Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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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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