Some Seek Fault with the Theology of Prayer

Some Seek Fault with the Theology of Prayer · Marxist Mask Off on Two Items (If Not More)

8 Prayers Christians Won’t Pray… But Why Not?
Mindshift | 13 April 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcYfAj4ffbw

4:07 No, asking God to change His mind is NOT the basics of prayer.

As CSL noted, we are not allowed to pray directly against what we know to be God's will. For instance, if we know someone died, we cannot pray "please don't let him die" ... apart from the psychological issue of such a prayer, it would be theologically unsound, as if asking the PERFECT Being to change His mind on the advice of us very imperfect petitioners.

4:35 No, praying for someone not yet dead not to go to Hell and praying for good weather are, in both cases, NOT asking God to change His mind or to change sth which otherwise was "going to happen" (quasi automatically), you are praying for sth which God as far as you know has left as an actual option and putting your request to weigh in on it.

DeludedOne

@DeludedOne

So you're saying God doesn't have a plan and that he will actually prioritize people's feelings on matters?

Here's the thing though, if God does not agree with your requests he will not grant them, it will only happen if he DOES agree with them yes? So in the end how is it any different from your requests simply being what God would want to begin with if they take effect and if they don't it's not what God ever wanted?

We are back to the the start point with no answers apart from the assertion that a clearly non-omniscient god can change their mind even though we will never know and can never shpw whether or not he actually changed his mind or if it was simply something he had already intended from the start.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@DeludedOne Has it occurred to you that in God's plan, there is a place for leaving detail to other persons, like by their requests?

Plus, whichever is God's plan, we don't have, while praying, a knowledge of God's plan being opposed to or anyway identic to what we ask for, things that actually are not in the category "details I'm free to get by asking" may seem so, which makes the prayer licit. In the case of things that God wanted anyway, He also wanted those prayers to contribute.

5:03 Reality exists because God is interfering.

So, praying for God to change His mind and praying for God to interfere are not synonymous.

And by the way, the Bible never condemns the exact concept of selfishness. Anything labelled selfishness in NIV has better translations. We are enjoined a certain degree of altruism, we are not, contrary to Protestant prejudice, enjoined to abstain from all selfishness.

The Urban Third Homestead

@theurbanthirdhomestead

The Bible doesn't even condemn slaughter.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@theurbanthirdhomestead Usually, yes.

THou shalt not kill and Genesis 9:6.

5:57 I believe Hell is more just to our free will than universalism.

I also believe Hell is more just to the will of the damned than annihilation.

6:32 Someone's probably praying for non-believers to get more evidence.

Not necessarily for there to be more evidence, though there is, the evidence from Hydrogen still existing is an extra, over and above the Geocentrism alluded to by St. Paul in Romans 1.

I'm probably the answer to that prayer, for instance in reminding that Heliocentrism can only be deduced, logically, from Atheism or possibly Deism, which is practically equivalent to Atheism.

DeludedOne

Deism is not atheism and it certainly isn't "the same" as deism. In fact, d[e]ism is usually what you get when you really push a Christian to their limits in terms of defining what their god is and defending that definition with anything outside of mere assertions.

Guess that means you're not thd answer as you just claimed.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@DeludedOne Deism and Atheism are the same from a practical p o v.

1) Involves a universe working all by itself in the present.
2) Involve a lack of motivation and a presence of dismotivation for prayer and for trying to please God by commandment keeping.

So, no, I didn't say Deism or Atheism were theoretically the same as to the things believed, but I said, and stand my ground, they are practically the same.

"d[e]ism is usually what you get when you really push a Christian to their limits in terms of defining what their god is"

A definition actually is an assertion, and since a man cannot on the same second answer a question of definition and a question for proof, you could always consider that correct answer as "mere assertions" ... so, Deism is a heresy, condemned as such in Vatican Council of 1869 to 1870. For a reason.

7:14 In my vocab, that prayer might be sth like "I pray that what I write reaches more" ...

I may at times have needed apologetics to keep the faith, in the face of two years of bullying by non-believers as a boarding school ninth- and tenth-grader, but I provide items I didn't personally need.

I also didn't need apologetics to become a believer, I had a loving and believing mother. That said, I thoroughly enjoy apologetics, and CSL is better on prayer than on the fall of Adam.

9:11 Child cancer is on God's palette of tools.

So is healing a child with cancer. Or a grown person with cancer.

Through doctors, through healthy diet (wonder what beetroot juice can do ...), through direct miracle.

I'm reminded of Father Philippe Laguérie's point. Immunity from pain was one of God's preternatural gifts to Adam and Eve in the state or Original Justice.

They blew it, and for us too. Impassibility without grace (and many of us lack grace, indeed most when we die, since Matthew 7:13) is kidding us things are OK with us, when they aren't. It's like treating toothache, not with alcohol, which actually disinfects, kills caries, but simply with a powerful painkiller, while taking more sugar, so you don't see the dentist, and you get a really rotten tooth.

