RE: Should we ever foster delusion?
July 30, 2017 at 12:32 am
(This post was last modified: July 30, 2017 at 12:34 am by Dropship.)
(July 29, 2017 at 9:14 pm)shadow Wrote:
..Is it really such a stretch, though, to extend the belief in god to thinking god is the answer to all of your problems? If I believed in god, I'd probably be prayer farming as well. If there's value to one person's prayer, it stands to reason that the prayers of many are worth a proportionate amount more. Under a bounded reasoning that assumes prayers actually mean something, it's not an irrational thing to do. It's religion that's the problem.
There are generally two sorts of prayer-
1- The first is where you quietly chat to God, telling him your personal troubles, it 'logs' you onto God and you get a 'feelgood power download' from him-
"Our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power"- (1 Thess 1:5)
It won't necessarily make your troubles go away, but you'll feel energised and more able to handle them..
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2- The second type is where you pray to God to change things in the world that you don't like, or to cure illness etc.
In that respect think of prayer as "thought pressure" that can influence this fragile illusion or dream that we call "reality".
"The [quantum] atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts"– Prof. Werner Heisenberg (Nobel Prize winner in Physics)
In fact we can speculate that perhaps Jesus was a 'Master of the Art of Dream Manipulation', bending "reality" to perform his 37 miracles.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one''- Einstein
"All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream"- Edgar Allen Poe
"You can be in my dream if i can be in your dream"- Bob Dylan
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on"- The Tempest
"Strawberry Fields...nothing is real"- The Beatles
"What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" - Bible,James 4:14
"Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?"- Morpheus in The Matrix
PS- Of course, prayers don't always visibly work, at least not in the short term, but think of a prayer as having a "butterflies wing effect" that gains momentum over the weeks, months or years.
BTW I know a middleaged christian street preacher who puts his life 100% into the hands of God, and won't lift a finger to help himself, and as a result his life is a total and utter mess, he's been hauled up court twice for not paying his council tax, he's got 2 failed marriages behind him, and his electricity, gas and phone have been cut off at various times for failing to pay the bills, plus he pedals his bike around after dark with no lights, expecting God to protect him!
I told him to get some organisation and discipline into his life and reminded him of this verse-
"For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of selfdiscipline" (2 Tim 1:7)
but he completely ignores me and carries on "trusting in God" regardless.
So now I ignore him and cross the street to avoid him..
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