How could prayer possibly work?

[smiling_bandit]

Prayer is not a form of worship. Prayer is simple talking to God, asking His blessings, giving thanks, and in times of trouble asking for help.

The two are not incompatible. God is so good that acknowledging his will is this is more or les by definition prayer.

In any case, one should never expect God to do things for you. He did after all, give you a body, a brain, and a will. I will certainly not claim that God never helps someone through a difficult surgery and that He could do so to everyone all the time. But by and large, you already have all the tools needed to do almost anything.

If you actually think about it, a wise person would not eed to pray for things. Their life would be a prayer in itself, but only for thanksgiving.

[Hoodoo_Ulove]

@smiling bandit

In any case, one should never expect God to do things for you. He did after all, give you a body, a brain, and a will.

So then, we should expect God to behave as if he didn’t exist. How is this view of God distinguishable from atheism?

[MrAlpen]

@Hoodoo Ulove

So then, we should expect God to behave as if he didn’t exist. How is this view of God distinguishable from atheism?

Well, I suppose it’s different by virtue of belief in the existence of God(!) It would have a practical impact on the lives of believers by holding them to specific norms of behaviour and (possibly) forms of worship. It would shape their beliefs of ultimate purpose and maybe eternal destiny.

The fact that God either does what he was going to do anyway, or that the universe is preprogrammed with God’s foreknown evolution, would not necessarily influence adherents to believe that he could be safely ignored.

[Hoodoo_Ulove]

@MrAlpen

The fact that God either does what he was going to do anyway, or that the universe is preprogrammed with God’s foreknown evolution, would not necessarily influence adherents to believe that he could be safely ignored.

Any answer I give to this would be obvious and shopworn, as well as a hijack. The thread isn’t about the existence of God. I’ll go away now.

[MrAlpen]

@Hoodoo Ulove

Any answer I give to this would be obvious and shopworn, as well as a hijack. The thread isn’t about the existence of God. I’ll go away now.

No! Come back Hoodoo ULove! I thought what you said was a relevant and interesting evolution of the discussion

… it just occurred to me that the subjective experience of theism must be different from that of atheism, whatever a theist believes about the malleability of God’s will.

[Hoops]

We can look at the OP in generic terms. For the sake of argument we assert that God exists and He is omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent.

Given that, the only prayers reasonable to pray would be:

Thank You.

I love You.

I’m sorry for my sins.

How can I do Your bidding?

Anything else would be IMHO at best foolish and at worst incredibly presumptuous.

But once we start getting down to specific religions, it becomes difficult to reconcile this with knowledge of specific actions and attitudes attributed to the deity in question.

I am not a theist myself. I like what Robert Anton Wilson says:

I strongly suspect that a world “external to,” or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense.

I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignity, like Internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style an Oriental despotism, an American corporation or Christian theology…

I somewhat suspect that Theism and Atheism both fail to account for such decentralized intelligencce, rich in circular-causal feedback.

Not that I necessarily believe it, but I like it. Then again, my opinion as to whether Wilson is a gonzo crank or a deep thinker flips around quite a bit. Maybe he’s both.

[uglybeech]

@lekatt

Prayer is not a form of worship. Prayer is simple talking to God, asking His blessings, giving thanks, and in times of trouble asking for help. Prayers are usually ended with “thy will be done, Amen.”

1. Prayer does serve multiple functions, but I’d be surprised if most traditions denied its role as a form of worship (praise). Maybe yours does.
2. In most traditions, prayer is manifestly worshipful - praise is central.
3. Prayers do *not * usually end with, “thy will be done, Amen.” The Lord’s prayer does.
4. Nevertheless “thy will be done, Amen.” seems clearly worshipful (not supplicative) to me. I don’t see how it supports your argument.

[AHunter3]

Given that, the only prayers reasonable to pray would be:

Thank You.

I love You.

I’m sorry for my sins.

How can I do Your bidding?

To which I’d add:

• Teach me, I’m confused!

• I don’t know how to do what I want to do. Am I wanting to do the right thing, should I be wanting this? And, if so, how do I attain it?

• You wanna, maybe, perhaps, explain current conditions? What the fuck? This can’t be life as it’s supposed to be…can it? Are you gonna fix it, or, umm, are there, maybe, perhaps, things you want that I should do? How is it all supposed to be, and how do I cope with it as it is, and how do I participate in getting it from what it is to how it oughta be?

• Am I okay? Am I hurting people or doing wrong things? Am I cripped, dorky, doofy, silly, stoopid, or, you know, otherwise short of what people should be? Am I insensitive, selfish, intolerant, unfriendly? Do I need to grow?

• How do I understand the heat death of the universe? Is there no permanence, no continuation, no eternity?

• Goddammit, pain hurts. Explain why things are like this. Could you not, maybe, I dunno, how about a sensation to tell us something’s wrong and then once you acknowledge it it fades to a less intrusive signal. Pain makes it difficult to attend to the situation that is causing the pain in the first place 'cuz you can’t think straight 'cuz it hurts so bad. Excuse me, but whose brilliant fucking idea was this? Teach, dammit. Help me come to terns with OW.

• This is really groovy. Cool beans, this existence thing. I am enjoying being alive, for all the frustrations and half-met challenges…maybe even in part because of them! Whee! You sure know how to throw a party!

[Hoops]

Well, AHunter3, I appreciate that your post seems to be somewhat tongue in cheek. But for the record, your additions could mostly be subsumed under the fourth prayer, ‘how can I do Your bidding?’ And your last addition is covered by ‘thank You’.

Sorry, no wish to seem humorless, but I did put some effort into trying to imagine what the least number of universal prayers might be. At least I resisted the urge to call prayer four the Darth Vader prayer (‘what is thy bidding, my master?’)

Wait, I guess I just failed to resist it. Oh well.

[devilsknew]

In other traditions outside of Christianity, specifically Buddhism, prayer has power within itself. It is the seed of intention and has accumulated power in incantation and repetition. Imagine the words of the prayer as the “signal carrier” of intention and meaning amplified by sheer human will over generations.

I believe that this accumulated psychic power built up in prayer is real enough and does effect the physical world, even in miraculous ways. Light as thought and speech might be they certainly have changed the world in impressive ways. Who really knows the links that bind us? What subtle and unnseen changes might the intention of prayer work in a system that appears as infinitessimally large and hopelessly disparate as our universe, but still allows an electron to be both here and in a multiplicity of other locations simultaneously?

[Hoops]

Yes, devilskenew, that is exactly what I meant to suggest with the Wilson quote.

Which is, again, not to say that I fully believe this (scientific evidence, as cited above, has yet to bear this out), but it is interesting to consider.

[cosmosdan]

This may or may not relate. Some have seen this before but for those who haven’t.

check this out

[devilsknew]

The Tibetans have prayer technology.