How Does God Pick Which Prayers to Answer?
by Randy Gage
In the last post I asserted that abundant prosperity is possible for you, not because you make a prayer, and an omnipotent force responds favorably to your plea — but because everything has its origins in mind.
That paragraph intrigued Sloopy. He posted, “I agree with what you say but would like your help in grasping a deeper understanding. I was in a circumstance this week where I was praying for my wife’s recovery — either she responded in about 48 hours or that was it — I prayed to the God I grew up with but believe it was the collective good thoughts of her friends and family, whatever their beliefs — that made the difference.”
You too have probably prayed for someone to be saved from a dire situation and hopefully your prayers have been answered. Most people believe this is evidence that god exists and brought them relief or salvation. But if ever there was an argument for confirmation bias and selective processing of evidence, this is probably it.
Did you know that 150,000 people on earth died yesterday? And the day before that. And 150,000 more will die today. And tomorrow. Because on average, 151,600 people on the planet die every day. Some are struck by lightning, die in a plane crash, get trampled by an elephant, or some other completely unexpected ending to their life. But many of them, tens of thousands in fact, die of old age, surgery complications, terminal diseases and other expected causes of death. And the vast majority of them have scores of people rubbing rosary beads, facing Mecca, praying, or otherwise beseeching the god they believe in to save them.
And they die anyway. 151,600 of them.
If you’re a believer, that doesn’t faze you in the least. Because you most likely believe that the people whose prayers didn’t work were praying to the wrong god, not yours. Which you are certain is the “real” one. Or you will remember a time you prayed for something and didn’t receive it that turned out good anyway, “proving’ that god’s unanswered prayers are signs of his omniscient, omnipotent powers. And if you prayed to be saved from a calamity and experienced it anyway, you’ll simply chalk it up to god working “in mysterious ways.”
All of which leads us back to where we started….
Was Sloopy’s wife saved because he and their friends were praying to the one, real god, and that god chose to answer their prayers, and ignore the prayers of the people asking for the 151,599 others? That’s what we will investigate in the next post. In the meantime, would love to see your thoughts below.
-RG
Originally published at https://www.randygage.com on September 22, 2019.