DeludedOne

And the point that is being missed here is that unlike nature that does not "consciously act", the Christian god is characterized without exception to be a being of actual consciousness and intent. Furthermore he is also asserted to have a number of other characteristics, such as being benevolent, which is not normally attributed to a force without consciousnsess like nature.

Hence we will end up with Christians having to call BOTH the curing and contracting of cancer in ANYONE as "good" to be consistent with this image of benevolence despite both also being the outcome of the conscious deliberation of this god, at least if Christianity wished to be consistent on this point (they usually aren't).

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@DeludedOne If you didn't note, I never denied that:

• God is perfectly conscient of everything
• and both the cancer and the healing are good as per God's plan.

Doesn't mean they are equally good to us right now, but both are in fact (for very different reasons) good in God's very conscious plan.

above answer by me was

taken away:

[I don't know if it will reappear ...]

Be N S O N

@Colddirector

That’s dumb, why would two people eating an apple (something they by definition could not know was wrong) mean everyone else has to suffer.

Also unless god isn’t actually omnipotent, he could easily fix the problem without suffering

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@ [Be N S O N] They certainly could know it was wrong to disobey God.

The story doesn't say they had no clue whatsoever of right and wrong prior to eating the forbidden fruit.

9:33 Mankind deserves that innocent children die.

Don't get me wrong, killers may be on God's palette for converting other people, but they are usually not on God's palette for saving their souls. And, as mentioned, God doesn't condemn moderate self interest, and wanting to go to Heaven is certainly not immoderate. So, in your best interest, don't be that killer.

10:08 The intervention of God would not disrupt free will.

Calvin considered that God's restorative grace makes us compelled by God with no free will in the matter, as someone without grace is compelled by Satan with no free will in the matter.

Catholic theology holds, God's restorative grace does not destroy or disrupt free will, but rather perfects it.

If you have been wanting to solve a sudoku and you suddenly see a breakthrough, is that relevelation a disruption of your freewill? No. Well, when God converts someone, it's like that. There is something that that person has deeply wanted which he suddenly sees he can gain by precisely converting. (In CSL's case it was an intellectual solution to each of a) the Hegelian "Absolute", which seemed more and more like a purely verbal compromise between Theism and Atheism, and b) to the place of the Gospel among myths).

10:56 That prayer sounds quite a lot like the preference for annihilationism.

Why would a damned person wish to not exist?

But in fact, all of "new people who will go to Hell" and "child cancer" are things that God will end on Judgement day, so, in that sense, praying for the end of that is resumed in "Jesus, come!" (Mara natha)

Turns out, the two words are either "maran atha" or "marana tha" ... my bad.

The Urban Third Homestead

Wait...I thought he was punishing me now? He crumbled my teeth, claimed my firstborn, made us eat our babies, slaughtered whole nations,... Wtf was all that?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@theurbanthirdhomestead A punishment for sin, against the will, not against existence.

11:30 Salvation is, when it comes to access to the Good News getting fairer by the day, thanks to Internet.

Meanwhile, when it comes to ability to live like Christians, it is getting less fair. Like teens who suffer lust were once upon a time able to heed the words of St. Paul in 1 Cor 7, and when not were more able to stay boys among boys, girls among girls, up to when marriage became possible.

12:11 Being "part of the divine council" is not equivalent to "working for God" ... the words Satan adresses to God about Job are not exactly what I would want to use as tone to an employer.

And yes, we pretty regularly do ask God to stop the devil from this or that.

Praying for his general cessation of activity other than about those already damned is, as said, a prayer

Hasten the time, and remember the end, that they may declare thy wonderful works.

As to the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of justice, which the Lord the just judge will render to me in that day: and not only to me, but to them also that love his coming. Make haste to come to me quickly.

14:37 What if the Bible was never meant to be the sole guide to theology in the first place?

There are NOT thousands of denominations that claim:

• we are the same Church that Jesus founded
• and that Jesus has kept in existence for all of this time (without major changes).

Lutherans and Mormons don't claim that. And most of the "thousand of denominations" come from the Protestants.

Outside Protestantism you have:

• Catholics
• Eastern Orthodox
• Oriental Orthodox
• Orthodox of the East

Maybe some splits more in each. Definitely not thousands.

15:29 God can certainly give revelations, and I am also not an answer to those prayers.

If there are things in the Gospel that seem weird, check Maria Valtorta (who spent years getting more revelations).

Only check : can't be new matters of doctrine, since the Church which is trusted with evaluating St. Bridget (definitely approved revelations) and Maria Valtorta (not obviously supernatural, but also not condemned) has already stated, the doctrines it has to handle have already been given.

16:18 Catholics actually are, since the revelation in Fatima, very encouraged to ask God to save everyone (who can yet be saved).

Kennedy Hall made an excellent video on that subject.

18:04 One saint actually did ask that, and was told, from other bishops and monks, that that was excessive.

There is a respect for freewill such that, when some will is "fixed in its object" God isn't changing it.

For us, that comes at death, for angels, it came at the test they had thousands of years ago

18:33 There is a difference between being in the presence of God and the Beatific Vision.

19:13 Those whose test is already over, well, they are either eternally safe or irredeemable.

As we are still on earth, ours isn't.