Elder Robert C. Gay Uses The Priesthood To Resurrect A Gnat He Had Just Murdered

[Rivendale]

Real conversations are preferred. Essentially you are saying God hides in the forest of coincidences. Subtle nuanced twisting of natural laws is the preferred tactic because he/she/it must respect free will. Epistemic distance must be preserved at all costs! Chants and spells are superfluous throughout human history and priesthood blessings are no different. They produce the same effect as no blessing at all. Faithful people have this covered, they have recently moved the emphasis from intercessory prayer to having the faith not to be healed. No A.I. involved and Jesus of gnaterith was one of the most ridiculous talks ever given by a LDS leader as children lay dying within a gastroliths throw away.

Word salad. Basically meaningless.

You put a gross generalization out there knowing that no one would challenge it.

You were caught red handed.

A.I. saves time. One can still have a "real" conversation. Best not to mix things up using the word salad method with hopes of covering your tracks.

Regards,
MG

I don't even no how to respond to this. You send an A.I. generated response and I typed mine on my own. This is what we mean by you being dishonest. Priesthood blessings have no measurable impact. My epistemic distance comment was meant to show why God hides. You simply use scripts to preach. It is dehumanizing and boring.

[MG 2.0]

Word salad. Basically meaningless.

You put a gross generalization out there knowing that no one would challenge it.

You were caught red handed.

A.I. saves time. One can still have a "real" conversation. Best not to mix things up using the word salad method with hopes of covering your tracks.

Regards,
MG

I don't even no how to respond to this. You send an A.I. generated response and I typed mine on my own. This is what we mean by you being dishonest. Priesthood blessings have no measurable impact. My epistemic distance comment was meant to show why God hides. You simply use scripts to preach. It is dehumanizing and boring.

I was mainly responding to the first part of what I had highlighted.

Rivendale:
If priesthood blessings were real they would have a kiosk set up at Primary Children's hospital but instead they hide in the forest of coincidences .

Simply to point out the unreasonableness of making that statement. And A.I. is a fantastic tool to help expose some of these things folks say that are either gross generalizations or just plain false.

Regards,
MG

[Rivendale]

The Pew Intercessory Prayer study showed prayer makes patients worse. That isn't a gross generalization. But of course you would say God hides in the trees during the study. Or God needed that person so he refused the blessing of healing.

[I Have Questions]

The Pew Intercessory Prayer study showed prayer makes patients worse. That isn't a gross generalization. But of course you would say God hides in the trees during the study. Or God needed that person so he refused the blessing of healing.

Elder Dave Bednar would deploy his version of the double-headed coin - he’d say those people who weren’t healed by prayer had the faith to not be healed. I am not making that up.

[MG 2.0]

The Pew Intercessory Prayer study showed prayer makes patients worse. That isn't a gross generalization. But of course you would say God hides in the trees during the study. Or God needed that person so he refused the blessing of healing.

I won't keep pestering you on the 'kiosk' snaffu.

I will say in response to your statement above that I think it is above my paygrade...and yours...to determine the why's and wherefores' of what God does or doesn't do. That's up to Him. We can exercise faith but that doesn't change what God will or won't do, even though He recognizes our faith as an outreach to Him. Of course we always have a hope that our will is what God's will is.

Often, that's not the case.

That's where we have to trust God. Easier said than done, right?

Regards,
MG

[MG 2.0]

The Pew Intercessory Prayer study showed prayer makes patients worse. That isn't a gross generalization. But of course you would say God hides in the trees during the study. Or God needed that person so he refused the blessing of healing.

Elder Dave Bednar would deploy his version of the double-headed coin - he’d say those people who weren’t healed by prayer had the faith to not be healed. I am not making that up.

Nope. You're not. But there's more to the story:

This question challenged John and Heather to consider whether they could accept God's will if it meant John would not recover. Elder Bednar explained that having faith doesn't always mean knowing God will heal you, but rather knowing that He can heal you and accepting His will regardless of the outcome.

John initially struggled with this concept but eventually came to understand that true faith meant trusting in God's plan, even if it differed from his own desires. He wrote in his journal, "Having the faith not to be healed seemed counterintuitive; but that perspective changed the way my wife and I thought and allowed us to put our trust fully in the Father's plan for us."

After receiving the blessing, John's cancer went into remission miraculously. However, the cancer later returned. Despite this, John and Heather's experience taught them to focus on having faith in Christ rather than in specific outcomes.

