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Notes -
Anyone want to try steelmanning these passages?
I believe that there are types of prayer that have benefits, but not this type of prayer. The elements of prayer that I defend are:
mental rehearsal. If you are praying in ardent desire for an object then you are increasing your ability to focus with desire on that object, which trains the mind against distraction and allows the unconscious mind to form connections around an object. This is similar to rubber duck debugging.
salience of longterm goals re: negative contingency. If you are mourning over a sin and continue to mourn over a sin, then whether you sin or not becomes much more salient (being associated with the contingent risk of further mourning). I think this relates to the evolutionary theories of depression in very interesting ways and I also think this is a major type of prayer in the Old Testament, but I digress.
the cultivation of a good attitude (spirit). We all want to be more patient, more careful with our attention, more attune to our real identity, and prayer can help with this given that you are effectively practicing an attitude when praying.
All well and good, maybe I’m missing some other benefits, but the passages above seem to conflict with my interpretation. This seems like plain wishful thinking, which studies have shown to be harmful. Am I misinterpreting them, am I missing something? One possibility that came to mind is that while such an activity is bad for the individual prayeé, it increases one’s devotion to God under false pretenses, increasing the strength of the community in toto. However if that’s the case then I don’t like it. Another possibility is that these passages are “shorthand”, a super-simplification of how prayer actually works which is helpful to draw people in. I don’t know.
Petitionary prayer is its own special problem. The above can easily devolve into the Prosperity Gospel and worse abuses. Yet in the Our Father, when the disciples say "Lord, teach us to pray", Jesus puts in the bit about asking for your daily bread.
That has been gone over for centuries about "does this mean real bread as in food, or some kind of spiritual bread of life, or what?" I think there are several meanings that can be taken from it, but I think if we wander too far away into "shucks, I don't need to pray for material stuff" we are missing out and are in danger of turning our faith into purely "spiritual, not religious" feel-goodism and forgetting that we are living in bodies and bodies need material stuff. Maybe sometimes we will be desperate enough to pray for bodily or mental health because we have nowhere else to turn in our neediness.
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This is a major issue with a lot of Christian writing in that it uses a lot of densely loaded language as well as assuming the audience is already hip to that language. The first time I read Poverty of Spirit by Metz, I thought, "this is woo-woo nonsense." Now, it lives as first among equals of my non-scripture / non-catechism prayer aids.
When the lay person reads sentences like "Christ calls us to open our heart to him so that we may more fully live in his Truth" it easy to eyeroll.exe. I won't expand this post to cover that larger topic. Let's get back to the steelman task.
You will get what you ask for in prayer because built in to genuine, honest, and devoted prayer is praying for the right thing. Prayer is a process with hundreds of subroutines, and one of them is praying for clarity in identifying the true and right object of prayer.
Say you are having trouble paying your bills, obviously you would start by praying for more money. Well, more money is not an end in itself. You would use the money to pay your bills. Well, ok, the envelopes with the big red letter stop showing up, what does that actually mean? It means you have less anxiety. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. The end you're after is reduced anxiety, more confidence in the future, hope ... faith (oh, look at that!). So then you start praying for a more well ordered object, specifically; faith that, with the help of God, you will find a just and honest solution to your bill problem that will allow you to reduce anxiety and build your capital-H hope in yourself, your life, and, as always, God.
That outcome you will receive through repeated devoted prayer. Is it a trick of mental exercise? Is it just heavily ceremonial Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Well, let's not turn the Sunday thread into more than it ought to be. (short answer: No. longer answer: Fuck no and the CBT people stole a bunch of their stuff from many different faith's prayer traditions.)
The main point here is that the sentence "And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith" builds in the assumption that you're praying for the right thing and that you are honest and genuine in your prayer for it (panic praying isn't good). More explicitly, the right thing is some version or compound of the core virtuous; Faith, Hope, and Charity (sometimes "Love" is substituted for Charity)
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https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-48-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-corbin-and-the-divine-double/
The last section, "An Aspirational Process Towards A More Angelic Self", can probably steelman this much better than I can.
Prayer is something like a process that affords you the ability to transform directionally towards an aspirational self (symbolic). If you believe your aspirational self has the qualities that you are asking for in prayer, then the action of praying can help start the process of bringing those qualities to your current self.
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It doesn’t say when you’ll get what you asked for.
Maybe you’ll only receive it in the hereafter.
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