Psychology and Prayer

The Bible is clear that prayer is communion, communication with God.  It is about a relationship with him.  The Bible says prayer is a gift from God.  The Holy Spirit prompts you to reach to God.  You are allowed to pray for the bike but only if it will help your bond with God.  So it is all about God really!  It would need to be a supernatural prompt then!  So God guides you to pray.  You get an answer.  If you did not you may assume that you were trying to pray without his input and that is why nothing happened.  There is something very suspect about a God who inspires you to pray for something he is going to give you.  To imagine that your prayer was like prayer but not really prayer if it was not answered is a form of self-abuse.  By bringing in the supernatural and untestable, the religion of prayer insulates its ideology from criticisms by scientists and psychologists.  That raises many red flags.  To protect itself from them means that it does not respect them.  It means when you pray you are diminishing respect for those who need science and who need therapists.

If the likely scheme above sounds like God is praying to himself, it is exactly as it sounds.  He virtually is.  An insane person would give you dinner only if you ask for it when they ask to you ask.  If you ask without being told to, you get nothing.  This is degrading. 

One would think that all that is really a mess and its down to people wanting to pray not because they want it to work but because they want to feel good for doing nothing.  The notion of a God only answering prayers he puts in you means he does not really answer.  It is just a performance.  So he is doing it too - he is trying to feel good from inviting an activity that does nothing.

What is the alternative?  The one who thinks that praying is about being arrogant to a God who knows more than him and yet that he should tell that God how to do things?  That is another way of trying to feel good about doing nothing productive.  It is feeling good in your arrogance and for your arrogance.

Either way prayer is an evil.  The only answer is to NOT PRAY!

In 2008, Science, the magazine, laid out the evidence gathered by psychologists Whitson and Galinsky that if people have too little control they become very likely to see patterns in random dots that are in fact not there. They are more open to superstitious practices and ideas and even conspiracy theories. It stands to reason that if you feel you are deprived of control, you will think your prayers are working!
 
Jonathan Rotter, the psychologist, found that people fall into one of only two groups. Group one thinks that everything in our lives is down to forces that we can do little or often nothing about. Group two thinks that it is up to us to choose. It says we do have enough control. People who see themselves as masters of their destiny to a huge degree tend to fear their choices and feel tormented when trying to identify the right one. The best approach is somewhere in the middle - let life surprise you and be willing to let go of the way of life you have chosen. This attitude is what you should be trying to cultivate not a prayerful one.

Prayer is about seeking meaning in a specific happening. You are not trying to give it to the person you are praying for. You are using them and their predicament to get meaning for yourself.