Originally Posted By CuriousConstance Or when someone makes a touchdown or wins a football game, they thank God for answering their prayers. Does God hate the entire other team that just lost the game?
Originally Posted By SuperDry Regarding prayer before a ball game, I've heard of what I think is a much more reasonable approach to it: you pray that God will keep your team safe, and allow you to do your best. You don't pray for God's favor to win - that's up to you. That allows people of faith to get the benefit of prayer, without the (ridiculous IMHO) notion that God is going to favor your high school or college's team over another.
Originally Posted By Labuda "Does God hate the entire other team that just lost the game?" Only if the "other" team is the Yankees, the Packers or Cowboys, or the Lakers.
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan >>you pray that God will keep your team safe, and allow you to do your best. You don't pray for God's favor to win - that's up to you. That allows people of faith to get the benefit of prayer, without the (ridiculous IMHO) notion that God is going to favor your high school or college's team over another.<< That makes sense. Also, you might pray that you will win or lose in a way that will bring honor to your religious faith - being a good sport.
Originally Posted By tiggertoo <<But there are tens of millions of Americans who engage in magical thinking and believe completely falsified, totally debunked nonsense.>> Exactly. However, I will take a somewhat controversial stance and say that I don’t believe that a basic belief in a deity and acceptance of science are necessarily mutually exclusive. The problem as I see it develops when religionists allow their faith to supersede methodologically proven scientific fact. Even if someone believe that God is omniscient, such an epistemological foundation is foolish. What is wrong with accepting science as the rules he or she created to organize and operate the universe? Scientific discovery simply becomes a form of revelation. Rejecting it for a mythical belief that contradicts science is silly. To me, rejecting evolution in favor of creationism is tantamount to saying gravity is God’s love attracting us to Earth rather than a scientific principle based on the mass of an object. You can believe in a God and evolution. I’m not saying I have a firm belief in God. Frankly, I don’t have enough information to make an assessment one way or the other, nor do I feel compelled to make it. I’ll just try to live a good life and see what happens. I certainly don’t discount it though. Considering modern research in astrophysics and developing concepts in theoretical physics tell me there is way too much we don’t know for me to nix the possibility. Heck, just pondering the ideas surrounding the origin and predicted end of the universe---infinitely small and dense to infinitely large and sparse---as well as evolving concepts in theoretical physics, like string theory, subatomic physics, the nature of reality, space, and time, etc. give me plenty of room to wonder.
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Originally Posted By tiggertoo <<Some would define this as "proof" that prayer works.>> Proof? It's can only be proof if the experiment is repeatable. But since you can't "unpray" something or view how the circumstances would have ended up otherwise (had then not prayed), it cannot be proven to have worked.
