Can prayer change God's perfect plan?

[Valyza1]

Sugar coat what?  You're acting as if it's a proven fact that your point of view is correct and any other point of view is incorrect.  That's not exactly inviting reflection on the part of the person you're speaking to, is it?

If you consider reality a point of view, then try banging your head on a wall to tell me that I in your point view, it doesn't hurt. The OP asked, I answered. Reflect on that. I for one am not here to convince anyone.

I never thought nor implied that you were trying to convince anyone. What I did assume was that you had some generous motive for answering in the first place.

[edit]also, no. I don't consider reality a point of view. I consider your point of view a point of view. The absence of a god is not "reality". It is not science. It is a way of seeing the world. Period.

[MellisaClarke]

If god has a perfect, unchanging plan, then you don't have free will because your thoughts and actions were determined for you long before you even existed and you have no choice in the matter.

This.
The bible speaks about prayer being about confidence, apart from being about asking and receiving, but I still feel uneasy.
Talked to some of my other Christian friends today. Didn't get a convincing answer from them. Tough question.

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Consider the prayer of a mother, spoken aloud or thought in silence, as she embraces her suffering and dying baby: "I beg you, God, save my baby. Please, God, don't let her die." This is a prayer for a young child, easily the most innocent and worthy of rescue of anyone. It's about as sincere and unselfish as any prayer could be. I think this is the prayer that provides us with an ideal way to judge whether or not God answers prayers. Yet the number and intensity of prayers seem to have no impact on the constant suffering and dying of babies in extreme poverty.

Remember the poor tend to pray hard and pray often. Extreme poverty and religious belief seem matched in some weird way between hope and despair, then how does the world play out? If prayer works, then we should see the most religious societies on Earth as the most "blessed," secure, and safest places to live. Meanwhile, the least religious societies ought to be more distressed, because there is much less praying for positive divine intervention. Is this the world we see? Not even close.

Fact is that religious belief and prayer do not save the lives of babies or ease their suffering in any detectable way. But this is precisely what many religious people claim. God answers prayers? No, he doesn't, it seems, even if you are a religious and loving mother begging for her dying child's life.

There is a really good point by Sam Harris how only narcissistic people can think that God answers prayers, because they are so blind with being obsessed with themselves that they fail to see billions of people that don't get their prayers answered by so called god.

God wants us to protect ourselves.
Pray and gain confidence in God's word.
I admit that prayer alone won't help, we pray and help out each other.

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A few things.

First, what do you mean exactly by "God's perfect plan?"

God's plan for us the big picture, and that is that we live this life in a way that reflects love and goodness in our hearts so that we can go on to enjoy it to its fullest in the afterlife. We can choose to follow that plan or not, but that is up to us.

Some people like to think that every little thing that happens was purposely made to happen by the hand of God Himself. But that is simply not true. God is not a micromanager. He created this world with us in it and allows nature to happen as it will, and allows us to make our own choices. I know many Christians buy into this "everything happens for a reason" mentality, but that is simply not true, imho. God's plan is with the eternal result, big picture. Not with details of this life which are insignificant when put into perspective.

Second, God exists in a dimension that is outside of time. So He already knows that we will pray before we do so because He has already seen us do it. Think of it as looking at a cube - you can see all 3 dimensions at one glance. If time is a fourth dimension, imagine that God can see all of it at once, in a similar way.

So for example: a couple wants a child but is battling infertility, and they pray to God every day asking to be blessed with a child. They end up getting pregnant with a healthy baby against all odds. God answered their prayer. But God already knew ahead of time that this child would come into existence because He already knew that the parents would pray for one and that their prayers would be answered. This child didn't change anything. God already knew the parents would pray and He already knew He would answer those prayers.

I do Economics, so I like being realistic.
I think it really is selfish to only pray. So I try to volunteer and help out others.
I have to be realistic, because where that couple is successful, I have experienced where my mother's friend's baby died at birth.

So God wants us to both pray and help others out.
The thing is I normally pray to ask for things to be fixed, and to connect with God. But the question in first post causes a little unease for me. Still no satisfactory Christian based answer.

Oh I believed the site would have persons with faith.

Then what is the religion section for?

It is mainly used for making fun of people of faith and pointing out every time a religious person does something bad.

That's horrible.

[Fake Messiah]

God wants us to protect ourselves.

Hey, we want to protect ourselves. That is what people are trying to do with science, like medicine. This is the reason why hospitals aren't staffed with shamans and preachers rather than doctors and nurses. If prayer healing really worked wouldn't we all be relying on it by now? But what when belief in god negatively impacts world peace, the education of children, the development of new medical cures, safety and justice for women, and the progress of science?

