Why People Think They Need to Pray

[robvalue]

People pray because they think god's current plan could be improved with their suggestions.

I remember thinking about that as a child, when I was still a Christian.  Prayer seemed like blasphemy to me, as it would be doing just what you are saying.  I realized that people around me had this religion thing wrong, but it took a bit longer to realize that all religion is wrong.

Your point illustrates how irrational and inconsistent people are when it comes to their religion.  It does not take a genius to see that most religious people are inconsistent and therefore wrong, no matter what the truth is.  If one wants any hope of being right, one needs to be consistent.

Indeed! I'd be very interested in any theist explaining away this problem. If God does answer a prayer, that means he did in fact have a way to improve his plan; or else he is now making his plan worse because of accommodating the prayer. I suppose the nearest thing to a solution here is that God changes his plan to another equivalently good plan that accommodates the details of the prayer. That's a bit ridiculous, I wonder if anyone will go with that? If by changing the prayer that makes the person happier than they would otherwise be, then surely that makes the plan better in of itself. If not, he must add a negative factor in some other area to compensate for this happiness bonus. So you're asking God to shift stuff about; this still amounts to telling him how to do his job.

If he is changing his plan repeatedly because of prayers, then his initial plan is pretty pointless huh.

I think what we're dealing with is the contradictory beliefs that God answers prayers; yet has an unchanging master plan. The cognitive dissidence allows the theist to believe both at once.