Prayers answered? Good Luck? Mind over matter?
 

I think all of us have said a prayer for someone, or ourselves. Assuming the outcome was good, was this prayer answered? Could the same outcome have happened to a person who had not been prayed for? Is this good luck? Is it just a boost of moral for the person in question giving them more confidence to complete the task, or get better? Could it just be that when people hope or pray for another person some of their energy is given to the person they have hoped for?

I have always personally felt that with or without these prayers the outcome wouldn't change.

With that said the floor is open.

Billions of prayers are made every day. Either God is ignoring most of them, or nobody is hearing them.

That's how I feel, anyway. People asking their imaginary friend in the sky for a favor.

I came across a video a while back that offered a pretty interesting (however simple) observation of how prayers are answered/not answered.
It's an atheistic view regarding coincidence and how it fits into prayer, substituting god--as the deity being prayed to--for a jug of milk...

While it's not exactly chock-full of references and supported by much, it's a short video that I thought made a good example for the illusion of answered prayers.
If any of you would like to check it out, here ya be:

That guy had a really irritating voice. Otherwise, buzzy video..

Yea, his voice got on my nerves too.
The way he pronounced "milk" especially.

Melk


Seriously? Melk?

Hahaha! That's how I pronounce it too. My brother has given me shit for it my entire life. :laughing:

This is pretty much how I feel about the concept of prayers and praying.

But I also learnt a bit about positive visualisation a while ago and how it can help you achieve things in your life. It's not some magical, spiritual crap - it's just the notion of visualising something you want to achieve, thinking positively about it, and then achieving it. The positive thinking of "this WILL happen" gives you encouragement to complete the task and get what you want. For example, if I think "I am going to fail this assignment" I think I will be more likely to fail the assignment because I'm already placing a prophecy on myself that the assignment is not going to be achieved. If I think to myself, "I am going to pass this assignment with ease!" I would be more likely to pass the assignment.

Of course, this wouldn't 'work' in a whole heap of scenarios but I think sometimes this is how praying works for some people. By verbalising and visualising what they want, they have more of an idea of how to go about getting it, and may achieve their goals.

@ Kate

Well, I think there's a fundamental difference between a person praying to god to fulfill a need and a person self-motivating to achieve a goal.
While I agree that a positive attitude is more conducive to achieving a goal than a negative one, I think that a prayer for a goal to be achieved is the act of a person submitting that they can't do it on their own and admitting to god that they need his help. To arrive at the point where a person admits need of divine influence is to admit that they are incapable of doing it alone, which is negative thinking.
In essence, prayer itself is the antithesis of positive thinking and personal esteem in the regard you're speaking of.

i can't believe he took almost nine minutes to say that little.

Yea there was a lot of extra info that didn't need to be included.
But it's spelled out for a wide audience.
I thought it was funny, but because I don't like milk, I pray to Satan.

True, if you conducted a prayer that was like "I want $1000" or "I want X to fall in love with me" or "I want my pregnancy test to be positive" or "I want to be cured of this fatal cancer" then that is very much the case.

But if your prayer is something like:

"I need the strength to overcome my addiction to nicotine," then by verbalising your problem you have identified that you need to overcome your addiction and to do this you are going to need strength. Thinking that God is giving you strength could muster up your own inner strength and help you to overcome the problem. Kind of like a placebo effect.

or if you said something in your prayer like:
"I need the motivation to finish this assignment so I don't fail," then you have recognised that the assignment needs to be completed in order for you to not fail, and that to do this you need motivation. Again, if you are under the impression that God has sent you motivation then you are probably more inclined to be motivated to finish the assignment. The fact that you have verbalised to yourself exactly what you need to do may also aid in working towards the goal.

I'm not saying this is something that happens every time somebody prays but just an idea...

@ Kate

Actually, you got it backwards in reference to what I was saying.
By no means is it reasonable to assume that a person praying for their cancer to be miraculously cured is a negative thinker. They don't have any control over their cancer. Positive thinking won't help their cancer. Medicine will go some way to help, and prayer does nothing but provide a supplemental factor to ease their mind.

