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Hi Chuck,
Lively discussion, eh?
You wrote -
"My skeptical side keeps whispering in my ear to repeat a similar prayer while my spiritual side says "don't treat God like genie.""
If you want people to be amazed at the statistical improbability of your answered prayer then you must provide further evidence. You are trying to validate prayer by saying that the odds of getting that particular prayer answered are out of the norm of random chaos. I think that it could be a one time deal, and if you tried again you would see it was "luck".
If you want me or anyone with a skeptical mind, to believe then you better "petition the lord with prayer" again and rub that bottle. If not then your claims have no merit in the statistical realm.
You wrote -
"2. God exists but God is indifferent or impersonal, or sort of like the "force" in Star Wars with a good side and a dark side."
You had me sold on this one for a while until you brought in the Star Wars analogy. If God were indifferent then good and evil would mean nothing to him. Good and evil are illusions of the human condition. What is good to some is evil to others. Picture this if you will -
A young racially mixed teenager living in the urban Chicago projects finds out she is pregnant. She has no idea who the father is because she engages in premarital sex on a daily basis with multiple partners. This is the norm for her because her parents are not around to set guidlines and her school doesn't have an adequate sex education program because it is too controversial. She never uses protection and neither do her partners because it doesn't "feel the same", again due to lack of proper education. She uses crack cocaine and shows no intent of stopping even though she is in the intial term of her pregnancy. She decides to have an abortion because one of her friends recently had one and she said it would be the best option. Now...
Is she evil or good? Some bible beater with a completely different outlook on life and different environment might say her actions were evil and she was a sinner. This is a long winded story, but hopefully you see my point. Good and evil are relative. Murder is acceptable when it is not our species. Murder of our own kind is taboo because it is counter productive, evolutionarily speaking. Does God distinguish between murder within or out of species? I believe that good and evil are not absolutes. What exists is a will to survive. We act on our instincts, whether they are selfish or altruistic.
I don't know what God is, but I don't believe that he instituted morals on the earth. That was done by man to promote social order and law. If God cared about morals then "it" could have programmed them into our genetic code when we were still fish. Evil is not a necessary component of good. Behavior is what it is. We apply those terms(good and evil) liberally as a way to judge the actions of others.
Maybe we are the Gods? We are the ones that came up with the idea of good and evil in the fist place.
Scott
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