Praying To God Options

yeah so i was thinking in the shower
not about magic
yet for some reason i had some sort of idea.

Is praying to god magic?
is it magic under the paradigm that if you ask this enigmatic being for a favor that he will reply and help with good faith?

and then i thought more?

isnt ordinary magic the exact same thing, except instead of asking a being
we tell the universe...
and in some cases we do ask a being
like in a summoning of a demon?

And if that's true, then if you replace God with universe in the bible, it is more like things were guided into place by fate, and not by a bearded sociopath?
and it becomes something entirely different?

idk really
i just dont think much about Christianity because i am not a christian at all so

whatever.

yeah so i was thinking in the shower
not about magic
yet for some reason i had some sort of idea.

Is praying to god magic?
is it magic under the paradigm that if you ask this enigmatic being for a favor that he will reply and help with good faith?

and then i thought more?

isnt ordinary magic the exact same thing, except instead of asking a being
we tell the universe...
and in some cases we do ask a being
like in a summoning of a demon?

And if that's true, then if you replace God with universe in the bible, it is more like things were guided into place by fate, and not by a bearded sociopath?
and it becomes something entirely different?

idk really
i just dont think much about Christianity because i am not a christian at all so

Well a loose definition of magick is its the practice of manipulating one's reality to produce some sort of intended gain, either for the self or someone else. When I think back to my Christian days as a kid when we'd pray at church, at least from my immature view of the world, when we'd pray at church we did it just because that is what I thought we were suppose to do. There wasn't any congitive awareness on my part that I was suppose to gain anything from it other than to be a good Christian.

So I think for the most part when people pray that only do it to be part of the crowd. In church everyone else is praying and if you do not also pray you kinda stand out. But even my Grandma still regularly says her roseries every night. She has dementia. I can't imagine that she is praying to hope for anything tangible that I could think of. On the other hand I do believe that people sort of use prayer as a way to try to talk to God and "ask" for something. Which any serious Christian who knows anything about Christianity knows that God only helps those who help themselves. That trading prayers for food or money is pretty silly and really not the point of prayer at all. As I understand it, since I myself am not a devote of Christianity, the point of prayer is not to gain anything from it but instead to honor God and the covenant made between man and God from the old testiment.

The practice of magick can overlap in some ways. Again, prayer is not suppose to be about personal gain. It can be for the gain of others as in praying for the poor or sick. So there you have prayer as a form of magick.

As for fate versus predestination at the hand of Gandolf... err God.... is there really a difference? Ultimately I think reducing God to nothing more than a human with incredible abilities really short changes the true nature of God. God is suppose to be a being that is beyond human wisdom. That is not to say aspects of God can not be used to achieve closeness to God. The point is in the infanite nature of God you could go to the bible and replace the word "God" with "Waldo". The word God doesn't not define God. Its simply our human expression for the nature of some insanely vastly powerful being/force that makes us and all our accomplishments look like fungus on a petrie dish. We could argue that all of nature is not already predestined to unfold in a certain way. But if you incorperate theoretical sciences the idea that all that is was and ever will be has already come to past and we are just at a finite point in time on space/time continuum then yeah.... predestination.