Posted: Oct 02, 2013 9:38 am
Monas wrote:MarkP80 wrote:Monas wrote:Regina wrote:
Affect is another word for emotion. But surely what matters most is whether prayer has an emotion on you.
Is that what your are trying to say? It's an expression I'm not familiar with, being a foreigner an' all.
No, I certainly didn't mean emotional (though perhaps that may be part of it for some, such as relief from depression or anxiety). In my own case a significant change was escape from addiction. This wasn't a warm feeling (quite the opposite at the time) but a real change in life. Handing control over to God is still an approach many addiction centres recommend - it is at the heart of Twelve Step programmes.
This is OT, but I just want to mention that I've been in a similar situation.
I was addicted to crack cocaine, and I kept praying and asking God to help me quit.
I have a very long post detailing all this.
To sum things up, when I finally beat my addiction, I was so thankful to God that I wanted to know everything about him.
So I started reading.
A lot.
I went from Catholic, to gnostic Christian, to diest, and finally, The God Delusion helped me cross the border to atheism.
I now know that all that time, it was me and my family that beat that addiction.
But my belief in God did help.
It helped because I would feel ashamed that God was watching me get high, when just a while ago I was asking for his help to stop.
But there was no one there, it was just me.
So yeah, prayer might work, in a sense.
But not because there's anyone listening on the other end.
Rather because you focus on those thoughts and it helps you reach your goal, all by yourself.
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Thank you for that Mark. I wonder though whether it is common to seek God in weakness and then to distance ourselves from Him in times of strength. This seems to be behind Jesus's words "blessed be the poor in spirit". The weak, the poor, the addict, the alcoholic - all of these people , in the midst of struggling, can often also be acutely aware of God, it seems. The millionaire, the fit, the strong - these people may often feel self-sufficient. Going back to silent retreats, one thing they can do is to again confront us with our weakness and also any ugliness inside of us; silence trends to strip away any surface bravado.
No, I didn't just seek God in weakness.
I had been a faith head all my life.
It was my being so grateful to God, and wanting to learn more about him, that turned me into an atheist.
Not because I now was Ok.
It was a very troubling time, and the fear of hell was the hardest thing to shake off. Thankfully, like my crack addiction, I was also able to get rid of my god addiction.
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