I pray you join my religion

[methylatedghosts]

i will start to pray for alan, that you can experience some real improvement in his behavior and stability, and that you can in time visit a church who will minister to you in a way that resembles more closely the love and compassion of Christ, which is (despite your unfortunate experiences!) real and without limit

This was posted by pyrite in response to one of Confused's posts.

And it kinda got me to think.

I have no problem whatsoever with the first part about praying for health - thats great.

My thoughts are, that Christianity is about "spreading the love of Christ".

But also is it not about allowing people to choose for themselves.

Now, is it not also a part of Christianity, that believes that prayer is powerful enough to change someones health, or even their mind.

Is it therefore right for a Christian to pray that someone join their church or religion, if we take the points "allowing people to choose for themselves" and "that prayer works" as true?

Because, wouldn't this prayer cause a change in the persons mind so that it isn't of their own choice?


(Just to be sure, pyrite, I'm not saying that this is what you are praying for, but just that this is where my thoughts came from )

[pyrite]

you're giving placebo way more credit than it derserves.. certainly has considerable power over the mind, but i've seen people thrown 4-5 metres across a room during prayer against demonic opression/posession. what i saw was impossible, people physically thrown by an invisible force.. does placebo explain this? they were actually prayed for against their will, they didn't think they needed to be prayed for, or expect anything at all to happen. placebo relies on expectation, which clearly wasn't present

If you can actually prove that this happened with anything more then anecdotal evidence then you would have precisely what I requested, now wouldn't you?

you're a tough man to please, no i dont have a photograph or what you would class as 'evidence' other than the fact that i saw what i saw... maybe if you actually went to a Christian meeting or watched footage for yourself of some supernatural acts instead of immediately assuming everything we say is crap then you would have a more open mind!! i can possibly direct you to some footage of a young african boy whose cancer (a huge, external tumor) was completely dried up after prayer, but you would probably write it off as placebo anyway

[Galphanore]

you're giving placebo way more credit than it derserves.. certainly has considerable power over the mind, but i've seen people thrown 4-5 metres across a room during prayer against demonic opression/posession. what i saw was impossible, people physically thrown by an invisible force.. does placebo explain this? they were actually prayed for against their will, they didn't think they needed to be prayed for, or expect anything at all to happen. placebo relies on expectation, which clearly wasn't present

If you can actually prove that this happened with anything more then anecdotal evidence then you would have precisely what I requested, now wouldn't you?

you're a tough man to please, no i dont have a photograph or what you would class as 'evidence' other than the fact that i saw what i saw... maybe if you actually went to a Christian meeting or watched footage for yourself of some supernatural acts instead of immediately assuming everything we say is crap then you would have a more open mind!! i can possibly direct you to some footage of a young african boy whose cancer (a huge, external tumor) was completely dried up after prayer, but you would probably write it off as placebo anyway

I have been to numerous Christian meetings and seen many 'supernatural acts' in video, you seem to keep forgetting that I was a believer for a long time, I have also seen Penn and Teller drive a semi-truck over Teller. Every single one of these things has had a simpler explanation. I am not asking much if you are actually experiencing something supernatural.

[pyrite]

you're giving placebo way more credit than it derserves.. certainly has considerable power over the mind, but i've seen people thrown 4-5 metres across a room during prayer against demonic opression/posession. what i saw was impossible, people physically thrown by an invisible force.. does placebo explain this? they were actually prayed for against their will, they didn't think they needed to be prayed for, or expect anything at all to happen. placebo relies on expectation, which clearly wasn't present

If you can actually prove that this happened with anything more then anecdotal evidence then you would have precisely what I requested, now wouldn't you?

you're a tough man to please, no i dont have a photograph or what you would class as 'evidence' other than the fact that i saw what i saw... maybe if you actually went to a Christian meeting or watched footage for yourself of some supernatural acts instead of immediately assuming everything we say is crap then you would have a more open mind!! i can possibly direct you to some footage of a young african boy whose cancer (a huge, external tumor) was completely dried up after prayer, but you would probably write it off as placebo anyway

I have been to numerous Christian meetings and seen many 'supernatural acts' in video, you seem to keep forgetting that I was a believer for a long time, I have also seen Penn and Teller drive a semi-truck over Teller. Every single one of these things has had a simpler explanation. I am not asking much if you are actually experiencing something supernatural.

Penn and Teller are master illusionists and magicians, they've never claimed to be anything else.
what happens when you know someone personally, know the person giving ministry personally (in fact they are both members of your family!), and still against all odds the physically impossible happens in front of you?

[Galphanore]

you're giving placebo way more credit than it derserves.. certainly has considerable power over the mind, but i've seen people thrown 4-5 metres across a room during prayer against demonic opression/posession. what i saw was impossible, people physically thrown by an invisible force.. does placebo explain this? they were actually prayed for against their will, they didn't think they needed to be prayed for, or expect anything at all to happen. placebo relies on expectation, which clearly wasn't present

If you can actually prove that this happened with anything more then anecdotal evidence then you would have precisely what I requested, now wouldn't you?

you're a tough man to please, no i dont have a photograph or what you would class as 'evidence' other than the fact that i saw what i saw... maybe if you actually went to a Christian meeting or watched footage for yourself of some supernatural acts instead of immediately assuming everything we say is crap then you would have a more open mind!! i can possibly direct you to some footage of a young african boy whose cancer (a huge, external tumor) was completely dried up after prayer, but you would probably write it off as placebo anyway

I have been to numerous Christian meetings and seen many 'supernatural acts' in video, you seem to keep forgetting that I was a believer for a long time, I have also seen Penn and Teller drive a semi-truck over Teller. Every single one of these things has had a simpler explanation. I am not asking much if you are actually experiencing something supernatural.

