(October 14, 2013 at 3:03 pm)Raeven Wrote: Here's the thing I can never figure out about prayer. (It's probably been stated here a million times, but I'm new, too lazy to go find those other posts, so get off my back, ok??)
If your god is all knowing, all seeing, and everything happens for a reason™, then... isn't it sort of rude to pray? I mean, entreating your particular deity to see it your way and grant you a particular outcome for, oh, a speeding ticket or your football team to win -- or even something a little more significant to you, like saving a loved one from leukemia... aren't you being just a tad presumptuous?
And anyway, it never changes anything. People who pray v. people who don't have the same outcomes, statistically. Isn't that a bit suspicious? Or at least, a complete waste of your time?
There is real psychology at work in 'prayer'. While I do not endorse all of the views expressed in this article, I will say that the 'psychology of prayer' is at work in nearly all cases of prayer 'working' for an individual in gaining a particular cognitive construct.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/enli...ics-prayer
Quote:Remarking on prayer, meditation and the power of intention, Paramahansa Yogananda and his contemporaries drew not only on the core of spirituality, but also fundamental principles of psychology and specifically neuroplasticity to describe the transformation of the interior landscape. The exterior expression of that interior transformation extends the intention of transformation outward, with prayer, and most specifically collective prayer, providing, in part and quite literally, the vehicle, to quote Mahatma Gandhi, for "[Being] the change [we] wish to see in the world."
