Why Do Christians Ask for Divine Favors?
Christian beliefs aren’t self-consistent. Christians pray to a God they believe is all-knowing, powerful, and loving. Prayer is communication with God. In prayer Christians praise God, express gratitude, confess sins, submit to God’s will, and ask for things. For now I want to focus on the last piece which is the asking. “God, please take away my mother’s sickness”, “God, please help me get this new job”, etc.. When traumatic events happen these same people may claim God did it for a reason. “It was to punish the sinful”, “It was to test our faith”, “It was a necessary trial for our growth”. If one were really to believe in this type of God, there would be no need to ask for anything in prayer. If God were all-knowing, powerful, and loving he would direct events in a way that was ‘most optimized’. By ‘most optimized’ I mean that no other sequence of events could be produced for humanity that exhibited ‘love’ for humanity. Perhaps this means the universe is constructed in such a way that pain and agony are unavoidable and God directs us through the path that minimizes the amount of agony we experience. In this version, God is dealing within the constraints of a fallen world. He is all powerful but he still is bound by constraints.
So why would you try to change the ‘most optimized’ sequence of events set in place by an all-knowing, powerful, and loving being? It would be irrational. There is only one inquiry which is even remotely rational, which is “Thy will be done” and even that is likely wasted breath.
The scriptures do implore us to pray. They even tell us to ask for things. In Matthew 6:8 it reads, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” But in the next verses he gives an example of a prayer and in that prayer Mathew asks for three things, “give us our day our daily bread”, “to lead us not into temptation”, and “forgive us our debts”. Interestingly, that same prayer also says, “Thy Will be done”.
Matthew also says in passages 21:22, “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” This passage seems to suggest that our prayers can potentially be granted. The next question to ask is, will this divert God’s will? If it doesn’t then what you have asked is already God’s will and the sequence of events was going to happen that anyway. If this is the case it’s interesting to ask, “was I destined to utter these words and following that utterance the events I asked for in my utterance occurred and was it because I uttered the words or because the events were already set”? If you change God’s will be asking for the thing we are back to the previous point which is you have derailed the most optimal sequence of events, according to what events an all-knowing, powerful, and loving God decides is ‘most optimal’.
Logically, when we simply consider individuals of humanity asking an all-knowing, powerful, and loving God to alter his ‘most optimal’ planned sequence of events for them it seems irrational for such a being to concede any of these requests that don’t match his plan to the very tilt of an atom and it wouldn’t seem logical or at least ethical for any individual to want to alter God’s will. The only thing logical to ask is, ‘Thy will be done’ but even asking this would be redundant. For the religious, prayer probably has more to do with changing the individual than it does with changing God. It’s surprising that the authors of Bible implore its readers and followers to ask for things. I wonder what lessons they intend the followers to learn from asking for things that will never, except for when the supplicant asks for the exact events God is already intending to transpire, be granted? Is there a deeper lesson to be learned through this process? If so, I am curious to know what it might be. Is it to learn to accept God’s will, to become familiar with disappointment or heartache? If so why is this process of asking for things that will never happen an effective way of learning it? If prayer were for reorienting the mind like meditation I would understand why the religious practice it. I don’t see prayer being self consistent with the beliefs of christians or even an effective way of self introspection when compared to meditation in its varied forms.
REPL: Read-Eval-Print-Loop
A REPL is an interactive program that allows the programmer to execute code and view the output in a piecewise pattern. The name explains the pattern.
* R - First some command is entered by the programmer and 'Read' by the program.
* E - The program 'evaluates' the input
* P - The output is 'printed'
*L - The cycle then continues, just like a 'loop', until the programmer exits.
A REPL is useful for experimenting with different features of a programming language.
First post
Here is my first post.
The purpose of this blog is to document my journey as a software developer. I will be posting about subjects I learn about. By and large this blog is a place for me to put the concepts I have learned into words. This helps me learn. Making this content available to the public will coerce me into making better content.
I hope you enjoy.