Sometimes Sweaty Statue Says Pope Will Live

Okay...so the guy is 84, doesn't smoke, drink in excess or have sex...and he's been in bad health for YEARS. Hmm...

How long in advance does the statue predict? Is it "this week" or "this month" or "this year?"

Some-one care to explain to me how this prayer thing works? Does God change his mind if enough people ask him to? Whats best for humanity is decided by the religious equivalent of a reality show phone poll?

midlandsea-God does what He wants, but if you pray, and its not for a bad thing, He might answer your prayer. It's not about what humans want, ultimately all decisions rest with Him.

Just to clarify, that previous Alex isn't me. It's a common name.

My view of prayer (and my pastor's, I think) is that it's for the benefit of the person praying. It's exercise for the spiritual muscles, so to speak. What other effects it may have is, and will presumably remain, a great mystery.
God already knows about our problems and has a bigger plan than we can come up with for disposing of them, in ways that may or may not be what we would ask for.

Hey, Big Gary C, we agree (for the most part) on something!! That is one of the definitions of prayer that I agree with; the other is that it is a dialog with God so that you can work out - for yourself - what you need to do/want/whatever. One that I kind of don't disagree with is that prayer is a way for you to understand how deep you desire is. However, I always have a worry about memories as verification of something. Remember the Charles Bronson film FROM NOON TO THREE where the main character loses his identity after the woman who spent those hours with him told an embellished version? One of the later scenes was in a jail wher one of the prisoners said that he had riden with the character in the Wild Bunch, only the character had never been with the Wild Bunch, and everyone believed it because of the published (and embellished) story. Memory research has pretty well established that memory isn't an accurate recording of events, it is a storing of events with similar events and there is some bleed-across. Those two nuns may believe without question that the statue is an accurate predictor, but this is one area where science can make a test to verify one way or another.

Christopher Cole said:

"Remember the Charles Bronson film FROM NOON TO THREE where the main character loses his identity after the woman who spent those hours with him told an embellished version?"

I LOVE that movie! I think it's very under-rated, perhaps because it talks about a side of human nature that we don't like to think much about: our infinite ability to bullshit ourselves.

A few days ago, I stumbled onto some web sites debunking Amway/Quixtar. Man, you ought to see the hate mail the operators of those sites get! People who obviously haven't made a dime (or at most very little money) from Quixtar write, expressing their anger at the site owners for bringing up what are obviously valid points about the unlikelihood of getting rich with a Multi-level Marketing operation.

They're putting much time and money into something that's supposed to MAKE them money (with little effort, by the way) and they're pissed at someone who simply gives accurate information about that. Like I said, humans have an infinite ability to bullshit themselves (which, by the way, is why hoaxes work).