by smiddy3 14 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Speaking from my own experience and that of my family of wife and two now adult sons do not believe that prayers to Jehovah /God are answered .
So it must also be true of all other religions and their believers also.
My wife and I were JW`s for 33 years and and I don`t believe anyone prayed harder than my wife and I at various trials we faced during those times in those 33 years.
We may as well have been like the present day Jews who pray to a brick wall
If you pray long enough and hard enough for rain...your prayers will be answered eventually...this proving there is a god.
There was a time I would have said he certainly does. I strongly believed that meeting my husband was an answer to a prayer. Granted it was a prayer I had been asking for 10+ years before it was answered.
There are those that say he will only answer your prayers if it is in line with his will but the same ones will tell you to ask God to help you like healthy food if you want to lose weight so I just don't know anymore.
I feel your pain.
Answers to prayers seem to go:
Yes
No
Wait.
Any of these answers can be put down to confirmation bias, wishful thinking, coincidence and so on. The 'Pray to a milk bottle(jug)' video is a favourite of mine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6ILZAaAMI
As far as Jobo prayers are concerned....the ones I had answered - 0
This whole subject is one that completely does my head in. I just cant take it when I hear that that some poor pioneer prayed for some cheap to shoes (or a tank of fuel) continue witnessing in and got them ...while nothing was done for the witnesses that were been gang raped or chopped up with machetes in places like Rwanda or Malawi. Was it because the African prayers were a bit short (cut off you could say) ... or is it because shoes or petrol is more valuable to Jehovah than peoples lives?
No.
To quote the old Cranberries song out of context, it's "in your heeaaad, in your heeeeeeeaaaaad". Add a dash of feeling powerless, some focus on the issue, belief in that there's a reason for everything because we can't face the facts of how random life truly is, and a heaping helping of cognitive bias, and voila!, your prayers have been answered. Remember, your prayers may not be answered in the way you think they will be, so keep looking real hard until you convince yourself that they have been somehow.
Funny, as a JW I did all the "right" things and was never blessed. I started doing healthier things, got better results, and credited god. Now I no longer believe in god and life is still good, because it was doing healthier things that made life better, not a sky fairy.
http://new.exchristian.net/2010/02/prayer-and-insanity.html?m=1 :
Whenever prayer has been scientifically tested with carefully constructed, double-blind research methods it has always failed. The best known of these is The Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP), conducted under the auspices of Harvard Medical School (2006). It showed, you guessed it, no positive benefit from prayer.
But are the believers buying this? Not on your life! Why not? Well, as one high-profile hospital chaplain said, "God is not subject to scientific research." How does he know this? Well because the research failed to provide a positive outcome, of course. You had to ask?
Prayer is not open two-way communication nor a gradual increase of understanding.
Though it would be well within his power, God never does something even as simple as replying to a prayer in an actual, audible voice.
The believer sends their prayers into the darkness, usually to be answered by silence, occasionally receiving in response a hazy feeling “within their heart” so to speak, then they thereafter spend their time looking for signs and trying to figure out if whatever subsequently happens is an answer to their prayer because God doesn't tell them if it is - they have to figure it out for themselves.
Human beings may talk to God, but God never talks back, except, so the believers say, in subjective feelings and vague sensations that possess all the explanatory clarity of a Magic 8-Ball.
There are several paragraphs in the upcoming wt "study" that suggest you to have personal mental games with invisible persons dead or alive.
