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Indeed not. Just praying for hope is ok, so far as it goes, just as 'The Bible has some good advice in' is ok - so far as it goes. But prayer that is supposed to come up with practical demonstrable gifts (and apparently unfailingly (1) as promised in the Bible is another matter altogether. The pretty general ignoring of the point other than various excuses that try to make prayers 'answered' while admitting that they aren't - or praying for stuff that they have a good chance of getting anyway, has been the usual response to this in the past and doesn't seem to have changed.
(1) aside from the get -out of the disciples Not having enough Faith. Odd that, as it worked at other times. Quite apart from in another gospel the reason that it didn't work is because it was a demon that you can't get rid of with just faith.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 03-28-2019 at 07:33 PM..
Indeed not. Just praying for hope is ok, so far as it goes, just as 'The Bible has some good advice in' is ok - so far as it goes. But prayer that is supposed to come up with practical demonstrable gifts (and apparently unfailingly (1) as promised in the Bible is another matter altogether. The pretty general ignoring of the point other than various excuses that try to make prayers 'answered' while admitting that they aren't - or praying for stuff that they have a good chance of getting anyway, has been the usual response to this in the past and doesn't seem to have changed.
(1) aside from the get -out of the disciples Not having enough Faith. Odd that, as it worked at other times. Quite apart from in another gospel the reason that it didn't work is because it was a demon that you can't get rid of with just faith.
Indeed. If prayer actually worked, there would be no children dying of disease or starvation. Everyone knows this, yet some people prefer to pretend to not notice.
Sure. And it would be super nice if prayer really worked. But, do innocent children die from disease? Yes, they sure do.
I'm aware. I've mentioned several times on this forum that when I was six, my also-six-year-old cousin died of leukemia. I had to pray for her every night before bed along with my regular bedtime prayers ever since she got sick. I had no idea that she could die until the day I came home and my mother told me died.
I didn't pray right. I also sometimes was goofing off with my sister during our prayers and not really concentrating on what I was saying. If I had, she wouldn't have died. Or so I believed because I was TOLD that if I prayed for Kathy to get better, she would have.
The short version is that I am now 60 and reverberations from that early event are still with me.
It is simply Faith - based self -deception. Easy to count the hits and ignore the misses. Easy to point to the bit of religious paraphernalia that survives a tornado and claim it as a miracle. It is the old business of starting with something that has to be proved and anything that can be used is used and if you have nothing then you invent it. Like the claim that atheist countries have more suicides which Jeff is still ignoring, preferring to make a big deal about how rude we atheist are.
It's a tactic that one sees in Believer debates (I saw it in the UFO world, too). Believer comes up with a bit of evidence, it gets knocked down and rather than deal with the implications of being wrong on that..' Well what about this one..?" and so on until you find something the skeptic can't answer and then you pin the whole debate on that. Even if it's only how skeptical they are.
This works best if one controls the discussion -forum. Which is why they hate it bitterly that they don't rule the roost here, and claim unfair play because we won the ground fair and square..
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801
I'm aware. I've mentioned several times on this forum that when I was six, my also-six-year-old cousin died of leukemia. I had to pray for her every night before bed along with my regular bedtime prayers ever since she got sick. I had no idea that she could die until the day I came home and my mother told me died.
I didn't pray right. I also sometimes was goofing off with my sister during our prayers and not really concentrating on what I was saying. If I had, she wouldn't have died. Or so I believed because I was TOLD that if I prayed for Kathy to get better, she would have.
The short version is that I am now 60 and reverberations from that early event are still with me.
They still tell children things like this.
I guess I'm attempting to "climb into the mind" of a fundamentalist like jeffbase even though I used to be one myself. But I was like you, MQ. I saw prayer not working and something inside my mind snapped. It's like I had an "aha!" moment--a realization that prayer doesn't work. But it caused a cognitive dissonance in my mind,
"Wait a second. Jesus made this promise in all four gospels"--the ONLY promise Jesus made that appears in all four gospels as a matter of fact, that's how weighty this issue was to the gospel writers.
All sorts of alarm bells went off in my head,
"Was this pure propaganda insinuated into the Jesus legend to try to "bribe" pagans into joining the faith" I wondered.
Interesting that it and eternal destruction are two of the very few issues that appear in all four gospels--again! The "carrot or the stick" ploy.
This was starting to look like a grand conspiracy to me--the fact that the gospels centered so forcefully on reward or punishment for accepting or rejecting Jesus. And if this deception was the central tenant of the Jesus story then this couldn't have come from God, I reasoned. It had to come wholly from the minds of fanatics bent on converting the world to their way of thinking.
