(May 10, 2017 at 6:48 am)AtlasS33 Wrote: 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.
(May 10, 2017 at 6:48 am)AtlasS33 Wrote: 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?
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
