I am not surprised that your real issue was the effect or otherwise of prayer on god's actions but that wasn't what you wrote. In the context of the Pope praying for victims and their families, you wrote: "How can people believe that the Pope's utterances make any difference?" This I queried narrowly, difference to whom and to what? As Big RR indicates, some people derive comfort both from the act of praying and being prayed for. It makes a difference to them.Gob wrote:When has it been demonstrated that any prayer has any effect on god?
I can truthfully tell you that after years of failure, I gave up trying to quit smoking. I spoke rather rudely to God and said "If you want this done; you do it. Because I don't want to quit and I won't". It was about 7:25 a.m. on December 11, 2001 in a driving snow-storm and I was huddled on my front door stoop in my dressing gown, sick with 'flu and puffing away at the first of the day. And I never smoked again.
Was that answered prayer? I suspect that I changed God's mind about nothing at all but instead fell into step with where he was taking me all along.
In terms of desired conduct, love your neighbor as yourself is from Leviticus which was written over a very long period before its final shape was in place some 500-300 years before Jesus was born. It's fairly typical of 20th/21st century persons who cannot themselves produce anything as good as a Psalm to look down on ancient civilizations on the grounds of "semi-literacy" when those same civilizations produced very literate works. Not only produced but also analyzed, taught, discussed and written about. "What God wants" is quite clear - that mankind is capable of it is another thing entirely.Gob wrote:When god sent down himself as his son so that we could kill him in order for him to forgive us, did he not know that his method of telling us his desired conduct for ourselves, which was written 60 + years after the event by people who were not there, in a semi-literate society, would lead to all the bloodshed and killings in his name?
Of course God is/was aware of all things but it's odd that you blame God's method of communication (what method is that exactly?). I'm shocked at your statement that all this horrible human warping of his will for us only began around AD 90! Mankind has been doing that and will, I expect, continue to do so whether in the "name" of God or "Allah" or ethnic cleansing or the triumph of Nazism or communism or any other ism there may be. Humans are, as the Bible tells us, not righteous - not even one. WW1? not about religion; Stalin? nope!; WW2 not a bit of it; Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda.... race, land, hatred, oil, etc. etc.
The many terrible things done in the name of "religion" amount to less than 10% of the death, destruction and horror perpetrated by humans in the name of something else. (No actual fact-based estimates were injured during the typing of that sentence). Given the overwhelming number of non-religious atrocities and killings between 1914 and 2014, I begin to wonder whose is the semi-literate society, if by that we mean to indicate relative ignorance.