Prayer & free will

I look at prayer as the bio-electric impulses emanating from your brain and combining with other people's thoughts. 

Sometimes I would think that maybe when you pray that people will get along and there will be world peace, are you trying to short-circuit people's free will. But then I was thinking that I should pray for people to see their options and look at the long-range effects of their actions. Of course the problem lies with fact that most corporate terrorists, political terrorists and drug terrorists tend to think about their short-term gains. 

And what about when you pray for ill people to get well. You have to remember that the brain energy coming out of your head is pretty low-intensity stuff and your best bet is to call, text or email the person to let them know you're thinking of them.

If you believe that God can change outcomes, that definitely seems to me that you're fooling around with free will.

This was mostly a mental exercise for me. Everyone has to figure out these philosophical conundrums for themselves.

Marcion PostScript 2

 About Marcion excising the Old Testament from his canon. I have read halfway through his canon and in his Gospel and Paul's Epistles there are numerous quotes from the Old Testament. So it's like building a house on the rock. If you move the house off the rock, it will not be very stable. The Marcionite canon should really be annotated in places where the Old Testament is quoted.

Marcion PostScript

 One thing that I forgot in the original Marcion post, is that maybe Marcion's idea of Jesus as a spirit in physical seeming form, is the reason there are no childhood or early adult info on Jesus ( except for birth narratives and as a 12 yr. old at the Temple). Maybe he appeared in adult form.

Marcion

 Marcion was a 2nd century heretic who gets a bad rap for many reasons. From what I can tell, he believed in two Gods. The vengeful God of the Old Testament, who created the world, and the good, compassionate and loving God of the New Testament who sent Jesus to rescue us from the evil of the world. Then, he left the OT out of his canon, which included just a shortened Luke's gospel and 10 of Paul's epistles. So he gets an anti-Semitic label that he hated all things Jewish. I think mostly he just couldn't see how the OT fit in with Jesus's message. But modern groups have latched on to his teachings to foment anti-Semitism. And the current Marcionite Christian Church has taken a right-wing anti-vaccine stance. And lastly, he denies the humanity of Jesus, thinking he is just a spirit in a physically appearing body. And the last rap on Marcion, that if Jesus wasn't human, he didn't really suffer on the cross.

It all sounds pretty heretical to orthodox Christianity, but I can take the basic  framework and apply it to my own thoughts.

I don't believe in a creator God. I think the universe is infinite. Some scientists theorize that even in a vacuum, there is a virtual energy field from which real particles can form. And there is the dark matter and dark energy that no one understands yet. It could be that it is really light, but we are unable to see it. And maybe on any given planet there are ways to access it. On Earth, this energy took the form of the physically appearing body of Jesus. And he taught us what we needed to do and when he was killed and buried, and then no body was found, he just went back into the energy of the universe, but left us with access to the energy, which some call the Holy Spirit. 

Now some believe in the suffering and death and resurrection of Jesus was atonement for our sins. But I look at it that the powers that be, who are only interested in their own profit instead of the universal community, who killed him, didn't get the last word, because they couldn't kill his pure energy. And aren't we all just energy. E=mc². At the partcle level, it's all energy, we just look solid because all the particles are so close together. And maybe when we die, our energy goes back into the universal, and maybe somehow our personal attributes are stamped on it somehow. 

Just some thoughts.