I am an orthodox Christian, ask me a question!

[Jon Paul]

Firstly, the effect of prayer for health of patients in hospital has been tested with negative results. Not the patients themselves were praying but other people were praying for thge patients, so there is no selfishness involved here.

Right. And I could quote you another study that says something else. It says nothing. It's missing the point and pretending that prayer is something which it is clearly not. Prayer is not a capitalist game where you cash in a certain amount of material success depending on whether someone was praying for you or how frequently they were praying. Prayer is the appeal to Gods will, it's the process of nearing yourself to Gods will and growing spiritually by your relationship to God. You can't measure that in quantities or in surveys. You can see it when it is there, though, and it is called sanctity and holiness.

What you don't seem to get is that God made kid cancer that man is putting much effort in to cure. What is your reasonable explanation for that?

I have already given the explanation, but you don't seem to get it.

Mortality is a natural process of change. Man was made with a physical body which would be subject to the same mortality as the rest of the everchanging physical realm, if it was to be merely that - another body in nature with no special status. However, that isn't the case.

The point is that man was given the privileges to rise up above createdness, not by becoming uncreated by nature, but by grace. Man rejected this grace and man has thus cast himself down to chaotic changeability, death and material insignificance by acting against God and immortality, and becoming more like the unthinking natural realm which we were never meant to. This is generality affirmed as "the fall" in Christianity.

That's what necessitated the incarnation of God into humanity - the re-union of divine and human nature, so that man could participate in this uncreatedness again through Jesus Christ and achieve Godlikeness - immortality. God is therefore still our destination. We are to join God in his Godly nature, by accepting his graces, and God is unchanging and therefore himself immortality - the antithesis of the changeability of created nature. He is himself wholly apart from it, and man is supposed to rise up above the created nature and become closer to Gods uncreated nature.

So that man is at the mercy of the changing and mortal nature of the rest of the natural realm right now is because of the original rejection of Gods graces, because we are far away from God, because we are following our own plan and not God, who is immortality, unchangeability and everlasting. Because Adam and Eve chose to reduce themselves to what was not destined for them - mortality, to act like animals and not humans. This is called original sin.