Living in Utah, I am always hearing of experiences where God has answered someone's prayers. Of course the answer might not be what they wanted to hear, but the prayer was answered nonetheless.
My personal view is that God does not answer prayers. I feel that we are placed here on earth to make our way through on our own. In other words, God does not interfere.
Take the example of the little girl that is kidnapped, abused, and then killed. She prays to God to save her, or for her parents to find her, but nothing happens. This is a sincere prayer from a trusting innocent child. This story is all over the news until finally a lifeless body is found with signs of what happened in the last moments of life. The family members are devastated. Months later, a young boy goes missing during a camping trip. For days the family and volunteers search for him to no avail. After a couple of days, he is found safe and uninjured though dehydrated and hungry. He says he prayed that he would be found and God answered his prayers.
I don't think God interfered in either case (these are both fictional cases). How could a loving God interfere in some cases and ignore others. How could so many innocent children die of starvation or disease in 3rd world countries if there was a God that could/would interfere on occasion? In my opinion, he doesn't interfere at all. We are on our own in this world.
Thoughts?
Looking for the Perfect Indoor Bench
2 years ago
4 comments:
God doesn't answer prayer, yet we are commanded to pray constantly? Why, if we can never bend God's will to conform to our own? Because prayer is a way to conform our will to God's will. An indispensible model for prayer is the Psalms, which have a structure almost as regular as a sonnet. David usually starts a Psalm pissing and moaning about something, and acting as though God has abandoned him. But there's always a point in the Psalm when he reaches a calm acceptance of God's will and sets his feet into the footprints already made by God.
That is an interesting point of view. Its only flaw is that it assumes an unprovable God that provides no form of feedback, thus where is the motivation?
The motivation is to create a loop between you and God. He speaks to you in scripture, you speak to him in prayer. In Linux terms, people are file systems (image.iso) and God is the directory structure (/mnt/image). Some people are "mounted" as read-only file systems. They only take orders from God (such as kill witches or gay people) and carry them out. Other people are write-only. They just tell God what they think he should do and they neglect the scriptures. But the perfect middle way is to be mounted as a dynamic read-write file system on the directory structure thus:
mount -o loop image.iso /mnt/image
This results in a relationship with God.
I disagree about prayer establishing a relationship with God. The relationship is all in the head of the person praying. Life is no different for that person whether or not they pray, because God doesn't interfere or make him/herself known to the person praying either way.
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