Prayer

[Huggy Bear]

Prayer does work, wether or not YOU believe it does is irrelevant, it's only relevant to the person doing the praying..

Fucking prove it.

Your claim, your burden.

"If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross"...

Read that statement you quoted from me carefully.

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No, like I said, prayer is not necessary, only belief. For example, in the Bible, whenever one of the Jews wanted Jesus to heal someone, they would always ask Jesus to be physically present, and Jesus always obliged, why? Because their faith was dependent upon him physically being there. Yet when a Roman centurion asked Jesus to heal his servant he realized Jesus had authority and didn't need to actually go to his house but just needed to speak the words, hence he had greater faith.

a placebo works based on that very principle. A person who has no faith will place faith in a pill if a doctor says it will make him better, but one with greater faith just accepts that they are healed, no placebo necessary.

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I'm going to tell you guys a little anecdote, of an experience I've had involving prayer almost a year ago.

Some of you may remember a while back that I went to Haiti to attend my Father-in-laws funeral (I had posted up pictures in the photos thread).

The wife and I flew down to Florida to meet up with her family members and we were to catch a flight from Florida to Haiti as a group (there were 6 of us total, Me, the wife, her two sisters, brother, and niece). My wife's youngest sister (Dinah) works for Jet blue so we had passes and we were guaranteed to be on the first flight, (there are two per day). Long story short we missed our flight, since the funeral was the next day we had to get on the second flight or we basically couldn't make the funeral.

The problem was that seeing how only two flights left per day, both flights were fully booked, and to compound it even further, quite a few people missed the early morning flight and would likely be trying for the next flight and they had priority, since our guaranteed seating was for the first flight only.

We went to the customer service desk to plead our case but the agent pretty much just facepalmed and shook his head, and said that there was no way we were getting on the next flight, he motioned for Dinah to come look at the monitor (since shes an employee) to confirm he's not BS'ing, once she sees the monitor, I see this dejected look on her face and she says "were not getting on the next flight guys".

Out of this group, the wife, her oldest sister and me, are really the only that believe in God, Dinah is a straight up atheist, the other two I can't say for sure what they believe. Anyway as a last resort they ask me to pray. I admit, on these forums I talk a good game, I can tell you all day long, what the Bible says, but in practice I have very little confidence in my prayers, If someone asks me to pray for them, I feel as if someone else can do a better job, so if whenever you see me state anything about a "true christian" know that I don't place myself in that category.

Anyways, I was asked to pray, so we all join hands right there in the airport, I can't remember all I said but I let God know our situation was desperate. So after the prayer was done, Lisa, my wife's oldest sister tells her husband (who drove us over an hour to the airport) to wait, just in case we didn't make the second flight (unbelief is why prayer fails to work), I told her no, send him home, it's not enough to ask, we must believe we're getting on the flight.

Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. - Mark 11:24

So we go sit at the gate for the next 4 hours or so till they start boarding the next flight. Long story short, they board the plane and it's full, they are just waiting for one person when a medical emergency (nothing serious) empties 5 seats (the exact number we needed, since Dinah being an employee could ride jumpseat) across row 3, so not only did we get on the flight we were all sitting together.

So no one can convince me that God doesn't exist, I've seen too much evidence of the contrary.

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Didn't Peter cut off someones ear one time...

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Catholics don't believe in "faith healing" beyond the Apostolic era...

Really?  Someone should tell our Diocese.  They hold monthly healing services with prayer and anointing.  They also take the prayer and smelly oil into the hospitals.
But you're right, nobody expects it to IMMEDIATELY take, and the sick person to jump up and shout Puh-RAISE Juh-HEEZUS!!!!

http://www.rosarychurch.net/answers/qa052001c.html

Question: Why don't priests heal the sick as our Lord and the Apostles did?

Answer:  The charism (spiritual gift) of healing, together with the various other charismatic gifts about which we read in the New Testament did not generally continue much beyond the apostolic era. Presumably, they were given to the Apostles as a means of getting the Church established quickly. By the time Christianity became legal in the Empire, most accounts of spiritual healing are attributed to the Blessed Virgin or to other saints in heaven. Only rarely do we read of living saints with the power to heal, and even more rarely are their healings more than isolated instances.1