 3 months, had gotten behind in bills, and within that Sunday-Friday time frame, had gotten 3 months worth of rent. (new jobs, a contractor)
A healing of asthma that literally had the 13 year old boys chest moving, waves pulsing up and down his shirt. (see my testimony thread in the religion forum.)
And just today, in our Thursday morning prayer, we'd taken the requests turned in on Sunday, and were praying for a young couple where the husband had been out of work since Christmas. I'm not lying when I tell you that we got a call as soon as prayer was over, and he'd been hired at 9:00 in the morning, right about the time that we were actually praying for him.
As far as people praying and not receiving an answer, I don't know what you mean. We pray for the needs that people turn in and I'd say that 3/4 of them are answered within a week or 2. The other 1/4 come to pass later on, and usually there was some good reasoning that God had.
Example: One young couple that lived in Yuba City, about 45 min. from our church in Roseville, had been praying and believing for a new job, and new place to live that would be much closer. They wanted to help and serve more at the church. The prayers didn't seem to be answered. In the meantime, the wife's younger sister (16) ended up having to leave the home of their other sister due to a divorce. (they had custody of her) So the younger sister came to live with this couple for a few months, until she ended up being placed with another family in our church, through social services. And what happened? JUST as she was moving, the husband got a job as a supervisor for a company that said they had no supervisor positions, living on site (apartment complex maintenance manager),when they said that they had no homes on site, and making more money than they ever had before.
The answer to the prayer wasn't "No", but it was "wait, because I have a reason for this." They were able to help the 16 year old sister, speak into her life and encourage her, and after she was put in a good home, the timing was right for them and they received even MORE than what they had asked God for.
Y'all showed up a little too late in the game to tell me that prayer doesn't work and that God isn't real. You give hypothetical examples of people :"Well what if so and so prayed for such and such and it didn't happen, where's God then?" but you don't know anybody, or have actual people telling you that.
Every testimony I've ever given, from my wife's father healed of Hepatitis C, to the healing of the boy with the torn and ruptured spleen, to the ones above, are real people who I know and talk to.
Their word of testimony trumps your unbelief, every time.
(a quick note: somebody who prays for something, but doesn't really believe it, or only half believes it isn't going to receive anything. The book of James talks about this saying: "How can any man expect to receive anything from God if he is of two minds?" So that may be the part of some peoples problems. I've yet to see anybody ask anything of God with TRUE faith, REALLY believing in HIM that He'll do it, then not see it happen. At least, not any people that I know.)
****, if you are actually correct, check this out http://www.randi.org/joom/challenge-info.html , prove that your prayers work (shouldn't be hard with a 100% success rate) get a huge chunk of money to help your church and poor people and whatever you Christian weirdos are into and show the world the most convincing and largest testimony yet. Just...when you get the money, don't forget I linked you up, I hope you see a fair share for me in your heart.
Sithsaber, I was curious if you read my formal rebuttal (as opposed to the casual dismissal earlier when I didn't have time to type everything out). I've added a little bit to it as well in the following quote, so even if you did it might be worth another look (new sections are italicized):
Originally posted by DigiMark007
The more sobering conclusions when it comes to prayer is simply that it's an inevitability that many will be "answered" (i.e. the outcome will be what was prayed for, regardless of deity).This is why the opening post's comments that downplay "coincidence" are sadly misinformed. Pray for a hundred thousand things (not outlandish for, say, a national output of prayers per day) and statistical certainty ensures that a fair number of them will be "answered" (again, I use quotations because no literal answer needs to happen). Calling it coincidence at all is to misunderstand the concept, and also the level of predictability of such outcomes.
But people tend to remember hits and forget the misses. So we see miraculous Jesus cures in the media, or propagated through anecdotal sources (Chicken Soup books, email forwards, internet forums, word of mouth, etc.) and used as evidence. But no one bothers to print the statistics of failed prayers, or even in cases like this the percentages of misdiagnoses. A religious answer suffices for most people, rather than empirically investigating the situation.
And "normal" people remember the hits and forget the misses, so when you are suddenly convinced that God intervenes via prayer, these people will be even more likely to search for something that they consider success. Maybe it isn't exactly what they prayed for, but it's similar. This is chalked up to "God's Plan" without considering that perhaps the prayer was ineffectual. And if they pray for something and it happens the next day, it's a "hit." But if it happens in 5 years, such fanaticism will still lead people to call it a success...it was just God waiting for the right time. Given such vague criteria, it's no wonder sithsaber pronounces that "Probably 3/4 of the prayers are answered." Selective interpretation, vague criterion for success and variable timeframes, the aforementioned statistical certainty, and the likelihood that 3/4 is an exaggeration brought about by selective memory of successes as opposed to failures, and this is exactly what one would expect. No miracle, simply a stretching of credulity past the breaking point mixed with a confirmation bias that is commonplace in the faithful.
So if you're religious and looking for confirmation of such beliefs, you get the "Look at all the prayers that are answered!" rather than realizing that it would be a bigger miracle if none of them were, simply because the law of averages ensures that many will. It's sobering to realize that to a person who understands the facts correctly, you would have an easier time convincing him/her of divine intervention if no one was ever saved by prayer.
It's the same confirmation bias used by psychics, afterlife mediums, and paranormal occultists that rely on the credulity of the general public for such things.
...
Then there's the matter of evidence. People can believe what they will, but if there is intervention of some sort, it doesn't remain fully transcendent to our reality...for God to intervene there needs to be a physical outcome. If a patient is dead, for example, then brought back to life by God, a physical change takes place that is outside the normal laws of causality. Such things are testable. So far, no evidence has ever been found of such intervention, which is why such stories remain just that: stories. Not evidence.
One also wonders, speaking of evidence, why prayer is needed to perform such acts of intervention in the first place. If something is God's Plan, prayers will neither aid the intended outcome nor prevent it. And if the intervention is brought about by prayer, we have a case of people determining what should and shouldn't happen...in this scenario, no unalterable Plan exists, but it is merely God's whim as to which ones to respond to and which ones not to. If he only responds to prayers in his "Plan" it robs people of the illusion of free will (central to Christianity) and if it solely the peoples' will (It can't be, because then no one would ever die) then it robs God of his omnipotence. Various theological responses attempt to validate this, because the need for prayer must be shown to congregations of followers. But none logically hold up.
I'm curious to see if you have a response. I don't want to come across as negative, and hope we can engage in a respectful discussion, but these are legitimate flaws that I see in your interpretation of such events.
Originally posted by WrathfulDwarf
As far as I understand it....Prayer isn't bargaining. It's spiritual moment of hope.
But that isn't what is being argued with this report. He's saying there is direct intervention as a result of prayer. I want to hear him defend himself in light of the objections I have raised.
Originally posted by Alpha Centauri
I don't mind the idea that prayer as a means for a man or woman to settle their issues with themselves and their God, but I don't think it's wise to consider it a way to ask God for things that will then be granted.That just seems stupid to me.
-AC
Still sore about never receiving that puppy, huh?