Try to think of it this way- would you say Pure, Unconditional God?

Of course not.  God IS.  You can't modify God.  Same thing with Love.  It is a state of being.

Re-read the quote from De Maupassant.

So when people say they "send" PUL to others, what they really mean is an affection, or an emotion.  Love is not an emotion.  Because it's a state of being, it cannot be "sent."

I realize PUL has been around this board for ages and is in Bruce's books, but if you say that love is impure or conditional, I'll then respond by pointing out that it could not, by definition, be love to begin with.

As De Maupassant points out, it really is not even a word.

R

Rondele,

If a spiritual question with a clearcul Yes or No answer is too threatening to answer, this for me signifies a question that gets to the heart of the matter of a truthful worldview.  So I don't apologize for my question.  Instead, I consider it the most important question  CH (the close-minded atheist) could ever answer, because it exposes the lethal vulnerability of his perspective.

But your counterpoint scenario also makes an important point; and I offer 3 points in response: (1) To be meaningful, every worldview must at least in principle be falsifilable. If I predetermine that no evidence or experience could even in principle count against the truth of Christianity, then I render the case for Christian truth untestable and therefore meaningless. So if a shaman's prayers for healing succeeded where a Christian group's prayers failed, I would take that as evidential--but evidential of what?

(2) Not necessarily as evidence that the Christian belief system was flawed, but evidence that this shaman had a relationship to ultimate power superior to that of that particular Christian prayer group.  Of course, that concession in itself would refute any black-and-white notion that the shaman's religious outlook was entirely false as opposed to the truth of the Christian belief system.   But then Jesus and Christianity already distinguish spirituality from intellectually held beliefs and concede that true spirituality is more important.  And Jesus concedes the fact that a pious Jewish faith healer who does not follow Him can nevertheless be used by God to heal.   

(3) But in fact my life experience points in the opposite direction: for example. tens of thousands of Muslims convert to Christianity as a result of visionary encounters with Jesus or visions directing them to places where they can hear the Gospel.  I have had some of these ex-Muslims speak in my church and witness to this phenomenon and Christian missionaries in Muslim countries have returned to bear witness to such visions as a key to their success in evangelizing Muslims.  In Nepal, 95% of the recent 500,000+ cionverts to Christianity have allegedly converted as a result of divine healing!

Still, I never expect any honest seeker to take my word for it. True, I can make the rational case for the historical evidence for the truth of Christianity.  But such a case doesn't prove anything; it merely has the potential to open minds for an honest and open spiritual quest.  What makes all the difference is self-authenticating personal experience of Christ's presence and power. 

Ahmed, for example, was a Ethipian Muslim mullah with AIDs.  After Ahmed received unwanted prayer for healing from a Christian couple, Jesus appeared to him in his hospital room and touched him on his forehead.  This touch resulted in his instant conversion, even though the Quran acknowledges Jesus as a true prophet and even though Jesus said nothing to Ahmed.  To experience itself conveyed an inner knowing that Chnstianity was true and Ahmed became a devout missionary for his new cause, after (by the way) Jesus had cured him of his AIDs!  I know this directly from the missionary who now mentors Ahmed.

For internet Muslim testimonies about such dreams and visions, google, for example:
(1) Kamal Saleem: A Muslim Cries Out to Jesus

(2) Dreams, Visions Moving Muslims to Christ

Don

"Prayer actually did have a completely failed result for me already, actually a completely negative outcome, in fact, the worst case scenario happened. But I would probably turn to it again regardless because.... in the end, when things are out of your hand.... why not?"

