(June 3, 2010 at 3:04 am)tackattack Wrote: I'm sure that's plenty to stir up a conversation.
Not really. There's no way to refute your points if we don't know the specifics. You say "this one time, God answered my prayer and helped out my friend, therefore prayer works." And all I'm left with to counter is... "did not."
: /
Godschild said
The video was meant to show that prayers can be left unanswered, can be answered immediately, or can be answered long after the prayer was sent. It doesn't matter whether you substitute the video's example of "give me money" with "give money to the poor" or "give me guidance so that I may carry out your will, Lord," the same three possibilities exist. Similarly, it doesn't matter whether you're praying to God, Allah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or a jug of milk; anything that you give a voice will have those options. And the believer wins no matter what, because they can choose whichever of those three rationalizations that is most appropriate to the situation.
So let's say you pray for "guidance." Immediately, you see a commercial pop on the television saying to donate to a certain charity and, thinking this is a sign from God, you donate. Another possibility is that nothing remarkable happens for the next three days, but then you get an email from your friend telling you to check out a church's website. You go to the website and the church's ideals match greatly with your own, you think back three days ago to when you prayed for "guidance," and believe God has finally answered your prayer... you join the church. The third possibility of the prayer going unanswered, here, is unlikely because really anything can be interpreted as "guidance." In more specific prayers, like "please God make WingedFoe a believer," you could rationalize that prayer gong unanswered by saying "WingedFoe was simply 'blind,'" or "WingedFoe exercised his 'free will.'"
The point is that there are a million rationalizations one can make for a prayer being answered, and a million more for a prayer going unanswered. Those same rationalizations work equally for non-existent beings as they do for supposedly existent (yet invisible) beings.