Man, someone should have told Jesus that. :-/
You forgot one quote from Jesus: Mark 14:36 "he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.”
I would never have put it more eloquently than this. :clapping:
Are you praying for patience?
But this is what I’m trying to get across, we both agree that the stone idol doesn’t answer prayers. I mean, why would I ever waste my time trying to prove to you that the idol doesn’t answer prayers when it’s agreed by both parties? Look, I understand your point. You don’t believe there is evidence that God answers prayers, just like you don’t believe there is evidence that the idol answers prayers. All I’m telling you is that your analogy doesn’t help me to understand anything more about your argument. You demand evidence pursuant to the scientific method, and the “yes” and “no” method doesn’t give it to you. I don’t need the idol to understand what you’re saying here.
Yes.
We can. The problem is that you demand it through a methodology (the scientific method) that can’t possibly give you any meaningful results. I am surprised you haven’t seen why yet. I’ll explain below.
There are actually quite a few other possibilities, one of which is that there is substantial evidence that God answers prayers, but that it is not verifiable through the scientific method. I will say, your demand for proof through this method is inherently unreasonable.
I agreed with all of your premises, but your conclusion doesn’t follow from them. I’ll explain why if you are interested.
Really. How would you know that it wasn’t just the power of the mind that was the cause? How would you know it wasn’t just a freak statistical anomaly, or a mistake in the study? I can sympathize with God and why he refuses to give signs to an unbelieving age.
Yes. Because your interpretation of Mt. 18-19 is not the way any Catholic I know understands it. It also defies common sense that Christ ever meant it the way you insist it be understood. So God will grant my prayer to live to be 500 years old on this Earth if I just have another person pray with me for that to happen. Come on. You are ignoring the rest of Scripture. I’ve already dealt with this in this post: forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=2262317&postcount=94
Sure. I’ve been a test subject before, and I have some very limited training in psychology; much more in statistics. One of the controls is that the subject is not told the actual purpose of the study; otherwise this knowledge might influence the subject and skew the results. Normally, there is comprehensive written history taken of the subject along with an I.Q. test. All of this is aimed to figure out what is affecting this person’s behavior. Because that’s what science studies; natural causes and not free choices made by persons. None of this by definition can apply to God. I realize that probably bothers you, but there’s nothing I can do about it. It is what it is. It doesn’t even apply to human beings very well, who also have free will. That’s why the behavioral sciences have to so tightly control the tests they conduct. They are trying to figure out a natural cause of the person’s conduct, not what his free choice was. Does this make any sense to you?
Do so.
Okay. But first I need to know where you now stand on some of these issues. Otherwise I think I’ll be wasting both or our time.
It is theologically unacceptable that God would fulfull every request made to him in prayer. This is difficult to reconcile with scripture, where Jesus very clearly says otherwise. But if I was a Christian, I wouldn’t accept the inspiration of scripture anyway, so it wouldn’t be a problem.
I’m not sure on this one. I’m not a student of psychology (I’m actually a theology student, believe it or not), so I can’t say for sure. But let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that I do.
Exalt;2263292But none of these answers are adequate: said:
It is also scripturally unacceptable, and probably exegetically unacceptable as well, although I’ll admit I’m no expert exegete. You would have to ignore the other passages I cited (and many others) to walk away with the understanding that Christ in Matthew 18:19 is saying that two Christians together may ask for anything and it will be granted to them by God. Presumably two of the apostles then could have requested that Jesus not undergo the crucifixion; something that Jesus Himself “requested” of God, yet with the understanding that it would be God’s will he would follow regardless.
Um, it would be an immense problem. The only standard of God’s revelation that we have as Christians is Scripture. Even Tradition must find its ground their. If Scripture does not accurately reflect God’s word to man, then we have no idea (except through natural theology, which is inherently limited) what God is and what He asks of us. So I take it that your conclusion is that God has not bound Himself to fulfill all requests, not because of what Scripture says, but in spite of what Scripture says (your interpretation of it anyway). Although you claim to have come to that conclusion on a theological basis, I suspect that just the opposite is true.
I don’t believe you need to be a student of psychology. Let’s say that you make a statement to a researcher that your favorite dessert is ice cream. He wants to determine if this is really the case, so he sets up a study where every day you have an unlimited number of desserts you can choose from to eat for six months, including ice cream. Lo and behold, the first few days you have ice cream for dessert. But then suddenly you choose to have other desserts. You have one particular low fat dessert over and over again. Little did the researcher know that you had exercised your freedom to go on a six month low fat diet. You didn’t do so arbitrarily. You had your reasons, whether it be to lose weight or stay healthy etc. At the end of the study, the researcher concludes that ice cream is not your favorite dessert; but of course it still is. The uncontrolled variables associated with free choice make the study worthless.
Scripture is full of contradicting accounts. In one part of the Bible, action X is condemned, but in another part, it’s encouraged. In a number of passages, Jesus says that God responds to every single prayer - and, in a number of other passages, it’s clear that that isn’t true.
And thus “symbolic interpretation” was born.
Proving a negative is very difficult. But why should I believe the opposite - that prayer actually does something?
Ah, I see that we have more problems with the claims of Christianity than just a dissatisfaction with the evidence for the power of prayer.
You haven’t shown that is the case with the passage we are discussing. I tell people frequently on the telephone where I work “If there is anything else you need, let me know and I’ll get it to you.” Of course, they recognize that if they ask me for a million dollars I’m not going to give it to them.
Anytime we read anything and try to understand it we are engaging in interpretation by necessity. So we are both interpreting this scriptural passage. It’s just that your interpretation has been demonstrated to be unreasonable. It looks like the “interpret” in quotes applies to you.
No, not if you continue to unreasonably reject the proposition that God has not promised in Scripture to fulfill every request to Him made in prayer.
I have no idea what this means. I have never heard the term “symbolic interpretation” before.
You give yourself far too much credit. Please understand, it isn’t that you just haven’t quite managed to prove a negative, it’s that your arguments for the proposition that prayer is an illusion are unreasonable and invalid. In other words, you haven’t provided any evidence that God doesn’t answer prayers.
Fair enough. But what about something really simple. What about “Hey, man, I was wondering if we could have dinner tonight.”? If you could, you probably would, right? Or if you couldn’t, you’d explain why and reschedule.
What if I told you there was an invisible, silent cat in your room right now. Wherever you moved, it would move away from you. No matter what you said or what you did, you would have no evidence for it’s existance.
Listen. You’re not understanding what I’m saying to you.
Maybe it doesn’t work for you because you tend to look over some very important instructions form the manual?
***I think maybe if you would actually stop to think of the many, many ways you keep refusing to see God and Hear God you may be able to see who wrong you are on this. God has never left us and He never will. He is just waiting for us to respond to Him, But just because we don’t that doesn’t mean He has given up on us.
Just Kidding:wink:
