Prayer

[Asmodee]

I'd also like to clear up again that I do believe in miracles. However, I understand they are very rare, and the general consensus in my faith is that it is much more likely that God answers prayers by working through people rather than through supernatural intervention.  

If I lost my car keys, for example, I could pray for God to make them magically appear in front of me. Or I could pray for God's help in trying to remember where I put them, or in thinking of likely places I could look. 

But probably 99.9% of the time, when people lose their keys and ask God for help, they mean the latter.

Then maybe you could clear something up for me.  I've chatted with various other people on various forums, some of them Catholics, who believe every brisk breeze is a miracle and absolute proof that God is real.  That last Catholic I remember talking to pretty much accepted any and every claim of a miracle as absolute proof, even if it was so week that the Catholic Church would not recognize it as a miracle.  So I have two questions.

First, the big one (I know it's more than one, but it's a general theme rather than a single question).  Miracles were obviously not rare in the Bible.  Why are they so rare now?  What purpose did they serve in the past that no longer needs served now?  Why did God change?

Second, what types of miracles do you believe happen today?  Are they anything like the big things of the past or are they now more subtle, more "undisprovable", if you will?  Again, why did God change?  Are there any specific miracles in modern times that you believe?  Are those miracles consistent with stories of miracles in the Bible?  For instance, every single miracle in the Bible had a clear purpose.  There was a clear reason behind every single one.  A statue crying, not so much.  So if miracles are not just weird things that happen which can't be explained empirically, again, why did God change?

I'm sure you probably read all that and are now thinking, "It's a trap!", "What an argumentative dick!" or both.  I am honestly curious.  Of course if you say anything which I disagree with or which doesn't make sense to me I'm going to respond, but that's not my purpose here.  The last Catholic I talked to was...shall we say, "unreasonable".  When he farted it was a miracle that proved God was real, even though there was no evidence he actually farted.  You seem, at least from the little I've read so far, a little more reasonable in your beliefs.  I'm not hoping to convert you, you have no chance of converted me (unless that's a God in your pocket, but I assume you're just happy to see me), but perhaps we could understand each other a little better.