Prayer is encouraged by many faiths, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder why it is not ignored – or actually discouraged – because I think people pray for these reasons, chiefly:
Gratitude
Ask for things
God requires it
Like meditation
Gratitude. God (the Judeo-Christian one, anyway) is omniscient: he already knows you’re grateful. Making a deliberate show of being grateful seems superfluous and pointless—albeit polite. Still, has a whiff of toadying.
Ask for things. Asking God for something suggests that:
He doesn’t know you need it; or
He knows, but His Plan heretofore required that you make do without.
Part 1 is impossible [omniscience]. So, praying for something not-so-subtly hints that his Grand Design® could use a little tweaking–and that, with enough prayer, he might be induced to change it on your behalf(!). Seems audaciously presumptuous, if not flat-out sacreligious.
God requires it. Okay, this one makes sense for a believer to follow, but that suggests praying is done for the benefit of the diety, not the supplicant. Hard to see what benefit an omnipotent being derives from mandatory prayer.
Like meditation. How is it qualitatively different from plain meditation?
If you pray, why? What do you see as its main objective?
If you hunker down and pray for things to be given to you, you’re missing the point of prayer. Prayer should, ideally, allow the petitioner to meditate on the sacred teachings, lift the petitioner out of his-or-her small place in the world and show how he or she can become a part of something much greater, and to allow the petitioner to refocus on the holy nature of God, including noticing and altering evil within the petitioner.
Dealing with your point in order…
Gratitude: Your wife/husband (presumably) knows that you love her/him. You nevertheless say that anyway. In the case of God, He certainly knows you do or don’t. Yet saying it means something: not just for Him, but for you.
Ask for things: Ideally, as one develops spiritually, you’d get past asking for mere things. God rains down gifts on all mankind. However, there’s nothing wrong with it. We all have wants. You should eventually learn to distinguish them from needs. God will provide for all needs, and much, much more.
God requires it: God doesn’t need prayer. But He certainly wants us to do it, for our sakes.
Like meditation: Has a different purpose. Prayer is not intended to relax or enlighten the petitioner per se.
For me, what you would call prayer isn’t for God, but for me. It doesn’t matter that God already knows I’m grateful, what I want, or God doesn’t require it of me; it helps me realize what’s important, gives me focus, and helps me feel like there is someone out there watching over me. It’s not for everyone, and, to be honest, I don’t “pray” regularly, but it helps me when I do.
Gratitude: it’s not about remind God that you’re grateful, it’s about reminding you of all you have that’s good, that you take for granted. And thinking about how well off you are and how much worse off you could be, should spur you to action, remind you to give or do more for charitable causes.
Ask for things: I find that my prayers are almost always answered. I pray for the strength to deal with a difficult situation, for the understanding or compassion to deal with my elderly relatives, etc. And I find that, as a result of the prayer process, I am given that extra strength, compassion, etc.
God requires it: this is fundamental to Judaism. WHY God requires it, we don’t know, but He does.
I’d add an additional: A chance to rethink past deeds and change direction, commonly called atonement or repentence: I find that prayer provides me with a way of coming to grips with guilt over my inadequacies or failures, recognizing past behaviors that I want to change, and moving forward in new directions.
Actually, I want to expand something in my answer. Many of the things we take for granted - like Gratitude - don’t actually exist unless we sit down and reall work at it. How grateful are we that things are good, when we don’t sit down and actually think about how much we like them?
I confess that my view of prayer has been tainted by sports fans praying for wins, screw-ups I know praying for solutions to problems they brought on themselves, the odd evangelist praying for San Francisco, e.g., to be swallowed by the sea, etc. Even to someone as non-religious as me, that seems to be grounds for a (spiritual) slap upside the head.
The contemplative aspect of prayer always seemed the most reasonable–examining your life and blessings, appreciating what you have and feeling grateful, atoning for past misdeeds, etc. But to me, that kind of prayer is just meditation by another name.
Prayer always seemed to imply some interactivity to me, more hands-on involvement from God, as it were. Perhaps that not so much the case…?
Heh Actually, that article was responsible for the timing, if not the substance, of my query.
Why would God make you ask for what you need/want rather than just giving it to you? I can’t speak for God, but I can speculate.
When you ask God for something, that makes you more aware of both your role and God’s role in the process, than if you just automatically received it. You have to take some responsibility for what you ask for, think it through, decide what you really want or need. If you then get what you prayed for, this is conducive to gratitude (which relates to #1, which others have already pretty well covered).
Praying for things for others is good because it can increase your feelings of concern and benevolence for them, and it can give you a way of “doing” something for them even when you lack the means to physically help them.
How do you know if you should be grateful? How can you tell the difference between providence and random luck? What if you got something by your own hard work? Why should you thank God for your own accomplishments?
