Can prayer change God's perfect plan?

[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.