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Not only to believers pray, but they ask others to pray for the same outcome. I always assumed they thought additional prayers would give more weight to the petition as God considered whether to answer it—like getting lots of people to write the congressman on one side of an issue.

However, today I overheard a person say: “If everybody prays then God will probably hear one of them,”—like making multiple prayers was like buying multiple raffle tickets for the desired outcome

How do your church friends understand multiple prayers of the same petition? Is it that the many prayers increase the effectiveness of the one petition? Or, the many prayers increase the chances that one (of many identical requests) will be answered?

Wallace 7 Aug 8
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There is Theology the study of dogma of religion and then there are the religious followers, who tend not be sophisticated or knowledgeable on the details. But religions nowdays they are sophisticated than ancient religions but they still in essence contain magical thinking. One of them is cause and effect and strength of connection. So prayer contains magic, and the more prayer more magic, magic in the sense of ability to influence or have effect on environment through external means, in this case through God and the way to seek intervention is prayer. So the more one prays the more one gets, the other which is based on ancient magical beliefs is that more people involved more powerful the magical spell, in this case more people pray the more effective the prayer. Funny how Abrahamic religions are against witchcraft and sorcery as sin or blasphemy (think is blasphemy because you are using demons or trying to have an effect through different magic instead of asking God), but in the end religion is a magical belief just like any other.

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In my evangelical days I never heard anything specifically taught about this other than the standard, "if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves ... then will I answer and heal their land". In other words, group prayer for group interests is implied to be necessary as a group expression of reliance on and submission to god.

While there was no specific teaching I recall that getting lots of people to pray would increase your chances of an "answer" for a personal need, I suppose the general thought was that the more people praying, the more chance one of them will be sufficiently pious / have sufficient faith to move god to action. Also, the bigger the thing you're asking -- victory over cancer, say, or survival of some horrible accident -- the more you want lots of people pulling for you, and prayer is seen as a valid expression of that.

Some evangelicals, especially Pentecostals and Charismatics, regard certain among them as "prayer warriors" who could do battle with the forces of evil, too. So it was not just getting god to move but getting Satanic forces to stop blocking the answer. This is where the request is to "bind" forces working against good and "loose" the forces working FOR good. To the extent people see life as a struggle between the forces of good and evil, this was another way to rationalize bad things happening to good people ... either we didn't make a good case with god, or someone stole the answer down the pipeline somewhere. We are battle-scarred casualties in a celestial conflict which is, apparently, overall pretty evenly matched other than in some ultimate future sense.

That's the thing about the promised benefits of Christianity, they are all safely in the future (or they are campfire stories safely in the distant past). God doesn't have to produce or show up or fulfill his own promises today, you just have to have faith that he will eventually. Like he used to do in the long-ago.

How convenient!

Thanks for those insights.

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Most of the things they say don’t make any sense, and I stopped listening to any of their craziness a long time ago....! Praying to God is about as effective as praying for rain in a drought.....same result too.....thirst!

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I’ve heard them say both things. I also have known people who literally prayed for EVERYTHING: health, for their husband to get a deer on a hunt, to give them a good BM. Seriously, every-damn-thing.

When asked for prayer by someone I care about, I just tell them I’m sending positive thoughts. ( Nice way of saying ‘you pray for me; I’ll THINK for you’?). Same thing if they say they’ll pray for me. Most people in my life know I’m agnostic and don’t say these things to me at all; I already told them I consider prayer like a letter to Santa or wishing on a star.

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