OK difficlt question… what makes certain duaaein count…
Once again my way of using practical examples…
I want to make a cup of tea.
I put water in a pan, tea leaves, milk, sugar, and for good measure…some tea masala too.
I wait for the tea. Nothing happens…why cos I did not think to boil it all.
Now I know this is so basic…but pls bear with me…
I wait and wait and also put in one dua.
Nothing happens.
I am disappointed…
Wait a minute…I realise…I did not switch on the cooker…silly me
Or my mum tells me how are you going to make tea if you dont bring it to boil.
So I say my duaa is not answered this time.
But hang on…the realisation which came to me that I had not thought of boiling the ingredients…or mum pointing out my mistake…that is a way of answering duas.
Possibly if you go thru your program, you will realise something so basic and critical that you missed out that you could kick yourself.
We all expect dua to be answered like Poof in an instant the problem solved before your eyes.
But no … your dua will leads you to the next step and the next step until you can find the solution. And now you have forgotten that you did the dua…and that it was the dua which led you to this.
Sometimes the solution is there but you do not take it…and then you can never solve the problem. Like in my example if mum comes to give me advice and I say to her leave me alone let me figure this out myself…well the solution was there and I did not take it…my pride, perhaps anger…or whatever.
So I dont think there is a certain model He uses to answer duaaein…maybe it is there in front of us and we refuse to acknowledge it…or perhaps we are too impatient and want instant answers..and conclude that duaaein are not answered.
Now regarding your rest of the post, I find two main points in it.
Why I see life so negatively ?
Matter of "Imposing our Faith" on others...
Regarding 1, you said that you want to understand why people feel that way about life, But incase of me, I think what you do wrong is that you try to find in me the reason of my opinions on "pain", rather then the thing itself, i.e. pain and all other negative things.
If you had read some philosophy of religion, you might be aware of "Problem of Evil"(as they call) It says in very simple words, that if God is good then how can we justify the existence of Evil. And its the a major argument against the God of Islam/Christianity etc(other religions which have mercifull version of God), So its not something unique to me or few other people. Its a major argument which isn't entertained by philosophers from religion. The best response on this is quite older, it was i think thomas augustine (pardon me for spellings), He said that, there isn't any Evil in short, Actually its the absence of goodness, some people still uitilize this argument. Its just the matter of bad use of concepts, because, we call "Evil" as "Evil" because its effect is "Evil", now if absence of "Good" has exactly the same effect as "Evil" so its the Evil.
As an atheist, i see life as it is, there are good and bad things, we have to catch the happiness out of them, but as said earlier it doesn't fits with "Good" God of religion. If you think that one can interpret things better then lets take my reply to the post of aly-sam on 14th, in which s/he given an example of a boy, and i raised few questions on it, example is specifically favorable one for your interpretation, So let see if we can understand it that way(with good interpretation of life), because if we can't do this to a favorable example the odd ones would really be difficult to show that way.
Now on 2, I think one can convince other to have faith. I'm not saying that the decision would not be taken by the person himself, actually when he will take the decision it would be his decision, but we do take such decisions in life which we can't even imagine to take, when we imagine ourselves sometimes back.
Let me give you an example from the religion, what a prophet does to people didn't he convinces them to have faith in something else, offcourse when they take decision its their own, but there isn't any problem in discussing.
By the way i didn't got any feeling that you are imposing anything on me.
In regard to your question, how can we justify the existence of evil....
Firstly I agree with "Evil is the absence of Good"
Since Good and Evil are subjective, I would like to deal with something we can all identify with...
Taste.
When I say Sweet...you can identify with it. You cant describe it but you can say it is not salty or not bitter etc.
What if there was only sweet.
How would you identify it?
What would sweet be?
If everything was sweet...then sweet would be ....well nothing.
In existence there are opposites. And not just one opposite for each thing...but several.
In order for sweet to exist...there has to be non-sweet.
And taking it from there in order for good to exist there has to be evil.
And everything is not totally Good or Evil nor Black or White...but mostly shades of the spectrum. That is the beauty of existence.
You mentioned why did the boy in my example deserve punishment...you should not see that as punishment, but rather a result of his action. According to your principles, what should ideally have happened to the boy after not listening and obeying the rules? Would like to discuss that.
. Appreciate it .