Philippians 4:6-7 (NIV): “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
So it reads to me like you’re supposed to do it so you won’t be afraid.
Edit: I do note that prayer and petition are listed as separate things, to maybe the OP is still right.
IMHO, because we have free will, you can petition, curse, beg, threaten, deny God all you want and it won’t make a difference unless you’re sincere in your heart of hearts, which is what he really sees and cares about. Ultimately, he’ll do he deems we need a the moment which may or may not be what we expect or want.
I don’t believe in pre-destination in the sense that everything we do is set in stone before we’re even born. But do believe that whatever happens has a reason that may or may not be eventually revealed to us.
Do you realize that your first and second sentence contradict each other?
It is our right but also it is part of our relationship. It’s like a parent not doing what they know a child wants them to do till the child actually asks.
So yes and there is times in the Bible that it says God did something because it was asked, so it is supported.
And in my experience yes that’s how it works.
As Skammer noted, Christians have the direct teaching and the example, of Jesus and of other Biblical figures, that they are supposed to “petition the Lord with prayer.”
So the same god that has this all planned out in advance also wants us to petition him with prayers to change/fix/eliminate situations that vex us and/or our loved ones? Is she/he/it deliberately making mistakes, knowing that we mere humans will ask to have them fixed, knowing ahead of time which prayers will be answered and which won’t because it is in the Heavenly Script?
Yes, because God is part of us and we of God. It is part of our function in the family of God. We are the part of God who observes and passes on that information to act beyond what we can do. We in this case are God’s eyes, and meant to be so.
He/she/it is teaching us, and we make mistakes, however God has it covered, so no matter how many times we mess up, God will clean it up and make it right. Thus we never made a mistake, as we are part of God, thus can not make mistakes. But that requires the family relationship to form for our mistakes to be corrected by our god ‘parent’
If you believe in any degree of free will—that God has allowed human beings the ability to make choices and take actions that have real effects on the world—then petitionary prayer could be among those actions.
We make mistakes, but we don’t really make mistakes. 
Anyone else?
Making the prayer, sure-but god changing his mind because of that prayer?
If there is some great plan, then his wanting us to petition through prayer is nothing more than a desire to watch us beg.
Nah, it’s about dialogue. Our relationship with God is supposed to be one of a child to a father. A good father knows what his children need without them having to ask.
It’s the same way with God. God doesn’t need to be told what we need. Prayer is for our benefit, not God’s. Maintaining a pattern of prayer, even petitionary prayer, reminds us where all good things come from and fosters a grateful disposition in us.
I have seen far too many prayers for the lives of loved ones to be spared, people on their knees begging, with tears in their eyes and great desperation in their voices, people thinking that if they are humble enough they can convince their god to throw them a crumb. There is no “dialogue” going on here. By the way, a good father doesn’t tell his children to beg and grovel for things he is going to give them anyway.
That’s sad and unfortunate.
You are absolutely correct.
Too add to my response to this, Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane in the Gospel of Matthew is an excellent example. According to the account, Jesus in his humanity was in extreme agony about what he was about to go through. He asked God to spare him from it, “let this cup pass from me”. But in the end, he did exactly what prayer should always help us do, he surrendered to God’s will “not my will, but yours be done”.
We can absolutely pray “God, please spare [me/my loved one] from ”, but we also have to be willing to set aside our own desires and submit to God’s will.
That is the point of prayer, surrendering one’s self to God’s will.
Will the result be any different then if we don’t pray, since whatever happens is that god’s will?
I can’t possibly know that.
The result is that hopefully we are closer to salvation through an increased dependence on/trust in God.
That is why I have faith in reality-I know that whatever happens will happen no matter how hard I wish, with the added bonus that I am not coerced/enticed to make useless appeals in the hope that I will curry favor and win a reward from something/someone for which there is no evidence.
No one is being coerced, and it’s not about “currying favor”. God’s favor is already abundantly and completely on all of his children. We are free to accept it rather than spurn it. We can never earn it or deserve it.
It’s true that horrible, tragic things will happen no matter how much you or I wish they wouldn’t.
There are many ways humans can deal with this fact of life, some are better than others. Prayer is one way, and I believe a very good one.
The way I see it, God’s going to do whatever’s best, and He knows a lot better than we do what that is. But He still likes for us to pray to Him, and that’s enough reason to do it.
Think of your mother. She’ll still love you if you don’t call her, right? But you still call her every week or so, because you love her, and because she loves you.
Yes, or another way of thinking about it is if we learned from our mistakes they were never mistakes, as that is what it took for us to learn.
As I see it, God’s plan is perfect, we all will learn from our mistakes, thus nothing is a mistake that was a mistake. But that happens in the end, once we have learned, till then it was a mistake because we didn’t learn yet. But again with God’s plan being perfect, for now it can be said as a mistake or not, both can be said to exist at the same time, till the lesson is learned, at which time it was never a mistake.