Since I was a kid, I’ve been praying to Infinite Intelligence/God for blessings because I believed prayer has power over external events. However, recently, I started thinking that prayer might be purely psychological as I realized that the main effects of prayer are mental. For this reason, I doubted whether prayer affects external events.
People pray for peace, but war prevails. People pray for a safe journey but still die in accidents. Some students pray to God to help them pass their exams, but they fail terribly, and terrorism continues although millions of people pray to God to end it. For this reason, it’s hard for me to firmly claim that prayer affects external events.
Although I highly doubt if prayer affects external events, I’m always interested in ancient prayers. I’ve studied the religious practices of several ancient cultures and realized that most of them were prayerful. The Akamba, Greeks, Arabs, Egyptians, and many other cultures prayed to God to bring rain, kill their enemies, and protect them. I wonder why ancient cultures firmly relied on prayer to change external events.
Did they witness prayer influence external events or did they just believe that their gods heard their prayers?
It’s reasonable to believe that God can hear us and change external events because God is everywhere and has power over everything, and it is difficult to disprove the power of prayer over external events because our understanding of the relationship between Infinite Intelligence/God and the physical world is limited.
Therefore, although I doubt whether prayer affects external events, I still advise people to pray. Maybe Infinite Intelligence programmed us to pray because prayer attracts favourable circumstances or it attracts spiritual power that enables us to change external events.
Anyway, we’ll never really know how prayer works, but we must pray to be on the safe side. Maybe prayer can affect both our psychological health and external events when we pray sincerely, or in spirit.
N.B – (I wrote this article on feb 2019: thus, my current view of prayer might be different from this article’s view).
Anyway, what are your thoughts on prayer? Is it purely psychological? Does it influence external events? Feel free to share your ideas on prayer in the comment box below.
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Isaac…I believe we are all part of a shared consciousness and share the same energy. If many people pray together or throughout the world, I believe we can evoke change. Maybe not the dramatic change we would like to see but an energy shift may occur. There was an experiment done where a group of monks were in a neighborhood that experienced a high crime rate. The monks all meditated in that neighborhood together for a period of time and the crime rate decreased in that neighborhood. The following link explains a bit about how that works. So I do believe that some form of prayer can change the consciousness of the greater population and possibly the outcome of some situations.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/muom-cgm031316.php
i love the article, interesting……nway, we cannot make firm conclusions on prayer…i think personal experience is the best option
My mom was having a hard time with a woman who was hard to work with, and her employer suggested she pray for the woman. When I asked if the woman had changed, mom told me that her prayer changed her, and the change in her changed the woman she was struggling with. “Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes me.”
I believe that to be 100% true, but I also believe that when we pray we also discover God’s will. When I asked Him to change the heart of a woman I loved, He didn’t. This told me that she was not the one God had for me. God does not change his mind, but that’s not the purpose of prayer. The ability to lay something to rest because it’s not God’s will makes the harder things in life more palatable. I also believe that prayer is a conversation, but too many of us don’t know how to listen. God speaks to everyone. Let us have ears to hear.
amazing swanstuff. i like real life examples. it then seems that many prayers go unanswered because people don’t know the principles of prayer.
I think you are right that we cannot prove or disprove that prayer works and the same is true about God’s existence. Belief is anecdotal. But it has been proven that quantam physics is real, which means that energy and thought can have impact on other energy and thought. I think we can take from this that prayer does have impact, but it is not a slot machine. We can’t know for sure what the impact will be. But, like Karen, I have read stories of communities creating change through meditation and there are stories of prayer that seem to coincide with healing. Like Rob, I also have been changed, myself, by praying. So I think prayer is not just a good idea, just in case, but because it does have impact. And I believe that God hears us, and just experiencing a connection with God is enough reason to pray.
wow, awesome…im starting to gain interest in prayer because of you guyz. nway, my reason on why prayer works could be, ‘god is a conscious being and therefore ‘he’ must hear our prayers.