I am an orthodox Christian, ask me a question!

[Jon Paul]

Oh dear, you have left yourself wide open to some doozy questions!

Why do Christians, the Catholic faith in particular, put so emphasis on prayer when it so obviously doesn't work? Or do I lack an understanding of how it is supposed to work?

I prayed for a Lamborghini when I was a Christian. It never arrived!

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of prayers ever having been answered.

This kind of prayer is not a prayer which comes out of serious faith, but out of selfish desires. You are not even praying for what you remotely need, but for what you desire, for what you lust almost. You are even sinning by praying for something like this. If you only wanted what you need, you would not be praying for materialistic desires. You would be praying for the salvation of your soul, which is the most important thing in your life.

While Hitler and his SS were killing so many people Christians the World over prayed for it to stop. It did stop eventually, after 12 to 14 million people had been killed because they were either Jewish, or homosexuals or had disabilities or were the wrong color. It stopped with Hitler's suicide. It didn't stop because of prayer.

The other thing you don't seem to understand at all is the whole center of the biblical -Christian- view of history, which is this: God made everything, and made man. God made man the god of this world, by giving him freedom. Human freedom is what you seem to be unable to understand. God gave man the freedom to reject goodness, to reject God, or to accept it.

If God wasn't going to give man freedom, he wouldn't have let Adam and Eve betray him. But he did let them do it. That's why you need to understand what happened in the Garden of Eden, why it's so valuable and informing a story for the the state of affairs in the world from a Christian perspective. Man separated himself from God, and God respected mans choice.

Hitler is no different from Adam there, for Hitler is only the consequence of his action, of the separation from God. Humanity is fallen.

If we pray that God erases Adams choice, we pray that God takes away humanitys freedom, which is fundamentally opposed to the purpose of Gods relationship to man, (and indeed mans relationship to man) which is freely giving charity of our very existence - love. God cannot force man to love - then it's not love.

However, all the people who are murdered or suffer all their lives, we cannot say that their suffering will not be compensated, in the next life. So from a Christian worldview, even those who suffer the injustice of their fellow man, and separation from God, in this life, might be a part of the True Church in the next one and have all their earthly suffering erased by boundless and perpetual happiness and presence of God.