Okay, if there was a supposed God--maybe there is, but logic says no--anyhow, if god has this so called master plan, then it by itself eliminates the need to pray. what good will it do if we ask it to be changed to fit our needs if it's already been decided? Just curious?

can't imagine anyone on an atheist/agnostic forum would have an answer to such a question.

i see you're young
line 1...if there was supposedd???? to be a god
who says there is suppossed to be anything

and yes everyone is curious
thaats why nobody seemss too
aagree...no one knowwsss

Question Reality

ques are always good

Tough question.

I would just say take it one day after another and just make the best out of life. There is really not much more you can do.

These questions have been asked for thousands of years. One thing I know is that you will have alot of different opinions about them. We cannot say we are oblivious to imagination! That is for sure. :)

well I would have asked it in the religion chat, but fundies get really upset if you question their god.

wow! 8 years is a HUGE difference.........lol

Well, that's just it. There is only one truth when working with the logic of the opening question. So if one considers the opening question by itself, which assumes there is one definite plan of course of history, then the question is answered before it is asked.

Christians believe that the plan of their god involves giving man free will, which acts as a random-action generator; a planned and built-in device which ensures the impossibility of iterative predictability of the universe. If enough randon actions happen, then a set course of action, which could have been the outcome of a plan, becomes fuzzy and completely unrecognizable as time goes on.

I think the proverbial god created a toy for himself, in the form of man who is capable of faith in god, in which toy or man god wishes faith in god to continue, but god stacked the dice against Himself with random free will given to man to make god's own work more challenging, and He is betting that He can still do it.

This I don't claim the above is true; I just say it is one way of the millions that can explain the need for prayer, notwithstanding that an original plan may otherwise have made prayer reduntant.

This is why the plan is not actually executable when one insists on executing it in a straight-forward and predictable way. That is so because the original plan also included a built-in and self-propagating randomizer, which has the purpose to make the actual reality unpredictable as it happens.

I am young too, but I see that you misquoted the OP... he did not say "if there was supposed to be a god" but he said "if there was a supposed God".

The two have differences in meaning.

Some people who are not Christians, have retained a sense of the language as a tool to transfer meaning. The Christians have been so busy in doing interpretations of the bible's language to make it conform to outside perception, that the christians actually went away from the meaning of the language; they impoverished the languge, because they, the Christians, can only keep their faith in the bible if they don't believe the language.

You see, this is the conundrum: You see the blatant contradictions in the bible. That book is full of them.

What you can do, nay, what you MUST do, if you are a human, is one of these two things:

1. Reject the bible as a book of untruths. This is what the atheists do.
2. Categorically and a priori reject the fact the bible is lying and saying stupid things, because your faith is the most important thing to you. To accomplish this, you uphold that the bible says the truth, and your only recourse is to apply "interpretations", which explain the plethora of impossible assertions in near-palatable ways.

This is why you misquoted the original poster. Your language skills are compromised, because in your life as a believer in the Bible you had to apply so many forced interpretations to give something the meaning of its own opposite, that you trained yourself to lose the importance of "meaning" when it comes to human language.

You can only stretch meaning so far before it affects your way and ability to think, permanently and in a negative way.

This assumes that the master plan is spelled out in such detail.

Maybe the master plan only addresses larger issues, maybe God leaves the details up to chance and 'free will' and such - and therefore there may be some flexibility in those details, which that imaginary God might be willing to act on behalf of the faithful.

I was wondering who'd catch that............good job wux

yes and both are actually meaningless in the context that i think the op meant. "suppose god exists?" could we suppose?

I thought of this idea a few years ago. If god is real and is all knowing then he must know the future before it happens. If he does then we have no choice in our actions and free will is only an illusion. If free will is an illusion, we cannot be punished for our sins because we had no choice. We simply acted according to the will of god. We do only what god wants us to do.

Some have argued the devil also has an influence. But, if god is more powerful than the devil, then god could stop him whenever he wanted. therefore, even the devil does only the will of god.

The book of Job in the Old Testament tells the rather curious (and subversive) story about Satan coming to God and making a wager about righteous people. Satan says to God, basically, "Of course he's righteous. Look how much you've blessed him with children, wealth, and good health. So what?"

