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Because we live in a fallen and secular world. Apostasy in the later days has been predicted by prophetic teachings. Every man rather follows his own teachings and create their own good. Even on this subreddit people denigrate the church. The attack on faithful members are relentless from every part of society, and people that are religious are portrayed as idiots, and people that don’t promote moral and religious relativism are depicted as fools in a world with many churches and political trends.
Quote:I heard and read before that the purpose of prayer is not for God to grant or prayers but for us to align or will with God. In that sense no prayer is wasted, I am not sure if that answers the question though
DarkJedi wrote:
SwedishLDS wrote:
While we ourselves can often serve as instruments of God to bless others, which I have felt often on my mission and in my life, I do not believe that God witholds blessings.There are many clearly miraculous events and blessings that have not come through the actions of others, such as food miraculously appearing for the pioneers.
I do believe people can bless (help, sustain, support, protect, etc.) others, instruments of God or not, and of course agree that God does not withhold blessings as I previously stated.
And I do believe miracles can happen, although I think my bar for what constitutes a miracle is probably a bit higher than most people’s (quite a bit higher than some people’s). I’m not so sure there are “clearly” or “many” miraculous events and I’m very unsure (yes, skeptical) of most of the pioneer stories which when looked at even a little more closely are at best dubious or come from dubious sources.
Edited to add for clarity: I don’t believe pioneer or other “faith promoting stories” have malicious intent. I think they’re more like the “one that got away” stories where the size and fight of the fish gets a little bigger with each telling. Add in the faith promoting component and it’s easy to get caught up. I’ll just use the china in the Kirtland Temple walls as an example because there’s pretty good evidence (including on the church website itself) that the story most are familiar with is not correct. People did not sacrifice their fine china, the stuff mostly came from the garbage piles. Another good example with evidence is John Taylor’s watch, which was not hit by a musket ball and therefore did not save his life. The book Real vs. Rumor (see our discussion here:
https://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10036 ” class=”bbcode_url”> https://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10036
fair enough, perhaps the word clearly was chosen poorly. I should have used a personal story instead of how the spirit has helped me
While we ourselves can often serve as instruments of God to bless others, which I have felt often on my mission and in my life, I do not believe that God witholds blessings. There are many clearly miraculous events and blessings that have not come through the actions of others, such as food miraculously appearing for the pioneers.
