"God is my ATM, prayer is my PIN"

[GSOgymrat]

This was posted online by an atheist but I'm not sure if this is the way many Christians look at faith. I know a particular Christian friend who would say prayer isn't a request to change the world but a plea to give the Christian strength to deal with adversity and maintain faith. He explained the world is meant to be bad, a place of sin, and inherently designed to be challenging. People are designed by God to be flawed. Life is an obstacle course and the purpose is to get through it while maintaining faith in God. You don't pray for God to change the course but the strength to not give up and to beg forgiveness when you fall. The faithful are not rewarded in this life but the next and Christians should not expect to be happy or expect justice in this life. This is completely opposite to my experience.

Thoughts?

[stromboli]

I've heard similar ideas in the sense that life isn't supposed to be rosy, but meant to be a hard trek to get to the end. The more you suffer the more exalted you'll be in the afterlife. But I would call that a minority viewpoint from what I experienced as a Christian. Most expect some form of reward in life.

What would be the point of prayer that never gets answered? Prayer is supposed to be appealing to god for help, but help would have to be in your mortal life.

[doorknob]

Um being raised a catholic prayer is meant for all sorts of things including praying for what you want. But I would say the biggest thing is that they believe you should give all the problems you can't handle over to god. I don't know about the success rate of doing that. I just know that any favorable out come is god answering their prayers.

[stromboli]

Um being raised a catholic prayer is meant for all sorts of things including praying for what you want. But I would say the biggest thing is that they believe you should give all the problems you can't handle over to god. I don't know about the success rate of doing that. I just know that any favorable out come is god answering their prayers.

Yes I have seen that in various places. Sort of classic is your garden variety brain tumor or the more virulent cancers. Suffer, suffer, pray some form of remission, disease returns, suffer, suffer, pray remission etc. until oops, returns again- fuck it, die, god has willed it. Never mind the talent and efforts of brain surgeons and Oncologists et al, just pray.

The irony is that it seems to me if god hands you a terminal disease or situation he has pretty much religiously punched your ticket. That being the case and heaven being the place everybody wants to get to, why not just say thank you god, pass the meds and die quietly. But these are the people that fight the hardest to stay alive. Ya got me.

[GSOgymrat]

Um being raised a catholic prayer is meant for all sorts of things including praying for what you want.

Reminds me of this.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

This was posted online by an atheist but I'm not sure if this is the way many Christians look at faith. I know a particular Christian friend who would say prayer isn't a request to change the world but a plea to give the Christian strength to deal with adversity and maintain faith. He explained the world is meant to be bad, a place of sin, and inherently designed to be challenging. People are designed by God to be flawed. Life is an obstacle course and the purpose is to get through it while maintaining faith in God. You don't pray for God to change the course but the strength to not give up and to beg forgiveness when you fall. The faithful are not rewarded in this life but the next and Christians should not expect to be happy or expect justice in this life. This is completely opposite to my experience.

Thoughts?

They've given up trying to make their god useful in the real world.

[Mike Cl]

This was posted online by an atheist but I'm not sure if this is the way many Christians look at faith. I know a particular Christian friend who would say prayer isn't a request to change the world but a plea to give the Christian strength to deal with adversity and maintain faith. He explained the world is meant to be bad, a place of sin, and inherently designed to be challenging. People are designed by God to be flawed. Life is an obstacle course and the purpose is to get through it while maintaining faith in God. You don't pray for God to change the course but the strength to not give up and to beg forgiveness when you fall. The faithful are not rewarded in this life but the next and Christians should not expect to be happy or expect justice in this life. This is completely opposite to my experience.

Thoughts?

The christian just described the devil as the creator--if their god is perfect,  then their god could not have produced anything that is flawed.  So, if the life he is living and the world he is living in, is flawed, then god could not have produced it.  It must have been the devil who did.  But then, why is god allowing the devil to be in charge????

[GSOgymrat]

The christian just described the devil as the creator--if their god is perfect,  then their god could not have produced anything that is flawed.  So, if the life he is living and the world he is living in, is flawed, then god could not have produced it.  It must have been the devil who did.  But then, why is god allowing the devil to be in charge????

Of course I can't give a real answer but why would there need to be a devil? Why can't God design people that are purposefully imperfect, similar to a robot designer who purposefully creates androids with specific limitations? For example, he doesn't give one android emotional responses even though he could.

