(July 28, 2013 at 9:21 pm)Drich Wrote: Prayer is not a formal wishing ceremony. It's not a way for Christians to change their lots in life, and it is certainly not a way to change the mind of God. Prayer is a tool used to change the mind of the one who is praying to seek and accept God's will and to make it their own.
But people pray for all kinds of things, and not just to know the will of god. The prayer 'template' that Jesus gave his disciples asked for a number of different things, including that god provide for their basic needs, forgive their sins, and help them resist temptation (although the way it's worded would indicate that god himself is the one doing the tempting???).
It is a channel for communication with god, and it does not seem unusual for people to pray for things that having nothing to do with changing minds or making god's will their own. Unless that's another of those phrases that can be stretched so thin that it becomes useless.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
