What Is The Point Of Prayer?

[Gil Gaudia]

Also, since you seem to believe that you "have a very advanced understanding of God/theology," how "would (you) think of God"?

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.

In addition, since you identify yourself as "Sword of Christ" and "Church of England," it would be reasonable to assume that you hold some ideas about Jesus and God that is consistent with these concepts.

Intercessory prayer is a request to God or Jesus to change his mind about the already established plan for the universe and make it go another way. Of course, this implies that a perfect deity's plans, which would (by definition) have to be perfect, should now be altered at the urging of an imperfect being. This is logical reason enough to refute the possibility of intercessory prayer's effect, because perfect beings cannot be outguessed by fallible mortals. Nevertheless, believers in the power of gods, saints, and angels claim that these agents are able to alter or suspend the well-established laws of the universe at their whim or at the request of the believer, through prayer.
If we were speaking of magic or sorcery, or any belief systems outside of Western Judeo-Christian tradition, most would agree that these ideas (of intercessory prayer's effectiveness) are ridiculous and consist of superstition at best. In only one area, the field of Judeo-Christian theology, are the very same phantasms accorded the status of legitimate entity. Why? Why are Judeo-Christian superstitions by any accepted taxonomy of logic allowed to maintain a grip on, not only political, social and economic values in our society, but on scientific ones as well?

If I am unable to decipher your response to the above, I will stick to my guess about your disingenuousness, and retreat from this area of discussion.