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Do You Pray?

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Kerry:

--- Quote from: shakestheground on June 04, 2008, 09:30:38 am ---I pray, and feel must the same about things as you Kerry. I struggle daily to maintain a good attitude, and taking a step back and being grateful for all lifes blessings certainly helps.

--- End quote ---

It's cold and wet outside (it's winter, here in Sydney). I'm sitting in a warm, comfortable room, chatting to someone on the other side of the world (that's you, Truman, haha ;) ) via the good graces of my cute Dell computer. For that alone, I am blessed, indeed.  :D

Marge_Innavera:
I've always had some awareness of a power or consciousness controlling everything and started praying regularly very early in life.  I was raised Christian and thought of myself as that, although I found out later that what I thought I was being taught in Sunday School was totally different from what Christian doctrine actually was.  I was essentially taught about a god who certainly does love human beings but with the "love" of a parent for a son or daughter who had messed up early in life and the parent never misses a chance to remind their child of it and hold it over their head.

Later on, I got involved in New Thought churches (Religious Science and some Unity) and they essentially have a concept of a non-theistic God although RS emphasizes that more than Unity.  That led me into a type of prayer where you first concentrate on there being one creative consciousness that has created everything and is always in the process of creation in the life-death-life cycle.  After that, if you're praying about something specific, you don't ask like you're asking a boss for a day off but rather focus on the divine mind, creative intelligence or whatever you want to call it working through you for the best outcome.  It's the same if you're praying for another person or for the world generally.

I know this sounds vague, but I can't even make myself want to believe anymore in a god who is little more than a bad-tempered human being with an insatiable appetite for flattery, and that's essentially the god of my Sunday School days.  If such a god exists, I have little to say to him.

As far as the Deity vs. the state of the world is concerned, I no longer believe that there was ever a perfect world where there was no conflict, sickness or death.  We now have some knowledge of human communities going back 25,000 years or so and millions of years of nonhuman life before that and not a shred of evidence that this perfect world ever existed for even a nanosecond.  The god that I pray to created the universe as it is, and it's working exactly as it's intended to.

dot-matrix:

--- Quote from: loneleeb3 on June 03, 2008, 12:25:51 pm ---I pray.
I believe in God and I think Jesus is who he says he is.
That being said, I think a lot of what he said and what he tried to teach has been lost or twisted so much that it is almost un-discernable from the truth of his teachings. Religon has been changed from a freeing and beautiful way to be closer to God to a means to an end. That end being control of the masses. Certain people now feel they have the right to sit in judgement of others and use their religon to support it.


--- End quote ---

Amen Richard

brokeplex:
I take the time to pray daily thanking God for His blessings in my life. I pray that He will guide me towards the direction I should follow in my life.

Jeff Wrangler:
Yes. Ordinarily, formally, three times a day, Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline. Other times "as needed."

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