[Baruch]

Depends on which church you go to.  The more Manichee the church, the more the emphasis on the evil of the present world and the perfection of the next.  Basically happened because the Western Roman Empire was first conquered by pagan barbarians, then by barbarians who had converted to the wrong theology (Arian Christianity) and finally to the failure of the Byzantine Empire to reconquer the West.  The Persians and Muslims and the Slaves kept the Byzantines busy.  So clearly in the West, G-d moved in mysterious ways ... even forcing the West to translate the Greek Bible into Latin, rather than making it in Latin in the first place ;-)

[Hydra009]

I know a particular Christian friend who would say prayer isn't a request to change the world but a plea to give the Christian strength to deal with adversity and maintain faith.

Imparting strength would also be intervening to change the situation.  Your friend is splitting hairs.

He explained the world is meant to be bad, a place of sin, and inherently designed to be challenging.

So basically, God is a Dark Souls fan.

People are designed by God to be flawed.

He really nailed that one.

Life is an obstacle course and the purpose is to get through it while maintaining faith in God.

Put people through all sorts of hardship and see who cracks.  Not much a gameplan.  Especially considering that this faith people are supposed to maintain was unknown to everyone but an obscure cult in Judea which spread to Europe then to most of the rest of the world relatively recently through colonialism.  And the cult was just a mish-mash of local religious beliefs with every bit the credibility as any other cult.  Not the sort of approach one would take get people to believe in something.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

The faithful are not rewarded in this life but the next and Christians should not expect to be happy or expect justice in this life.

Sounds great if you have a deathwish.  Not so great for maintaining a psychologically healthy society, though.

[Mike Cl]

Of course I can't give a real answer but why would there need to be a devil? Why can't God design people that are purposefully imperfect, similar to a robot designer who purposefully creates androids with specific limitations? For example, he doesn't give one android emotional responses even though he could.

As I see it, an All Powerful god could create flawed creatures.  But not a Perfect god.  Then creating an imperfect creature would be demonstrating that he was flawed.  Once again, the christian wants it both ways. Just the fact that god created the devil and then let him loose is a sign that he is not perfect. 

[SGOS]

But I would say the biggest thing is that they believe you should give all the problems you can't handle over to god. I don't know about the success rate of doing that. I just know that any favorable out come is god answering their prayers.

This was a big part of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I thought about the mechanics of this a lot, because AA talked about it all the time.  My belief (actually, I think of it more as an insight), is that many of our problems tend to be rather petty.  Some people are more petty about it than others, and worry about some pretty silly things.  But if you turn your problems over to a god, whether one exists or not, things often work out because there wasn't much there to bother worrying about in the first place.

I stated this in AA once, but in order to avoid offending the zealots, I put it this way:  Most of our problems aren't worth worrying about, so what do you suppose a God might do with them when you turn them over to Him?  He will most likely look at them and quickly throw them in the trash, and they will work themselves out.  But at least in theory, you won't be bothering to worry about them, so that's a plus.

Although, I think many people still worry after they turn a problem over to God.  But whether there is a god or not, the mechanics of these two types of problem solving are identical.  No one or "thing" does anything with them, and usually they work out.  God has an uncanny knack for mimicking how reality would be without him.

[SGOS]

Imparting strength would also be intervening to change the situation.  Your friend is splitting hairs.

That's great.  I love it.

"Oh God.  Make me stronger."
"Oh God.  Make me an NBA star."

Yep, splitting hairs.

[GSOgymrat]

The flawed creatures would be flawed from the perspective of other creatures but not God. The android without the emotion chip would be as the creator made it. The devil is doing as God designed him, a creator of adversity and suffering, testing people's faith.

[Mike Cl]

The flawed creatures would be flawed from the perspective of other creatures but not God. The android without the emotion chip would be as the creator made it. The devil is doing as God designed him, a creator of adversity and suffering, testing people's faith.

I do understand what you are saying.  I've heard it several times.  But if god were perfect, why would he need to test his creation?  And why would he craft a creature to create adversity and suffering?  For god's pleasure?  Why kind of perfect god needs that kind of pleasure.  And why make his creations suffer?  That is not a hallmark of perfection.