But for someone who IS capable of controlling an outcome, like finishing an assignment or what have you, is selling themselves out by relegating the responsibility of providing motivation to achieve their goal to some external deity.
Placebo or not, this conditions a person to not see worth and ability in themselves and creates a dependency. Regardless of the outcome being positive, the methods of achieving it are just as important because self-confidence and esteem play major roles in a person's life and having the ability to stand on your own legs in all those areas affected is more important than simply thinking you've got a "life-line" in case things get tough. A big negative of that is the fact that if a person is dependent on god to help them achieve goals, then their behavior can be a negating factor if they start thinking that maybe their deeds have put them out of favor with god or made them less deserving for their prayer to be answered... which may cause them to not attempt to achieve their goal at all because they doubt their "support" will be awarded.

Ideally, in motivational aspects, yourself is your best bet because it's the one thing you have the most control of.

Ah yeah, I gotcha. That is very true. A person praying to God to ask them for motivation in finishing their assignment would be completely different to a person using positive visualision to summon their own strength to finish the assignment.

So I suppose everything is simply coincidence. There would in that case be no fate, nothing happens for a reason, only cause and effect. So we should in fact worship a milkjug because prayers may not be instantaneous. Do you feel anything when you make a prayer to god? Are we brainwashed to worship our god over a milkjug?

pretty much. welcome to reality.

"good luck"

So God is a milk jug? Or is he a spaghetti monster?

That last link made me laugh. Idk why, I just find something funny about WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com.

Hahahaha... For real though.. Apparently god has a thing against amputees. He simply refuses to grow their limbs back for some odd reason.
But who knows... maybe we're all on our way to a divine trajectory of being a society where limbs are a thing of the past and we just kinda roll around...

The way Christians see that their prayers are answered is just a small part of a large problem. If we zoom out a bit, one will see that the logic Christians use goes something like "I prayed for X, and X happened, so it must have been my prayer that caused X." The bigger problem, which is evident outside of religion, is the acceptance of the statement, "I preformed X, and Y happened, so X must be the cause of Y." It is the same logic people use when they throw a bunch of statistics out in order to show that "people who play violent video games will be violent." One can't make the leap from the occurrence of Y after X to X being the cause of Y. Correlation does not mean causation.

Prayer is to motivational tool as chewing tobacco is to cigarettes. Some people might be able to break their addictions and whatnot, but then they drag around faith-based contradictions in their lives, which I will assume that we all agree are not healthy. Why bother with prayer if you can just break the addiction with a healthy dose of self-esteem? Oh, that's right! Then we would start approving of pride and things like that. I am sure we don't want to start heading down that path . . .

^^^ we are aware of that.. The real question is what does it mean to you, not what some guy who pronounces "milk" "melk". If you have a more personalized opinion I would like to hear the fail vs. success ratio. I think there is a bit more to this than a freaking jug of milk. Don't forget the mind over matter part.

here's my take on prayer...

one fine Tuesday night in November of 1999 my right eye got really itchy and sore. by Thursday it was the most painful thing i had ever felt. i honestly thought my eye was going to explode overnight on Wednesday. i was in a quarantined hospital room by dinner time on Thursday.

once the results came back (Pseudomonas) the specialist informed me that it normally took about 3 weeks to heal to the point of being allowed to return home. fine, whatever.

so my friend who had helped me get around and get checked that fine Thursday happened to be from a religious family, so when he told them about what happened they choose to say prayers for me during their next few masses and gatherings.

i was out of the hospital in 11 days.

maybe i just heal quick, maybe the hospital really needed my bed, or maybe having a bunch of people i don't even know exist hoping and praying that a friend of one of their own gets through a rough spot actually helped me get through a rough spot. either way, the doctor was impressed and quite pleased at my recovery.

i think its ****ing ignorant to assume that a jug of milk can't deliver. I think this thread is fairly offensive to our Lactotariate members.

Lactose interance = athiesm.

Maybe that is true sometimes, maybe there are things that happen they way they are supposed to happen and the outcome wouldn't change. But that being said the prayers might not change the outcome, but it can change the person who is praying.

I find it funny, since without a god to answer our prayers the jug of milk actually does in fact do "more" than prayer.

Milk:

• Answers prayers
• Does a body good (except mine)
• Provides sexual innuendo via milk mustache
• Cats like it
• Is white

God:

• Answers prayers
• Cat's don't care about him and are all going to hell
• Is black

You decide.

The feeling is mutual, cats aren't mentioned in the Bible.

wrong, obviously they were on the ark instead of being culled in the flood

I'm pretty sure god was just joking about the flood, and took great humor watching Noah toil away at building a giant boat for nothing, but when he smuggled kittens aboard (for a purpose other than being snacks for the dobermans), god got pissed and flooded everything to shit for reals.