So God makes a wager with Satan, go ahead and take away his children, his wealth, and his health, and we'll see about it.

So Job loses his wealth and all of his children are killed, and then he's struck with a horrible disease.

This is the "preface" to the story in the book of Job, which is like one of the philosophical dialogues that was a popular literary form in the past. Various friends come to him and discuss the nature of evil and God and so on.

But what is amazing to me is the preface itself, due to the subversive way in that it portrays God. God just blithely makes a wager with Satan that wipes the man out. His sons and daughters are killed as the result of this wager.

Now, what kind of a god is that?

The kind of God that people who think they are made in his image act like when they think He is only on _their_ side. The kind of god who is worshipped by those persecuted for their religion, but who become every bit as bad as their persecutors when THEY finally get their chance to sit in the catbird seat.

In other words, typical human beings...

-Kerry O.

Imagination at its best. We have to remember in those times people thought the planet was flat and we could fall off it into a hell! And dare anyone to think otherwise for they would be condemned for it! Poor Galileo and his inventive curiousities right!

It started when an Egyptian Scribe wondered why the sun comes out and disappears leaving the planet cold...making the flowers wilt in......making everyone insecure as they listen to odd noises of wild animals. They then created the sun god of Ra and the dark god of Set. They didn't have technology for scientific evidences about how our planet worked let alone nature. They thought since there isn't a reasonable explanation a supernatural must have done it. Today we know better!

so from there it was history........

and religions evolved adding to the stories for more miracles.

Even the stories of Jesus are not new as they have been repeated often as far back as 6000 years ago. Of course they used different names then and perhaps the story shifted a little here and there...but the premises are the same. Don't believe me do some research on Egyptian religions! They even had a pharoah that started the monotheism worshiping only the god of Ra. It only lasted I think 5 years. It was a lazy way to not have to worship so many gods. Just imagine how much time that took out of a person each day to go to various shrines to worship the many gods. Why not put it all in one!

So don't believe the Jews were the first to worship one god okay!

Today we can say that the world is round...oval or however you want to say it...that we don't fall off somewhere in the absences. We can say a great deal of things we couldn't back then. We know that the earth wasn't created in 4000BC like many claim. We can also say that the Earth isn't the center of the universe either.

We have moved far yet unfortunately many cling onto the mediterrenean mythologies (torah, koran, bible) when it should be stored in the mythology vault like the other religions people use to believe in.

Now to the hard questions Peccy was asking about if their is a higher intelligence that created humans or if life started with a stroke of a hand...well we can probably create ideas from our imagination like.....

Perhaps meteorites hit our planet that had one celled life on them. Is it possible that it had all of the essential elements to keep one celled life alive on them?

Aliens that are highly advanced in technology used DNA connections to create a subspecies for slave labor??? I have heard of it since the Pyramid constructions cannot be repeated due to their precise architectural structures.

What else could there be??

Yes one can use the imagination of scribes and historians 2 to 10,000 years ago....but to find a logical conclusion to it all...will take time. Maybe we will find it and maybe not.

So that is why I stick to the answer I had above earlier. Those are hard questions, yet one thing we can get from asking such questions is we have plenty of imagination to find different answers. Hopefully we can find more facts in the future to understand it all.

Well put green

Yeah Peccy that is how I feel at the moment, but ask that question again in a few years. I might have (yet) another answer to it! Our minds are futile to change all the time! Imagination and curiousity can get the best out of us sometimes!

The contradictions of "all knowing", punishment, "all powerful", and "all loving" have been illustrated clearly since the time of the Greeks and probably well before.

The religious have lived with this cognitive dissonance from day 1 IMHO, and shrug it away regardless.

I like wux's answer, but here's an interesting idea ...

Let's answer that question with the "multiverse". Assuming there is a God, He has a plan and everything is absolute, then alternate realities can play a part. If every decision humans make creates another universe in which a different choice was taken, then praying can indeed have been factored in and can make a difference because there is an alternate reality where either God did not grant the wishes of the one praying or the one praying did not ask.