Simple enough question, huh? But I can’t come to any good answer. Here are some reasons I have for why people pray:
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your religious book commands you to. If that’s the case, I would say that your book tells you to do a lot of things, many of which aren’t used in practice today. No one has sacrificed animals in the Jewish religion since 70 AD. You’re now allowed to eat meat on Friday. Religion changes and some things get left behind. So doing it because a book told you still doesn’t answer the basic question of why it’s done.
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God has commanded you to. This one doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t you want to pray? Why must God command you to do it? Why should anyone pray to a God that requires you pray to Him? Seriously, I find the idea a little egocentric for God. Any God that needs us to remind him he’s God doesn’t seem like that great of a God.
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A moral compass. You pray to God because God is good and you must align yourself to the path of goodness. Fair enough. But the more times we spend alligning, the less time we spend living. Praying to Mecca 5 times a day, spending 1-2 hours a day in synagogue for morning and evening services. The problem is that praying is, IMO, a neutral event. You aren’t out doing evil, but you never have the chance to do good while you’re stuck there praying. If God wants us to do good in the world, why doesn’t He allow us more time to do it?
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A sense of understanding. To pray is to help understand the world. But what are we understanding? We already know that God is good. Do we need a 400 page book that tells us that again and again for sentence after sentence, page after page? I enjoy the Torah, if only for the stories within. Whether they’re true or not, historically accurate or not, is irrelevant. They contain morals to help us learn and that I can accept. But then I open up the prayer book and see 500 adjectives for “good” as pertaining to God and I ask “what am I learning?” I can’t come to an answer
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a sense of community. This seems, to me at least, the best answer I can come up with. This is why we pray. To share ourselves with the rest of the congregation. But then why do we pray silently? Why do we pray alone in our houses? Doesn’t God know what we’re feeling? He’s God, right? Why do we feel it a chore to come to religious services and why do we feel it is bad to talk to our neighbor during the service? If we can pray on our own, why do we have religious temples?
So…why do we pray?