One day you're cleaning the dinner table, you walk to get the pasta and the ceiling falls crashing down out of the blue. The area surrounding you and the pasta are home free. You become a devout Pastafarian and start to have faith in the divine healing powers of Spaghetti. You tell your family and friends about the life changing incident, and some of them in turn go on to make a ritual of tossing Spaghetti to heal people. Unconscious Pasta obedience seeps into the everyday lives of people. 'Oooooh my Macaroni'. 'Pasta you' when people sneeze, for good luck and a happy Pasta meal. One day while kneeling to a pack of Spaghetti in the nearby store, there's a robbery, it's out of your hands, and it turns out bad - several bottles of water get shot at and hurt, but are patched up and refilled. You start to notice cracks in the ways of the church of spaghetti. Hmmm. You were told there was no I in spaghetti, even though it was when you decided to examine it. Hmmm. Spaghetti uses water to get comfy, bendy and wam, yet doesn't really care about water, and gets very stiff when discussing other culinary options. With this in mind, you don't go to the next pasta gathering in San Francisco with spaghetti in your hair.

When something doesn't work out anymore, does it make sense to continue in that same circle, just to place bets all around the table? For you, maybe christianity works out better, or buddhism, wicca, new age, the church of the coffee or something else. Even then, later on, maybe you're on the move again, towards something, better, hopefully.

People have been helped after asking Jesus for help. Heck, going by what Berserk wrote, they received his help even without asking for it and while not believing in him. I don't know of anybody who has been helped by pasta.

My feeling is that God doesn't want us to worship him. It's okay to love and respect another, but what is implied by worship? What kind of being would desire to be worshiped?

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Remember, in CH's case, I wanted to pray for his 2-year-old son's large tumor on his heart, a tumor that had caused cardiac arrest and then brain damage.  But I wasn't just trying to demnstrate compassion and social solidarity with those who care about CH's plight; I wanted to pray in a way that makes a decisive difference.  CH's close-mindedness to a prayer experiment destroyed whatever confidence I had that prayer might heal his son.  But I was struck by the fact that in the next few weeks I learned of the healing of 2 huge tumors, one vanishing and the other calcifying so as to be rendered harmless. 

The Bible teaches  that effective prayer follows certain principles and is a craft that must be learned and honed.  So if someone says, "I prayed and it didn't work," my initial response is that the prayer might have fallen short of minimal qualifications.  Of course, this response runs the risk of making the power of prayer unfalisifiable in principle.  So any argument for faith based on prayer easily begs the question.  For this reason, any rationale for faith based on prayer-induced experience must be deeply personal.  The question is, does one's evidential experience and inner knowing persuade one to believe in God or Christ?  Whether the answer is Yes or No, the answer is nonrational (niether irrational or rational)--a function of the validity of one's intuition and assumptions.  If anyone in interested is setting up a prayer experiment, why not PM me about it and will establish a basis for such spiritual quest.

Don

Masters of Light often pray when they have a big task at hand. Energy is intelligent. It moves in certain ways. If your prayer is deep and intense enough energy will come to work for you. And your inner thoughts and devotion can reach higher spheres and be picked up by higher Masters. They will help too if they can.

Prayers are like affirmations and mantra's. You have to learn how to do it and then you can do great things with them.
I worked with affirmations in the past and I had very clear results with them.
And I also know I have been helped by high spirits of light in the past as a result of prolongued concentration of my mind.

In ancient Egypt priests in the holy temples also knew about this concentration of the mind and used this to their advantage. I have read some amazing things about that.

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Do you mean in terms of kiloWatts or Volts? We don't have the tools on Earth to measure that. I don't know if they have tools in the spheres of light to measure it. But the results can be very visible.

There are requirements for prayers. They must be sincere and realistic for one thing. Prayers don't reach a destination. They have an effect.

Masters don't respond to every and any kind of prayer. They also take in account a persons own evolution that has to be followed, the state of it's mind, of it's soul. They see things in a much wider perspective then people on Earth. They can also look in previous lives and see how karmic threads originated there, for example.
In some cases they have to let things follow it's natural flow, in other cases they are able to do something. But I don't know the difference between those things. That is also very specific to each and every individual.

If you read "A View into the Hereafter" many things may become clear to you about this.