I bet when you said "God wants us to protect ourselves." you didn't mean we should educate people in Africa to use contraception to avoid AIDS? Or that we should pursue more stem cell research that have enormous potential for curing human diseases, regrowing tissues and organs, and attacking a variety of previously intractable medical problems like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and spinal cord injuries. Or when earthquake happens and kills hundreds of thousands of people should we invest more in punishing people for homosexuality and non belief in god or more investing in science of detecting earthquakes in time to save lives?
Or what do you think about pressure from the Catholic Church has also halted the administration of anti-HPV vaccines in Trinidad and Tobago, with the church going so far as to question, in the face of all scientific fact, the safety of the vaccine. This is clearly "not helping ourselves" - wouldn't you say?

Some people like to think that every little thing that happens was purposely made to happen by the hand of God Himself.

But what abut big things, like virus of malaria; or dysentery; or hurricanes? Who made that? And if wasn't by god why couldn't he stop it? Why should innocent people die in hundreds of thousands? Or what about fact that more than a billion people do not have access to safe drinking water? Or that about half of the world's children live in severe poverty? - I mean what am I missing here? Are those "little things"?
God does as he wishes, no matter how irrational or disproportionate.

Even if you insist that anything god does is good by definition. Still, the effects down here on earth are the same: pain, misery, and strife imposed on innocent and guilty alike, under the apparent indifference, neglect, or even intentional cruelty of this powerful good god. If such a god really does exist, it's hard to accept how he deserves our praise.

He created this world with us in it and allows nature to happen as it will, and allows us to make our own choices.

So he gave us free will and that explains it? Why, for instance, did God, who should have known better, make such a flawed creature as man, who would likely if not certainly use his free will to his own detriment? If you believe God is omnipotent is it not logical to conclude that he could have made an improved human who still possessed free will - one who was more likely to choose freely the course of good. Here's an analogy: when people as parents raise good children, children who are more prone to act morally and positively, they have not thereby taken away their free will.

[Huggy Bear]

New here and confused about this.


I saw a meme today, with the question in title. This is a toughie. 

I am a person of strong faith, and want others with strong faith to chime in on this. Help!!!

The short answer to your question is... No.

[chimp3]

A praying mother pleads for the life of her infant child who is dying of diarrhea.

The OP's question is whether the mother's prayers can change God's perfect plan.

My question is why babies dying of diarrhea is part of god's perfect plan? Why do humans create such imaginary beings to begin with?

[WinterHold]

Personally, I believe prayers are answered with either a yes or a no.
Rejection should not be interpreted as an evidence for disbelieving. We shouldn't be desperate from the mercy of God.

Sura 30, Page 408, The Quran:
( 36 )   And when We let the people taste mercy, they rejoice therein, but if evil afflicts them for what their hands have put forth, immediately they despair.

When a mercy touches a human population they indeed throw parties and spread cheers, but once a disaster hits because of a war they started, or a hunger they began, or a leakage in a close nuclear plant, they throw tears and quit believing.

It's not that the prayer wasn't answered; but simply it was rejected, and people were left to deal with their own mess.

I can give an example of a smoking dad, who spend his life picking up the wrong decisions, and with every stressful outcome he smoked more and more, and then had a son, 24 years later the son was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

It's not the fault of God, that the dad was stupid. It was the fault of Tobacco companies, who spent two centuries spreading the poison, just so stressed people like the dad in the story would purchase packs of the infamous poison, making owners of the industry more wealthy.

To invest a stock or two in weapon manufacturing that a militia would purchase and use in Syria, making a child crippled.

And it all falls for those who voted Trump and Bush...it gets repeated and repeated.
With Billions of people.

God answers the prayers, but many humans are not believers. Have no mercy in their hearts; either. Would anything for money and blood.

[Mystical]

New here and confused about this.


I saw a meme today, with the question in title. This is a toughie. 

I am a person of strong faith, and want others with strong faith to chime in on this. Help!!!

I wouldn't say my faith is relatively strong, but that isn't really necessary to answer the question.  As far as I see it, nothing can change God's Perfect Plan.  Your prayer is part of your free will, but YOUR free will is part of God's Plan.  People object  to the idea of one's will being free if God already knows what it will be, but what God KNOWS is irrelevant to freedom.  It's what God IMPOSES that restricts freedom.  And God does not impose your will from being acted upon, thus it is free.  And He doesn't need to in order for His Plan to succeed, because your will changes by itself.  

Excuse me but if this is your belief.. Then what do you believe happens to babies (innocents) who are killed before choosing your god? If free will is the reason for all the suffering in the world, how is it so easily removed from babies, or "people who haven't heard the word of god"? Where's their free will?

No offense, but if I were a baby sent straight to heaven and knew what I know about your god--I'd try to remove myself from him as far as possible. I'd rather an eternity with the devil in your biblical literal hell, than with the being who created it in the first place knowing a that a single eternal spirit would end up there. 

