Okay ATHEISTS <rolls sleaves>

I guess that's close enough, tell me did that liter of water spill out of the plant and cover the earth?

 

Have you ever considered that you just don't make sense?
It's a poor workman that blames his tools!
It's a poor teacher that blames his students!
And it's a poor writer that blames his readers!

 

Brother...
To 'explain' would mean nothing without ~ concept/database.
You are not my student. And i question your motives for being a reader.

And i am not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Occam

 

Wbld, SelfControl, Portalguy, about when you were talking about prayer;
If you are a father or when you become fathers, wouldn’t you like your children to have love for others and show concern for their problems and may be think about how they can help others?

How would you do it? Would you try to draw them out? Maybe ask them to tell you how they feel about things? Try and get them to talk about the problems of others and how they could help?

Wouldn’t God want to do the same for us, his children? Wouldn’t prayer fit the bill?

 

Thanx for the explaination?

PS Has that liter of water you poured on your plant covered the earth yet?

 

A couple of thoughts come to mind;
First, logistics, the Bible says “no man can see God and live” which seems reasonable, so face to face chats would be difficult at best.

Second, some would say giving us a written document like say, the Bible, would be proof.

Last, who’s to say that God would have our same time frame reference, having lived for forever time might seem to move a little faster for him than us, I know it does for me as I get older. The Bible says that a thousand years is but a day in God’s eyes. I mean how often to you talk to your friends, every day or do you some times skip a day or two or maybe a week, a week? A week to God would be 7 thousand years to us. If you believe that God talked to us though Jesus, that would mean he spoke to us only 2 days ago.

There you go, three answers and no; "God works in mysterious ways".

 

Brother.. I AM a father.. And i simply said.. read these books and
expand from there. Ask any questions you need to ask.
I'll answer as honestly as i can
Milnes's House at pooh corner
The quoran
The bible
A history of the western world
Plato's republic
Sun Tzu's Art of War
Musashi's the book of 5 rings
Words of the buddha
Spinoza's A Treatise on Religious and Political Philosophy
Conrads Heart of darkness

You see. i trusted her to have a brain.. and use it.
Not kneal at end of bed and hope for a gift from on high


Occam

 

Prayer is talking to God about the concerns of your heart and can be done standing, sitting or walking on the road.
It is not kneeling at the end of the bed and hoping for a gift from on high.
Why, is that what you expected from your daughter?

PS Has that liter of water you poured on your plant covered the earth yet?

 

So in your analogy, humanity = my kids, and God = me... so the kid's asking me to make them a better person?

It's a moot point since I hate kids, but I don't really see how this analogy works. I guess what I'm most confused about is why I had to ask God to make me a better person, to keep me on the straight and narrow or whatever. I mean, surely it's the kid's decision, regardless of whether she asks for my advice. Has anyone ever prayed and received evidence that they were absolutely wrong? Has prayer ever made you not do what you thought was right, only to discover you were mistaken in the first place? Has it ever led you to a right answer you didn't already have?

 

perhaps a new nickname is in order then?

 

I don't know how you got this from what I said.

My analogy was, humanity = my kids, and God = me... the father is trying to teach his child to be a better person.

At no time did I say that the child was asking the father to make them a better person! That is the responsibility of the father whether the child asks or not.

My whole post was written from the viewpoint of the father toward the child and how a father might develop good qualities in a child.

 

I understood that, which I why I didn't understand it as an allegory for prayer, since God does not - to my knowledge, anyway - pray to man.

 

You must believe that prayer is only asking for something, where as Prayer is talking to God about the concerns of your heart.

 

See, I can see a value in having a dialectic on an issue, of talking it over to yourself. If it's necessary to replace one's own voice with another's, be it God or a mirror or whatever, it's all good if it gets you where you want to be. I'm not stupid, I know that prayer isn't supposed to be just asking for stuff (although I'm sure a lot of people use it that way), but talking about concerns... I mean, if you pray for someone else, how does that figure into that?

 

I think of prayer as a way of focusing postive thoughts--similar, in a way, to guided imagery. And different occasions call for different prayers. For example, one kind of prayer the group with which I take fellowship uses is the "Resentment Prayer", used for people we resent, dislike or think we've been aggrieved by. We pray that God will bring that person peace and a long and happy life. I don't know what it does for the person targeted, but it can have a healing effect on the people praying.

 

prayer is basically self-hypnosis

if your mind wants to think it's talking to 'god'

[yahweh, jesus, allah, moroni, jah]

so be it

if you think you can beam your mind-rays unto friends and family

[or those you resent?]

oh well

[the state of mental health care has SERIOUSLY been diminished in the u$]

 

Only christians could come up with silly beliefs and silly analogies such as these.

If the christian "Father" was inherently good, then naturally, it follows that the offspring/ child would also be good.
Otherwise, if the child didn't turn out to be "good", then, perhaps, there was something inherently wrong with the chrisitian "father". LOL.

Talk about genetic defects or perhaps, the supposed christian "Father" was no god after.

Didn't your bible teach that man was created in the image of god their "father"?

Therefore, if the christian offspring/child is bad, wicked or even ugly, it follows that the christian father was bad, wicked or even ugly also. LOL.

 

wow that makes no sense at all.

do you have kids? do you know someone who has kids? is their child an exact copy of themselves? I didn't think so....

 

Why of course, since your christian faith and your bible makes no sense at all as well.

This merely validates the fact that your christian bible is nothing more than a book of fantasy and fiction, no different than the mother goose's book of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. LOL.

 

Dude, if you're not even going to make the effort to make sense, why bother at all? You say "this merely validates that fact"... but it doesn't! I'm not saying that the Bible isn't a fantasy, but what you quoted doesn't indicate that. This is why your position is not credible; you can't even be bothered to explain why everything anyone says makes them stupid/delusional (unless they're not Christian), and in this case, there's just nothing to back up what you're saying.


And I'm still waiting for an explanation as to why drawing moral lessons from a work of fiction makes people delusional. I'm still yet to notice you actually coming up with an answer to that other than "you are a christian/were raised christian and thus every u say is teh stuped", which is frankly all I expect from you now.