If you credit God for good stuff, do you also blame him for bad stuff? If not, why not? It’s like George Carlin says- you never hear a football player say that “Jesus made me fumble.”
As you noted, praying for something you want is theologically very problematic. But it does make you feel like you’ve done something about a situation that is out of your control, and can be reassuring. It may not do anything to change the situation, but there might not be anything you could do that would do that, anyway. When theology goes up against the human need to do something to comfort yourself, theology generally loses.
Those of us who believe that God requires us to do things look at it differently. The requirements are for us to do things that we believe will make us better people. For example, the kosher laws. We don’t abstain from (for example) pork because God will somehow benefit from our doing so. We do it as a way of developing better self-control and reminding ourselves that there are things in life that are more important than eating whatever you want whenever you want. Daily (or weekly, or whatever) prayer can be thought of similarly- it reminds you that there are more important things than doing whatever you want whenever you want. Or it might just remind you that we are not alone in the universe, or remind you of your connection to other people who share your faith. You could even think of something like animal sacrifice this way- it shows that you realize that God gives you any wealth you have (measured in herds of animals for people in cultures like early Israelite culture), so your wealth is not entirely yours to do with as you please. We believe that doing the things that God asks us to do (through holy books and religious traditions) makes us better people, more like God would like us to be.
I believe, as do many Jews, that publicly praying for something that detrimental to so many people is a serious sin. When a very publicly religious person does or says something evil, that reflects badly on their religion, and ultimately on all religion. It makes people think badly of religion, and could lead to someone rejecting their religion, or rejecting all religion, and we don’t believe that God likes that. So I try to be very careful to pray only for things that won’t harm others, and don’t pray out loud.
There’s a story from the Talmud about Rabbi Meir being harassed by some local hoodlums, and praying that they would die. His wife, Beruriah (who is also respected as a rabbi) said to him, “How could you pray for such a thing? You know that God wants sins to cease, not for sinners to cease to exist. Instead of praying for them to die, pray for them to stop sinning.” Rabbi Meir did that, and the hoodlums stopped harassing him and became nice people.
Even if you have received something good after working for it, God still provided you with your natural abilities, the circumstances you were born in, and any favorable events that were not due to human choice. Even your continued existence is completely dependent on God’s continuing choice to maintain that existence. There is no “random luck” – everything that is not the direct result of human will is the result of the will of God.
Another way to think about both making requests and giving thanks is to think of a parent and a child. A parent may well know that a child wants a certain gift, but may choose to wait until the child asks for it to give it; may indeed want to wait until the child asks many times. Similarly, a parent can look at a smile and see a child is thankful for a gift … but nonetheless it’s good for both sides for the child to articulate that gratitude.
There is an article in today’s Chicago Tribune where they did an experiment on heart patients and the people who knew someone was praying for them did the worst than those who were not told, or not prayed for. The conclusion by a priest said perhaps the best prayer is: Thy will be done.
I agree with that, I just accept what comes along and do what I can, what I can’t do anything about I let go. I agree with the OP, if there were a god that hears and answers prayers, one would not need to pray, for a good father would not hold anything back he knew was good for his child and he would not give anything that would harm him or her no matter how much they begged.
Jesus’s prayers were not answered,he prayed that all be one even as he and the father were,it didn’t happen! His last cry was one of despair.
Monavis
Yes, I saw that article in my local paper. Here’s a link to one place the story’s available on line.
I have to agree with this:
The study doesn’t really tell us that much one way or the other. It just rules out one particular way or circumstance in which prayer might work.
The study sounds a bit like, what if you wanted to find out whether writing letters to your Congressman really did any good, so you came up with ten laws you thought ought to be passed, or projects that should be funded, and randomly selected five of these, and had people write letters to the Congressman urging him to support those five. And suppose the Congressman knew all about the study; he knew where the letters he was getting were coming from and why, and what ten issues had been chosen and which were the five that were and were not selected. Under those circumstances, I really wouldn’t expect the Congressman to give the five his special support.
There have been other studies on prayer before this. None have ever shown that prayer has any effect at all, although there does sometimes seem to be a slight placebo effect for those who believe they are being prayed for (even if they aren’t).
This is a common argument against attempts at scientific prayer studies. You can do double-blind experiments where the experimenters, the doctors, and the patients do not know who is being prayed for, but you cannot keep that knowledge from God, nor can science describe how God chooses to heal one person or another.
Any statistically significant positive result can be trumpeted as proof of the exsistence of God, but any negative result just rules out a certain type of God, one who just automatically gives help to people who are prayed for. Very sketchy.
Actually, that article was responsible for the timing, if not the substance, of my query.