Quote (Legacy_Tangent @ Sep 10 2010 04:24pm)
To your first point, we may have been looking at what God does in response to prayer, but do you think a loving God would deny help to the people recovering simply because he was being observed? Is that love? To your second point, we don't have to take one result, because we can take 1,802 results. And to your third point, is your final answer just to simply say they were bad christians and god doesn't listen to bad prayers?
How exactly do you think god is expressing his love to the patients recovering from the coronary bypass surgery? Why should he all of a sudden deny them his help, simply to stay under the radar? This would make God's supposedly unconditional love, conditional.
love goes beyond what is seen or observed, not to mention the fact that if God were to love each person in the world equally the same as he said he does, he would have to be fair to everyone in the sense of death and health, that includes dying of old age, everyone would know their own life expectancy, because it would simply be unfair for someone to live longer than someone else, do you know what i mean?
wut u mean by 1802 results? there are many results that occur in to every action and a reaction that creates more results and a constant chain of this occurs
not bad "christians" - the term for that is backslidden christians, they are those that are truly saved but they start to become numb to the holy spirit's soft voice, the one that leads you in life, the one that gives you an uneasy feeling when you're doing something wrong, the one that encourages you to do right
but that's not the idea i'm trying to get at either (backslidden christians) - i'm talking about those who probably are not even christians at all, they claim to be but have never accepted Jesus Christ as their saviour
the bible says that Jesus is our mediator to the father, (there are 3 parts of God - the father, the son (jesus), the holy spirit - all God but have their own distinct roles) - therefore, Jesus hears us and then relays it to God the Father
although God the Father is Jesus and Jesus God the Father, it's a very hard concept to understand and even I don't understand it fully but obviously like prayer and how everything is worked out in heaven we can never know until we go there someday
our feeble human minds cannot understand the ways of God
there are even proofs in the bible where God commands things of his people that modern science is just figuring out within these decades
such proofs are - the circumcision of babies in the Jewish community - the reason for circumcision today as we know it is for the purpose of preventing urinary track infections
although you do not need a circumcision to prevent UTI's it's a good idea due to the fact that one day when you are married or participate in sexual intercourse, bacteria that is stagnant in the foreskin can be passed into the vagina of your partner
God commanded this of jews and they did not know the whole reason why God commanded it but they did it anyway
another factor in Jewish circumcision is the fact that the babies were not to be circumcised until the 8th day, scientifically, vitamin K a necessary component in blood clotting is not readily available until the 7th to 8th day of birth
this is why newborns in the nursery of hospitals who get circumcisions are given a dose of Intramuscular vit K
another fact in the bible states that lepers are to be set aside from the community or city walls
this is because God knew how leprosy transmitted itself, back then, there were no microscopes to study how bacteria transmitted itself
there were no isolation precautions, there were no scientific labs as we do today
but how could these people keep themselves safe? God knows everything already since he created everything and put the laws into place
God's love is uncoditional, if these people are "true Christians" then why would they fear death? if you knew you were going to a place where there is no more crying no more pain no more suffering (heaven) then why would you fear dying?
death to a christian is not the end of the world, it is simply God calling one home, there's a phrase that Christians use, it goes "This world is not my home, I'm just passing through" yes we are here on earth, but that is not our final destination