Transactional Prayer

A lot of people treat prayer like a business transaction. ”I pray for person A, and that person is either going to intercede on my behalf or God is going to reward me.” Is that a real prayer?

Depends on one’s intentions. If one prays only to get something in return from the great beyond, but one doesn’t actually care about the soul one supposedly prays for or one cares only for as long as there’s some kind of a benefit, then the soul is merely a tool to get something from God. Hardly a real prayer. More like a cosmic business transaction masked as a prayer.

It’s kind of like being nice to your dying parent because you want them to include you in their will. You don’t really care about your parent. It’s just an act to get their money.

When we pray for ourselves, that’s a different story. It’s only about us and our communion with the Creator. We don’t expect anything from anyone. It’s about us and God.

Why do we pray for someone who’s no longer with us? Mostly, it’s about helping that soul to get rid of pain and move on to heaven. So the soul doesn’t linger, perhaps as a spirit, perhaps as a dybbuk. Well, if there’s some kind of a purgatory, then expediting the process of salvation by cleansing the soul from sin and making it easier for that soul to get to heaven.

If someone died suddenly, they might not even know they are dead. Perhaps praying for them is going to show them that they aren’t among the living anymore? Not in the material sense, anyway. Maybe prayers are a good way to tell them, ”Hey, hate to break it to you, but you’re dead. You gotta move on now.”

Sudden deaths are as macabre as they are intriguing. Suppose a fanatic dies suddenly. A jihadi, a Z-patriot, whatever. Do they cling onto their fanaticism with an ever-increasing fervor, seeing the whole experience as God’s test, or rather realize how deluded they were? Do they feel betrayed by the ones left behind? Does the act of dying suddenly make them realize they were fooled by their ideology, thereby humbling them?

I guess, again, it depends – it’s clearly different for a suicide bomber desiring death and someone who dies in a car accident. While jihadis welcome death, people such as Z-propagandists talk about death a lot, but they’d rather see others die. Who knows, maybe a sudden death is a wakeup call for some zealots. How? Well, if you think you can’t be touched, that you can call for genocide with impunity, and then you get blown up, then, just maybe, it’s a particularly humbling experience, the road to Damascus experience, if you will.

Maybe then, in turn, the former zealots can pray for those still on Earth? That kind of prayer would indeed be non-transactional, because what can the living possibly give the dead zealots here? The living won’t even know the dead zealots pray for them. It’s a truly selfless act. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s the kind of punishment all sorts of jihadis, and other fanatics, get: forced to pray for their victims and would-be victims – forced to pray without getting anything in return. Though, to be fair, God would have a wicked sense of humor if, instead of giving a jihadi his coveted 72 houris, the jihadi got turned into the houri instead.

People who claim that women’s prayers don’t resonate with God nearly as much as men’s prayers base their assumptions either on dubious religious sources or they twist the whole idea of God’s will to fit their worldview. Would God really take a woman’s prayer less seriously when she’s the one giving birth? Who knows. Maybe some of those religious so-called scholars, and others, talking about women’s prayers being less valued by God, maybe they have some special access to God the rest of us don’t know about? But it seems infinitely more likely that it’s just a humiliation and emasculation tactic to keep women in their place (that is: the back of the temple) by hiding behind God.

It can get so ”cosmic glass ceiling” absurd that women praying for someone are seen as a nuisance that God doesn’t really resonate with, or worse yet, God gets annoyed by, so the women are discouraged from praying until the ones with the real prayer power, with the real link to God, arrive.

I’m not aware of any passages in sacred texts that tell us God doesn’t take women’s prayers seriously. Why would a self-aware infinity be so petty? Seems like a human invention to me. And then we wonder why God making someone a woman is seen as a punishment…

It’s a shame so many people can’t see that… or are unwilling to, because it’s convenient.

My mind conjures up an image of my militant atheist acquaintance (who calls the idea of soul copium for fools afraid of the dark) reading the above, shaking his head and saying, ”Make-believe nonsense. Death is lights out. Forever. End of.”