(August 24, 2013 at 1:29 pm)Sword of Christ Wrote: I have a more advanced understanding of God but I'm not claiming to be have an advanced understanding, not yet anyway. The basic idea would be to think of God not as a man with a beard up in the sky but more as a Force from Star Wars, an all pervasive presence. Bear in mind there is no "dark side" to it that comes purely from human sin. If we're talking about something like say miracles and/or healing it has to be done through someone who is capable of drawing upon Gods power, or the Force if you want to call it that. This is really more of a interactive kind of experience God alone doesn't really do anything as such, beyond maintain the universe in existence. This is the way to understand the subject of prayer if you're talking about using it for a practical purpose such as healing a bullet wound. The best you're probably going to expect to achieve if you really spiritualist yourself up is aid or enhance the recovery speed. But different people will have a different degree of talent for this much like anything else. If you just have a random group of well meaning people holding hands and chanting something or other in a room somewhere and not really knowing all the details of what it they're meant to be doing and how it's meant to work, then nothing at all will happen.
A world where god answers prayers seems to work exactly like a world where god doesn't exist.
"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