If ever science was to prove that the Noah story is completely real, I'd just like to state that I am incredibly impressed and thankful to Noah for managing to collect two of each of those little mites and springtails that I occupy my time with in the lab. Highly impressive!

On a more serious note, I think prayer might have some real benefit in the shape of placebo effects or a collection of positive effects that stem from positive thinking and self-empowerment. I don't believe that the mind can move mountains (unless that mountain is merely a product of your psychosis ;)), but it can certainly do a lot.

If you kill them, you can post in that topic too -> what the largest animal you could kick to death? ;)

Well .. one thing is, though, they're quite small. I look at them through a microscope. ;)

Getting back on topic I would like to make a few extra statements

In life we have needs and wants, I think that when asking God for a want like money which was used in that video you are "foxhole praying". Prayers are not answered when someone prays in this manner. If we could all pray to win the lottery and it was answered we would all be rich. Or realizing that only one person can win the lottery at a time might help. I think that there are coincidences that people have tried to link to prayer when it comes to asking for outlandish things. I don't think that we should ask god for things at all, I think that its more of a strengthining of the mental state, for instance to ask for stability or strength to overcome certain situations. Cars, clothing, money and love these are all things that god knows we have control over, or do not. Our goal in life is less to be given all of these things free, more to have experiance with them on our own individual mortal level. God knows this and you know this, without experiance your are not worth the shoes you walk in. We are supposed to grow old and wise.

If there is one thing that bothers me about Christianity - well, ok, there are a lot of things - but, one of the big ones is how a literal interpretation of the bible has produced a personified God. Everyone imagines a big guy up in the sky with beard and robe deciding what he should be doing to/for us all the time. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. For one, God would not have a physical manifestation. God would be an all pervading energy that lives within everything. Why would he need a body? He is an all powerful intelligence and a body would just limit him. Praying "to him" is a completely fruitless effort. There is no one entity to pray to...God would be everything all the time.

The above is just one of the things I've thought about over the years, and I'm not sure what I firmly believe in terms of a greater power, but I feel there are definitely greater energies at work than what we can see. I think the only reason we would call that energy God is because we aren't even close to understanding it scientifically. Creating a religion and worshiping something out of a lack of understanding is just something humans do to help rationalize the world around them, but I am of the belief that nothing is beyond explanation.

A possible contributing factor to the idea of God as a man in the sky is the line from Genesis which says he created man in his image. Although that doesn't necessarily mean that God has or sometimes takes a human-like body shape, I think a lot of christians have interpreted it that way in the past .. and continue to do so!

Of course, God manifesting as an old man is an ancient idea :)

http://2menoffaith.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/god1.jpg

The thing I've always loved about that painting - God's wife is freakin hot.

But, yeah...God has been personified throughout human history, but not until Christianity was a literal interpretation of a religion's sacred text taken to such an extreme. Christians are raised to look down on other religions because of their polytheism, but fail to understand that a lot of times those gods are worshiped as metaphors for what they truly stand for. The Hindu Gods, for example, put this into perspective perfectly. There is a god for everything, but everyone who follows this religion understands these physical being don't exist. They use them as vehicles for understanding the finer points of the lesson being taught.

My personal favorite has always been Kali:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...oster1940s.jpg

I won't relay the whole story behind this particular picture, but Kali represents the primal and aggressive side to humans while Shiva (the dead guy) represent the logical side of humanity. There is a massive war that Shiva tries to calm, but fails so Kali is called to fix it up. She goes into a blood rage, kills the opposing force, but is so messed up on the carnage that she starts killing everything. Not until she kills Shiva does she realize what she has done and gains some sense about her. I'll leave this story to your own interpretation since that is what it is for...but I always found this particular tale fascinating.

There are to many factors within the idea of religion to be completely faithful. The biggest pain to me is the amount of different religions there are. Should we just pick one? The thing is how many are there and which one is the correct one?

So after thinking about that I just decided to have my own little thoughts ideas on how it all works.

That's the best way to do it. No one is right...how could they be? Religion is nothing more than a way to ease our minds since there is no way to explain what happens after death. I honestly mean no offense when I say this since religion can really help certain people, but following one specific religion just shows you are not confident enough in the world to try to figure things out on your own. I personally love the mystery.

A quick question to you, Duga, and of course anyone else who want to answer. Do you believe that there is a sort of moral code that we will be judged by after we die?