The path is narrow, after all, so the majority of those he created he knew would end up in hell. And no, there's nowhere in the bible where it says anything other than eternity, and fiery suffering hell. 

To Miss Mellisa, hello from a fellow Melissa! 

I too had a question that never stopped circling my brain, again and again, for years. That question was, why are my grandparents surely in hell for suicide, when grandma found out she had cancer and grandpa had spent a lifetime in mental anguish? They didn't want to go to nursing homes in the 80s understandably (who would?), and they didn't want to burden their young adult children who had blooming families, with their own needs? Since the age of 6 or 7, I asked and sought answers about this. From god, from preachers, from my mom and dad, etc. 
This question didn't disappear. I even got suicidal myself, at one point, in protest to this unfair judgement that my loved ones, and others, are subject to. Suicide victims are probaby the most heart wrenching cases of human suffering on this planet secondary to murder victims.
For years I decided that the god I followed surely wasn't the god as described in the bible, and I reasoned Hell out of my belief. For a god of love, pure love, could not possibly send most of his creation to hell!? I reasoned that it's a bluff, and that God would save everyone from hell in the end. But, the more I read the bible the more I came to the realization that the god of the Bible is not who I thought I had given my life to! He is a jealous, vindictive god. Arbitrary and seemingly without conscience in the OT. No wonder church kept it's teachings in the NT. But then I read Jesus' own words stating that not a single letter of the Law shall be altered until the Judgement comes. Check out my signature for the passages if you like. 

Some apologists like Drich here, will tell you to make you feel better that hell is an eternal separation from god. In my eyes he's still in the "denial" phase. But that's why we have these Religious subforums. Christians and Atheists alike like to parlay their thoughts, beliefs, and reasons for non belief here. Most every other Christian forum and most Atheist forums limit the subjects of interaction and deny free thought and free speech. But this forum does not. 

It is mainly used for making fun of people of faith and pointing out every time a religious person does something bad.

That's horrible.

No, the Religion section of our forum is not for making fun of or denigrading theists, and I surmise that you knew that when you came to post here-- I suspect that you, having read our public discourse and finding valid arguments from both sides in healthy discourse, felt you'd found the "trenches" of the war for souls. Theists and deists, Atheists and everyone inbetween--we all end up in the Religion section. For conversation, for reminiscece, for reinforcement, for curiousity, support, for many things. A lot of us were priorly religious, after all. These subjects are interesting to us still, mainly because there's not many places on earth to run away from Religion. Most governing forces in our lives are directly tied to Religion too.
I don't know why Catholic Lady would be so misleading and cynical, to be honest. Free thought comes in many forms. Christians come here threatening eternal doom very often. I'm sure they think that that is the most effective way to get our attention. Well, in return, you end up with posters like Last Poet who made the analogy about praying to a jar, equating its efficacy to that of praying to god. Belive or not, that's just common sense to him. It's how he believes. And yet there was someone who took offense. Because his common day thoughts were actually offensive to this Christian. 
Maybe that's why Catholic Lady said as she did. Because despite her seemingly friendly candor and endless interactions in subforums that don't have anything to do with religion where she seems to be just another person amongst just some other people--deep down, she gets offended too when she goes to the Religion section.

 Personally when I'm  offended, I tend to ask why I'm offended and evaluate what I'm offended about, then assess whether I'm correct in my stance. Like Last Poets 'offensive' analogy. I mean, Isn't it true? Couldn't you pray to a jar and have good things happen to you that you could attribute to praying to the jar? Catholics are renowned for praying to vessels other than Jesus Christ himself. Even when a face that looks like Jesus or Mother Mary, ends up appering on mundane objects. Like trees, or tortillas or toast. Miracles have bden claimed by the church too, based on nothing my more substntial. So why is it odd to compare prayer to god and prayer to a jar? Especially when the prayers of millions of slum babies go unanswered whilst god is supposedly helping people in first world countries find their keys???

I like the Religious section, for instance, because I am still waiting for someoe to pop in and show actual tangible proof of the existence of a creator (I'm an afterlife hopeful, what can I say?). I've looked far and wide and found the "evidence" that I thought was evidence, was farce.

Constant new findings in archaeology and science are always moving forward at lightning speed and I like to keep up with their findings compared to the bible, and the responses that Religion comes up with. Sometimes it's amusing, and sometimes it is something I need to stay vigilant about. Like how Religion treats and views homosexuality in our societies. Science says we are all bisexual on a sliding scale, and observation shows that there are over 15k species of animals who practice it. It's essential for social interactions to propogste those species. One of many reasons, to de-escalate dangerous power strugales in a society. The more social the society, the higher the prevalence of homosexuality. Yet my own family and then those in charge of running my far superior complex society condemn homosexuality based upon the Bible. So Religion is very much pertinent to my life still. I'm not homosexual, I'm bisexual. And I'm married. And I want my child to be able to choose to be whomever they want to be and love whomever they feel love for.  

