Sorry, I’m a few days late to this party. I gotta come to GD more often.
The Jewish position on this pretty much totally agrees with you. God is NOT gonna change His mind just because a bunch of whiny humans annoyed Him into it.
Jewish thought is that the goal of prayer is to improve our relationship with God. Remind ourselves of how important He is, how we are dependent on Him, how we need to do what He wants us to do, yadda yadda yadda. If someone (or a group of people) succeeds and improves, then God reevaluates the situation. It could be that beforehand, we didn’t deserve to have Aunt Minnie among us any more, but now we do deserve it.
God is all-knowing, and yet we have the ability to change the circumstances. One might ask, but God is all-knowing, and so He knew in advance that you’d do all this stuff, so why didn’t He just heal her beforehand? The answer is that it doesn’t mean anything until it happens. We have to actually become those better people, or else it’s an undeserved freebie. OTOH, if we had been good people all along, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten sick to begin with, following those same ideas.
And always keep in mind that while God always gives us what we need and deserve, that’s not always the same as what we ask for. (There are a lot of unhappy lottery winners out there.)
I don’t recall ever having believed that God knows everything — or knows best about everything, or that His mind can’t be changed by someone who’d pray to Him; I read about Him resting after taking six days to get something done, and about Him apparently not knowing stuff but learning it upon seeing it, and Abraham bargaining with Him, and so on, and so on, and figured, uh, okay.
I know you’re taking a general philosophy and re-applying it to my specific example. And my example may not be the perfect illustration of what you are explaining. But doing so invites the question of why did she get cancer in the first place? And doesn’t her life have meaning beyond being some sort of reward for other people who succeeded in their little self-improvement project? The presumption, at least mine, is that people pray for Aunt Minnie not because “God don’t make us sad by taking her away” but rather “God she is a good person and deserves to live.” And yet God had something in mind by letting her get cancer, so why should it matter what we think?
As has been implied, in prayer of the “if it is your will, let X (happen/not happen)” type a critical part of it is in that initial “if it is your will”, either explicit or implicit, as it means the supplicant accepting that they are doing or have done what they can, or just can’t do anything about it, and should not torment themselves over that.
Now as for “Aslan may like to be asked…” that has been one of my theological eyebrow raisers since early life. Sorry but why should a totally self-complete perfect existence want to be flattered?
These questions are much stronger than their answers. We have no idea why she got cancer in the first place. And of course her life has a great deal of meaning - just imagine all the people whose lives she’s touched over the years, relatives, friends, strangers. Every single one of those interactions counts. The formula for mixing all that is so complicated that we have no chance of understanding it all, or even a small piece of it. We might as well ask, “Why did she get this kind of cancer instead of a different kind?”
I know this will sound like a cop-out answer, but I focus less on “Why did this happen?” (which I’ll never really understand totally) and more on “How do I react to it?” (which can be very practical and constructive).
We need to know our place. We need to know that we aren’t know-it-alls like He is. We need to know that now matter how well or poorly we plan something, surprising things might happen if He decides we deserve it.
But, if we took the position that there is NOT some decision-maker-in-chief we can call upon, then we’d have no choice but to embrace that s—t happens and “deserve’s got nothing to do with it”.
That is indeed the Jewish position, as I was taught it. But the bible is full of references to God changing his mind based on some whiny humans crying out to him. Sometimes the people changing God’s mind are special, like Moses; other times it is described as the people in general suffering and crying out.
I don’t know definitively why (or even that) “Aslan may like to be asked,” but I do know that there are possible reasons other than a desire for flattery, reasons involving the effects on the asker and/or their relationship with Aslan.
Again, I can think of reasons for praising God other than God wanting or needing praise. (Hint: Have you ever heard someone praising or honoring a person who is not present or who is no longer alive? Surely they’re not doing so because they think the person being praised wants, needs, or demands flattery.)
Yahweh doesn’t want or need the flattery? No, He demands it, along with roasted fatty meats, and there’s an future of eternal punishment for those that fail to comply.
What I meant upthread is that it’s intellectually dishonest to ignore the fact that for millions of actual religious people, prayer IS transactional. Their lived experience says that this is a part of their religion, whether it is theologically reconcilable with their omnipotent / omniscient deity or not. They use prayer like this: they expect that the act of asking God or a proxy (Saint Whosis) is going to affect the real-world outcome. Not all Christians, of course, but a large subset, and I don’t think you can hand-wave away their existence because you find them inconvenient.
As I said, though, it’s a question of whether you want to look at theology (humanities), where you can dismiss these practices as doing the religion wrong or stupidly, or whether you want to look at religion (social sciences), where this is actually happening within the context of Christianity and therefore needs an explanation.
Just a few months ago, my 40 year old cousin came out to me as an atheist. He comes from a very religious family, so he hadn’t yet made the official announcement to most of them. His wife was not taking it very well. He told me because he knew that I’d been an atheist since I was a teen.
Anyway, the “Prayer vs Infinitely Wise God” thought experiment was the crack in the door for him. It happened to me, too, when I was about ten years old, and I gradually became an atheist over the next couple of years as I thought about it more.
That’s what I don’t get: if he believed in an infinitely wise god, and the “Prayer vs Infinitely Wise God” thought experiment was such a crack, then, sure, you could jettison the “God” part — but couldn’t you instead jettison the “Infinitely Wise” part?
Praising a dead person is like, “We gather here today to celebrate the memory of a wonderful person.”
Praising God is like, “All rise and turn to page 256 in your hymnal and raise your voices to the heavens with ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty!’” Isn’t that why they call it worship?
Yes, there are certain things that He demands, but put it in proper perspective:
What do I need so many sacrifices for? asks the LORD; I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of well-fed cattle; I have no desire for the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. … And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide My eyes from you; even when you make many prayers, I will not hear; Your hands are full of blood. Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do good; Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, Judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:11, 1:15-17)
(That’s just one of many quotes I could have cited.)
Culturally, transactional prayer has been around since Christians absorbed Greek-Roman pagan traditions. So even when Jesus said one thing, tradition meant doing something else. And that’s okay. Although there’s a lot of focus on the Bible, the Christian religion is only partially based on it. For example, Methodists follow scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
But typically, the more a Christian says their beliefs are “Bible-based”, the less they’ve actually read the Bible for comprehension. It’s another example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The answer to the original post’s question is: it’s justified by tradition and not scriptural study.