That's when the scales fell from my eyes. I imagine you had a similar "Aha!" moment to, MQ--as have several of us who came to see the promises of answered prayer were completely and utterly contrived to produce a desired result: conversions. Didn't matter if the promises of Jesus and James were wildly impossible to fulfill in the long run. All that mattered in the short run was to get the church numbers up. That's it.
I saw this, Transponder saw this, so did Harry, Trout, Petunia and many other skeptics here.
But jeffbase, BaptistFundie, jimmie, and my favorite nemesis, Mike 555 CANNOT see what we see. How does that happen? I know you said it's faith-based self-deception, Trans, but I still can't get my mind around that. No reasonable person denies what is right in front of them. Their examples of answered prayer pale in comparison to the statistics which demonstrate that statistically roughly 5% of prayers are going to show positive outcomes. And these are the ones the Christians seize on. But what about the other 95% that fail right before their eyes?
Here's my question: do Christians block out the empty promises from Jesus that are right in front of them--do Christians block these empty promises out with pure faith-based denial?
Or is what we skeptics see completely and totally INVISIBLE to them?
They don't have to block it out because the reality is transparent to them?
This is what I ponder and try to comprehend, as a former fundamentalist who was one of the few to be able to see through the lies.
"The function of prayer is not to change God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays."
Soren Kierkegaard
Which is fair enough, though it is pretty much admitting that it tacitly accepts that the promises in the Bible do not pan out. I don't myself admire the 'change' in people because of prayer, but then as an atheist, i wouldn't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
I guess I'm attempting to "climb into the mind" of a fundamentalist like jeffbase even though I used to be one myself. But I was like you, MQ. I saw prayer not working and something inside my mind snapped. It's like I had an "aha!" moment--a realization that prayer doesn't work. But it caused a cognitive dissonance in my mind,
"Wait a second. Jesus made this promise in all four gospels"--the ONLY promise Jesus made that appears in all four gospels as a matter of fact, that's how weighty this issue was to the gospel writers.
All sorts of alarm bells went off in my head,
"Was this pure propaganda insinuated into the Jesus legend to try to "bribe" pagans into joining the faith" I wondered.
Interesting that it and eternal destruction are two of the very few issues that appear in all four gospels--again! The "carrot or the stick" ploy.
This was starting to look like a grand conspiracy to me--the fact that the gospels centered so forcefully on reward or punishment for accepting or rejecting Jesus. And if this deception was the central tenant of the Jesus story then this couldn't have come from God, I reasoned. It had to come wholly from the minds of fanatics bent on converting the world to their way of thinking.
That's when the scales fell from my eyes. I imagine you had a similar "Aha!" moment to, MQ--as have several of us who came to see the promises of answered prayer were completely and utterly contrived to produce a desired result: conversions. Didn't matter if the promises of Jesus and James were wildly impossible to fulfill in the long run. All that mattered in the short run was to get the church numbers up. That's it.
I saw this, Transponder saw this, so did Harry, Trout, Petunia and many other skeptics here.
But jeffbase, BaptistFundie, jimmie, and my favorite nemesis, Mike 555 CANNOT see what we see. How does that happen? I know you said it's faith-based self-deception, Trans, but I still can't get my mind around that. No reasonable person denies what is right in front of them. Their examples of answered prayer pale in comparison to the statistics which demonstrate that statistically roughly 5% of prayers are going to show positive outcomes. And these are the ones the Christians seize on. But what about the other 95% that fail right before their eyes?
Here's my question: do Christians block out the empty promises from Jesus that are right in front of them--do Christians block these empty promises out with pure faith-based denial?
Or is what we skeptics see completely and totally INVISIBLE to them?
They don't have to block it out because the reality is transparent to them?
This is what I ponder and try to comprehend, as a former fundamentalist who was one of the few to be able to see through the lies.
They really do block it out, as they appear to block out anything that conflicts with their faith. At the same time, they rummage around for anything they can credit as answered prayer or miracles, no matter how paltry they are.
"I think Jeff is just a xian bot. Not a real person"
I have no respect for such tactics.
Exactly what a xian bot would type.
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The "carrot or the stick" ploy. 
I know you said it's faith-based self-deception, Trans, but I still can't get my mind around that. No reasonable person denies what is right in front of them. Their examples of answered prayer pale in comparison to the statistics which demonstrate that statistically roughly 5% of prayers are going to show positive outcomes. And these are the ones the Christians seize on. But what about the other 95% that fail right before their eyes? 
