Quote:
Originally Posted by Lasereth
Just so I have this straight:
God does not intervene in natural disasters or in any type of human encounter. So bad things happen to good people, and bad people get rich, etc. Ok, so why do people pray? If God doesn't intervene and we all have free will, then what is the point of Him even existing? Prayer means nothing if He can't act on it. I've always heard that people pray to God to save the lives of others, to hope someone gets better, to hope that fortune comes their way, to hope they make an A on their test, to hope their basketball team wins. Why?
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This presumes that the only purpose of prayer is to try to get God to perform specific actions; and only if those actions take place precisely in the timeframe, style, and methodology we envision at the time of prayer as ideal do we consider the prayer to have "worked."
Now, I cannot speak for Christians or Muslims, but I can say at least that in the Jewish tradition, we are taught that there are three kinds of prayer: Praise, Thanks, and Request. We emphasize the first two kinds in our formal liturgy, although the third is certainly abundantly present also. Praise is the most important, we are taught, because without God's actions as Creator, we wouldn't be here to ask for anything anyhow. God is the Ultimate Source of All, the source of all holiness, and should be praised for that, full stop. We say he should be thanked, too, for our lives and the world we live in. As long as we are alive we have possibilities; and the world, though dangerous, is also filled with beauty and joy and hope, and God should be thanked for those things, without "strings attached." We should certainly ask God for requests, but our liturgical tradition emphasizes communal requests of a slightly more abstract nature ("prosper our people," etc.), and although I cannot speak for other Jews in this, I at least was always taught that when I made personal requests to God, they might be answered in ways I couldn't recognize or understand, or they might be sometimes unanswered if that were what was best for me overall (which again I might not be able to recognize) or if they were unanswerable (i.e. I was asking God for something either entirely dependent upon my own free will or in conflict with the free will of another).
People pray because they want to commune with their Creator. Requests are only a part of it, and the educated pray-er will understand that their request may or may not be answered, and if answered, may not be in the time or place or style envisioned by the pray-er.