Elder Bednar used this story to illustrate that righteousness and faith are instrumental in moving mountains and healing the sick, but only when it aligns with God's purposes and will. He emphasized that facing and enduring mortal adversity with God's help is essential for our eternal growth and development.

-Perplexity A.I.

As I mentioned to someone here recently, there are typically more moving parts than the simplified version of things that critics such as yourself hand out to unsuspecting/trusting souls.

Buyer beware!

Trust and hope are part of the equation. Accepting God's will is the other part. Granted, that's not easy, right?

Come on over to the other thread...you know where...and ANSWER MY QUESTIONS!

Regards,
MG

[Kishkumen]

Maybe it was a DezGnat.

[huckelberry]

The Pew Intercessory Prayer study showed prayer makes patients worse. That isn't a gross generalization. But of course you would say God hides in the trees during the study. Or God needed that person so he refused the blessing of healing.

Somehow that just does not make any sense unless it means prayer instead of medical care and proper Health activities. Otherwise a skeptic would expect no change.

[huckelberry]

Maybe it was a DezGnat.

I think it is hard to see how to respond to that odd story. Perhaps physics guy's comment is about as correct as one can get.

[I Have Questions]

The Pew Intercessory Prayer study showed prayer makes patients worse. That isn't a gross generalization. But of course you would say God hides in the trees during the study. Or God needed that person so he refused the blessing of healing.

I did some reading.

Aviles et al.[34] examined cardiovascular outcomes related to prayer. In this study, 799 coronary care unit patients at discharge were randomized to intercessory prayer or no prayer conditions. Prayer was conducted by five persons per patient at least once a week for 26 weeks.
Patients were considered to belong to a high-risk group if they were 70 years old or older or if they had any of the following: diabetes mellitus, previous myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular disease or peripheral vascular disease. The primary endpoint of the study was any of the following: death, cardiac arrest, rehospitalization for cardiovascular disease, coronary revascularization or an emergency department visit for cardiovascular disease.
By the end of 26 weeks, a primary endpoint had occurred in 25.6% of patients in the prayer group and in 29.3% of patients in the control group. The difference was not statistically significant. The results remained nonsignificant when data were analyzed separately for high- and low-risk patients. Thus, this study showed that, as delivered in this study, intercessory prayer did not influence the 26-week outcome after discharge from a coronary care unit.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2802370/

Elder Bednar would claim that those cardiovascular patients had immense faith not to be healed by prayer.

Benson et al.[37] described a triple-blind, randomized controlled study that examined whether remote intercessory prayer influenced recovery after coronary artery bypass graft surgery and whether the certainty of being prayed for was associated with better outcomes. The sample comprised 1,802 patients in six hospitals in the USA. These patients were randomized into three groups: 604 were prayed for after being informed that they may or may not be prayed for, 597 were not prayed for after similarly being informed that they may or may not be prayed for and 601 were prayed for after being informed they would definitely be prayed for.
Prayer commenced one day before the surgery and continued for 14 days. Three mainstream religious sites prayed daily for patients assigned to receive prayer. Assessment of outcomes was made by nurses who were blind to the group assignments. The primary outcome was the presence of any complication within 30 days of surgery. Secondary outcomes were any major event, including death. The study sought to examine the efficacy of intercessory prayer and not to test the presence of God. The design was described by Dusek et al.[38]
In the two groups that did not know for certain whether or not they were being prayed for, complications occurred in 52% of patients who received intercessory prayer and in 51% of those who did not. In contrast, complications occurred in a significantly larger proportion of patients (59%) who knew for certain that they were being prayed for. Major events and 30-day mortality rates, however, were similar across the three groups.
This study therefore showed that remote intercessory prayer did not improve outcomes after coronary artery bypass graft surgery. In fact, the knowledge of being prayed for was associated with a slightly but significantly higher rate of postsurgical complications.

The key to these studies is to remove the ability for retrospectively drawing selected targets around where some specific and carefully chosen arrows fell, whilst ignoring everything else.

What Mormons tend to do, particularly the leadership, is to find an example that seemingly fits what they want to believe - in this case find someone that recovered that was also prayed for, ignore any and all other evidences and implications, and claim that prayer heals.

If the senior church leaders (the Apostles) truly believed they held the power to heal the sick, they’d have spent their time during the COVID pandemic in hospitals giving blessings and offering prayers, instead of what they actually did which was to hide away in isolation in fear they were going to catch it and die. They’d have ‘put their money where their mouth was’. But they didn’t. Because when push comes to shove, they know that what they’re selling is just snake oil.