"God reduced to comforting but not intervening so that comfort over tragedy is not required in the first place. Ah,I would love God's role - provider of invisible comfort but not practical intervention, as impotent as his supplicants." -- steve2
Greetings, Sour Grapes and steve2:
The above quotation regarding God's role in the so-called answering of prayer brought this quotation to mind, in a tangential manner:
"So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it." Bartleby, Herman Melville.