Explanation for this? (grace, atheist, agnostic, beliefs)

[Djuna]

Originally Posted by Nea1

This is an issue for me as well. What makes him so special that a god would answer his prayers, yet ignore those that are suffering from pain, disease, starvation and such. Moderator cut: Orphaned

It is the most self centred train of thought. I am so special that god answers my prayers. Too bad for the rest of the world. And if god has a plan for you, why are you praying for a change in that plan?

The logical explanation is god is not answering anyone's prayers. Things in life happen, both good and bad. religious folk just like attributing the good things to god. I don't see them praising the lord so much when their kid gets cancer.

[old_cold]

I am wondering if the prayers are being credited for the job or is it a separate issue that one can have a prescient dream?

[Mr5150]

Originally Posted by Djuna

The issue I have with the goddidit thought is this;

-millions of people are starving all over the world yet god is giving Mr5150 a promotion
-children are being abused and sold into prostitution yet god provides a new car for another bigwig pastor

Priorities

Funny you should mention the two points. My church did a big presentaion. The pastor wanted the church to support this group dedicated to freeing children from prostitution. So we did.

We also support ministries that help staving children.

So what are you doing about starving children and child prostitution?

[Mr5150]

Originally Posted by old_cold

I am wondering if the prayers are being credited for the job or is it a separate issue that one can have a prescient dream?

I lean towards the prayer side. I prayed. God gave me the dream and it came to pass eight hours later.

I remember waking up and thinking, that was interesting. Like the dream meant something. Then I went back to sleep. The memory of dreams usually fade quickly-within an hour or two, but not this one.

[Nea1]

Originally Posted by Mr5150

Funny you should mention the two points. My church did a big presentaion. The pastor wanted the church to support this group dedicated to freeing children from prostitution. So we did.

We also support ministries that help staving children.

So what are you doing about starving children and child prostitution?

She was talking about God doing it instead of answering prayers about jobs, not the believers doing it.

[jackmccullough]

Originally Posted by Mr5150

Good point also. but this is the only dream I ever had that came true. And it was so vivid. And the conversational details were exactly as in the dream. The dream was short as was the actual event.

I think you're missing my point. If you want to evaluate the predictive power of dreams, or even a single dream, you need to consider all the thousands of dreams you've ever had and how many of those have come true.

If it's only the one that's come true, it's much more likely that you had the dream because it was something you were hoping for, or had some reason--even an unconcsious reason--to think it was going to happen, than to believe that the dream was based on divinely inspired foreknowledge of events; where was god when all your other dreams didn't come true?

[jackmccullough]

Let's go a little farther with this.

Have you ever had a dream about having sex with someone, possibly someone you didn't even know? Did that happen?

What about flying?

Have you ever had a dream where you were naked in front of a group of people? Or you showed up to take a test only to realize that you had never been to the class?

Did those things ever come true?

Why not, if you're assiging some supernatural significance to this one dream about the job? Was god wrong when he gave you those other dreams?

[Nea1]

Originally Posted by jackmccullough

Let's go a little farther with this.

Have you ever had a dream about having sex with someone, possibly someone you didn't even know? Did that happen?

What about flying?

Have you ever had a dream where you were naked in front of a group of people? Or you showed up to take a test only to realize that you had never been to the class?

Did those things ever come true?

Why not, if you're assiging some supernatural significance to this one dream about the job? Was god wrong when he gave you those other dreams?

I had a wacko one last night, cant figure it out, hope god doesnt make it happen either!!

We kept finding dead bodies in our laundry room, every night someone would sneak in after killing someone dragging their body and put it in our laundry room. Weird
Dont know if it had anything to do with me watching Supernatural that night or not!!

[Chango]

Originally Posted by Nea1

I had a wacko one last night, cant figure it out, hope god doesnt make it happen either!!

We kept finding dead bodies in our laundry room, every night someone would sneak in after killing someone dragging their body and put it in our laundry room. Weird
Dont know if it had anything to do with me watching Supernatural that night or not!!

Last night I dreamed that someone snuck into my house and stole my X-box. No joke.

Maybe god is trying to tell me something about my playing habits...

[KCfromNC]

Originally Posted by Mr5150

True story.

About eight years ago I had the job from hell-working with abused and neglected children and their abusive parents. What made things worse was that I couldn't quit. We had just relocated and there was no going back. Job was very stressful and a bit scary-sometimes the parents made threats.

After two months I prayed and prayed-got serious as I felt I couldn't take it much longer. I did get a sense of peace and the stress subsided. But here is the point of the OP:

On a particular night I had this dream. In the dream my boss called me into her office and said: Mr5150, Kent (the head guy) was wondering if you would be interested in changing departments and work with elderly and disabled adults? The program I was to work in is about enabling these folks to remain safely in their homes. I said yes and then I woke up. The dream was quite vivid. I looked at the clock. It was 3AM.

I went to work. At 11AM (that same day) the boss called me into her office and said: Mr5150, Kent was wondering if you would be interested in changing departments and work with elderly and disabled adults? (my head began to "spin" ) My boss continued and said the program I would assigned to is about enabling these individuals to remain safely in their homes. I said Yes!
*********
So what do you think?

I think God did it.

God did what, specifically? Make you dream about something that other people were going to do in the future, taking away their free will in the process? Make these people give you a promotion against their will? Provide only a crappy job in a strange city for you despite your faithfulness? Make the abusers abuse their children, or at least fail to intervene? Move some of those abused kid's support structure to a cushier job just to make that employee feel better? Torture you for 2 months in a terrible job pushing you nearly past the point of no return instead of fixing this immediately?

I'm not getting the point of the story. Is it just that you thought about moving to a new job, had a dream about it, and then did? Seems like the more likely explanation is you subconsciously picked up on something going on at work and your unconscious dreaming mind filled in the blanks. What others have said both about your memory of the dream changing after the fact as well as confirmation bias are also pretty likely given how the mind works.