[normy]

If God answered your prayers against the Giants, does that mean that he consciously chose to answer No to all the folks who were praying for the Giants? Were they better people or their prayers better prayers? Does he go by quantity? What's the logic? Praying for something that doesn't make much sense one way or the other is not high on my mental scale of sins, but it still baffles me. Like the banner mentioned above says, if you're on "Team Jesus Christ", what does that mean you're saying about the other team? Or is it simply that the Seahawks outplayed the Giants and that God chose not to have much to do with the outcome?

If I were the only person on Earth, God would have sent Jesus to be a sacrifice for me. That said, God answers my prayers and sometimes he doesn't.

I expect God to be for me, I expect to win in all things I do whether work or play and I expect God to be for me. I bless all my customers, my competitors everyone involved in my business because the Bible says so, forget what my mind might think.

As far as the Giants/ Seahawks game goes, when the kicker misses the game winning field goal and then misses two more in overtime. When the Giants out gain the Hawks in most offensive and defensive categories and miss the game winning field goal plus two more in OT and the Hawks hit theirs to win, I choose to thank God for the win. I wont say we got lucky.

I will pray for victory in Iraq and victory for America in whatever we do and I expect God to hear my prayer. I will acknowledge him if he answers it and ask him what happened when he doesn't. Sometimes he answers back sometimes he doesn't and thats his business.

I believe all religion is worthless. Christianity should not be religion, it should be the way it is. I believe there is a God, he sent his son to be a sacrifice for all humanity, to clean all men of their sins toward God. Jesus said there was none righteous, so that tells me I am not righteous because God decides who is righteous, not man. "Good deeds" do not make me righteous, nor does it make Jimmy Carter righteous.The only way to be righteous is to have a cloak of righteousness placed on you when you have faith in Jesus and what was done on the cross.

The reason I mention this is because in your post you were writing about a person being better than the other and sins and those sort of things. I can't consider myself better than another except that I have some faith and that doesn't make me better. I know this though, God definitely chooses sides.

[leveler]

I think the thing is that while God chooses sides, we as humans have no way of knowing what side he chooses. We can presume, using ethics as we understand them, that if God is good he must be on the side that we perceive as being good, but we may be wrong.

What I'm saying is that there is no particular reason to attribute a sports victory to God rather than to the relative efforts and skills of the players. Making God a kind of tribal mascot demeans him.

Iraq is different in scale to a Giants versus Seahawks matchup. But even there, we have no way of knowing for sure what God wants to happen. We can maybe presume from the Bible that he wants peace to happen, but we have no idea how he wants us to get there. Maybe an American victory will make the world more peaceful. Maybe it won't. Can either you or I be sure of the answer?