History is being written with proof, not just a pen. Also a lot of my family are still believers. Whilst I stay neutral amongst them regarding their beliefs unless they ask of me otherwise, I do want to be prepared for the times I'm "attacked" by the unavoidable overly pious who cannot afford me the same treatment. 

I'm sad that for as long as she's been here, Catholic Lady is unable to relate to us  people in the Religion subforum.

Prayer gives you the opportunity to participate in God's plan. And perhaps it is God's plan that sometimes His will is to be implemented through prayer.

You pretty much just said to the effect, "we vote and are allowed to in order to allow us to participate in the outcome even though the election was rigged in the first place."

Damn, you're good. Are you American?

If god has a perfect, unchanging plan, then you don't have free will because your thoughts and actions were determined for you long before you even existed and you have no choice in the matter.

This.
The bible speaks about prayer being about confidence, apart from being about asking and receiving, but I still feel uneasy.
Talked to some of my other Christian friends today. Didn't get a convincing answer from them. Tough question.

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Ask your preacher then. They usually have the official refutation.

[Fake Messiah]

Personally, I believe prayers are answered with either a yes or a no.

Maybe for Islamic God but your line doesn't hold very well with Christian god because he made the promise found in the Bible: "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive" (Matthew 21:22). Nor does it fit well with the tears and pleadings of all those mothers holding near-dead babies in their arms right now at this very moment. A god who ignores those prayers has no business answering any others.

I can give an example of a smoking dad, who spend his life picking up the wrong decisions, and with every stressful outcome he smoked more and more, and then had a son, 24 years later the son was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

It's not the fault of God, that the dad was stupid.

But we are talking about supposedly omnipotent God? Aren't we? Why would a god allow father to use his free will to do evil to son? If this god is powerful and good, and if son is righteous in his eyes, surely he can and is inclined to protect him?

Imagine this: Among humans, a parent who can protect one child from the evils of another but does not do so is a bad parent; how less so a god?

[WinterHold]

Personally, I believe prayers are answered with either a yes or a no.

Maybe for Islamic God but your line doesn't hold very well with Christian god because he made the promise found in the Bible: "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive" (Matthew 21:22). Nor does it fit well with the tears and pleadings of all those mothers holding near-dead babies in their arms right now at this very moment. A god who ignores those prayers has no business answering any others.

God is one; many Christians refer to him as the father. That's their own business; own belief; own book. They hold responsibility for their faith,
I wouldn't trust the whole bible though; it does contain some right things, but also the wishes and thoughts of the writers. What if I pray that Satan should die? more cunningly: what if I shoot an innocent person while praying I go to heaven?
Maybe because of verses like these; the crusades took place, and thousands of innocents were butchered.

But we are talking about supposedly omnipotent God? Aren't we? Why would a god allow father to use his free will to do evil to son? If this god is powerful and good, and if son is righteous in his eyes, surely he can and is inclined to protect him?

Imagine this: Among humans, a parent who can protect one child from the evils of another but does not do so is a bad parent; how less so a god?

Because there's an afterlife; we weren't created for this life.
It's all a test, an brief examination before the hour.
We were in paradise; humanity showed an inclination to believing and following Satan over God; so God sent both Satan and humanity to earth; bashing each other until the hour.
Satan's fate is well known, but for every human there's a fight to battle through. God knows who will be where, but how is it fair if we didn't live it to be real?

[Drich]

Is God's plan really perfect if he had to drown most of the fucking population?

It meant to do that from the very beginning (nudge nudge wink wink).

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Two things.

1)Prayer is always answered in the positive by God.

2) Most of what 'we' call prayer isn't. It's call petitioning God.

To pray is found in luke 11 forward. (The Lord's prayer) this prayer is about acknowledging God and asking God to change our will to His will. To make us pleasing to Him. (among other things.) That is the only example of prayer we have. All else is to petition God according to Jesus and Paul.

So I guess what your asking is does God answer petitions. The answer is yes so long as it does not lead you to sin or corrupt the nature of God as described in the bible.(makes you paint God in a wrong way)

In my own personal experience I know it seems like I can literally ask for anything, and I can get what I want (not free of cost or consequence) Which is the reason I ask for little. Because I understand the cost "things" we want.

Better to be poor and content than wealthy and obligated to care for what you have.

bold mine

False assertion. Asking for daily bread is a petition.

Move along.

If God tells you to ask for it is it a personal petition? Not according to any modern dictionary. as a petition in this instance represents a formal request of a personal want. If one is mandated the one 'request' something then it ceases being a request. It ceases being a want and becomes a Need.