Penn and Teller are master illusionists and magicians, they've never claimed to be anything else.
what happens when you know someone personally, know the person giving ministry personally (in fact they are both members of your family!), and still against all odds the physically impossible happens in front of you?

Self deception is the most powerful kind, but as I said I won't be accepting anything based on anecdotal evidence. It's not reliable because memory it's self is not reliable. Here, I'll give you an example. I remember falling about ten feet from a tree I was climbing when I was around twelve and hitting my head on a rock about twice the size of my head and then blacking out, but recently I saw a home movie of the actual event and I fell maybe five feet and hit the grass, next to a rock about twice the size of my fist. I did not black out, I just picked up the rock, threw it and went back to climbing. Even knowing that it's not a real memory I still have it.

I agree though, Penn and Teller are amazing illusionists, and very avid atheist skeptics.

[pyrite]

you're giving placebo way more credit than it derserves.. certainly has considerable power over the mind, but i've seen people thrown 4-5 metres across a room during prayer against demonic opression/posession. what i saw was impossible, people physically thrown by an invisible force.. does placebo explain this? they were actually prayed for against their will, they didn't think they needed to be prayed for, or expect anything at all to happen. placebo relies on expectation, which clearly wasn't present

If you can actually prove that this happened with anything more then anecdotal evidence then you would have precisely what I requested, now wouldn't you?

you're a tough man to please, no i dont have a photograph or what you would class as 'evidence' other than the fact that i saw what i saw... maybe if you actually went to a Christian meeting or watched footage for yourself of some supernatural acts instead of immediately assuming everything we say is crap then you would have a more open mind!! i can possibly direct you to some footage of a young african boy whose cancer (a huge, external tumor) was completely dried up after prayer, but you would probably write it off as placebo anyway

I have been to numerous Christian meetings and seen many 'supernatural acts' in video, you seem to keep forgetting that I was a believer for a long time, I have also seen Penn and Teller drive a semi-truck over Teller. Every single one of these things has had a simpler explanation. I am not asking much if you are actually experiencing something supernatural.

Penn and Teller are master illusionists and magicians, they've never claimed to be anything else.
what happens when you know someone personally, know the person giving ministry personally (in fact they are both members of your family!), and still against all odds the physically impossible happens in front of you?

Self deception is the most powerful kind, but as I said I won't be accepting anything based on anecdotal evidence. It's not reliable because memory it's self is not reliable. Here, I'll give you an example. I remember falling about ten feet from a tree I was climbing when I was around twelve and hitting my head on a rock about twice the size of my head and then blacking out, but recently I saw a home movie of the actual event and I fell maybe five feet and hit the grass, next to a rock about twice the size of my fist. I did not black out, I just picked up the rock, threw it and went back to climbing. Even knowing that it's not a real memory I still have it.

I agree though, Penn and Teller are amazing illusionists, and very avid atheist skeptics.

i understand the validity of your childhood example, except that it's very easily explainable by the fact that when you're young, everything looks and seems bigger and more extreme than it actually is, which is common knowledge.. i have similar examples from my own childhood.
i also agree with you that the simplest explanation is usually the most likely (occam's razor), and have personally witnessed enough faked or hammed-up christian healings/deliverances to be sceptical at best when entering such meetings. Many televangelists make me sick for this reason.
but i've also seen things that i can't deny! recently enough to not be discarded as a failure of memory or an exaggeration, or any form of 'placebo'

[Goat]

claiming that God 'has no effect' on the real world assumes you cant verify effects by experience. how, with countless experiences of the love and nature of God, can you claim with such certainty that he has no effect?

How can you show those countless experiances of 'the love and nature' of God is God?
I know people who hear voices in their head, and believe it is dead people talking to them. I am sure you would consider them insane. Except qualively, how do you know that the 'experiances of love' of god is not in a similar vein?

[Galphanore]

i understand the validity of your childhood example, except that it's very easily explainable by the fact that when you're young, everything looks and seems bigger and more extreme than it actually is, which is common knowledge.. i have similar examples from my own childhood.
i also agree with you that the simplest explanation is usually the most likely (occam's razor), and have personally witnessed enough faked or hammed-up christian healings/deliverances to be sceptical at best when entering such meetings. Many televangelists make me sick for this reason.
but i've also seen things that i can't deny! recently enough to not be discarded as a failure of memory or an exaggeration, or any form of 'placebo'

And that's the problem, argument from personal incredulity. Just becuse you cannot personally understand how something happened does not mean that there is no explaination for it. For instance, in San Antonio there is a tree that just suddenly started shooting out spouts of water from it's side, hundreds of people went to this tree and drank the water comming out of it believing it to be holy and having healing properties.

Then someone tried to actually figure out what happened. They took a sample of the water and found it was the exact same, chemically, as the water pipes through the area. Then they shut off the water to the house and the 'miracle tree' stopped spouting water. People still go to the 'miracle tree' though, even though it has been proven to be anything but miraculous. If you want me to actually accept your claims as anything more then another miracle tree then you're going to have to do more then make anecdotal claims.