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.

I don't use the psychological model to describe the spiritual world. I actually do really believe in the existence or good and evil spirits as well as a real God. I cant just shift it away because for me they are really there. Well God maybe teaching me a lesson or I may of spoken wrongly to an angel. I was talking to myself saying that God let free the evil angels upon the earth to deceive man after they were misusing the teachings of enoch. maybe I'm being punished.

I think this wasn't the point of what Kath was suggesting, exactly, though I may be mistaken. Perhaps the face this entity was showing you, was one which would resonate with that darker part of your own nature - whether to show you how much that part of yourself scares you, or in order to communicate on that level. This isn't a psychological model of a spiritual world, but acceptance of a psychological world within yourself, which must necessarily set the boundaries of how a spiritual entity can interact with you. It must be within the framework of your own psyche, or it will be outside of your awareness.

By making an internal psychological adjustment to yourself, you can transcend the fear response and achieve a companionship/comfort zone with the entity - or possibly simply the face that the entity is wearing - to reach some critical understanding that may only be possible by experiencing that part of yourself.

Like the universe itself, angels and demons, good and evil, both can be creative and destructive. We are always in awe and wonder at Creation, and we are always Terrified to the soul of Destruction. We are warmed by purification, and chilled by corruption. But these reactions, wither we hold a psychological or spiritual model of the world on any level, are purely psychological, not spiritual. Nothing your brain experiences is spiritual - its all chemicals making you feel things, and those chemical changes, while they do reflect spiritual pressures, are independant of spiritual phenomenon all together. In other words, you are able to have a sense of terror in the face of Creation/Good/Purification, as well as a sense of awe and love for Destruction/Evil/Corruption. Maybe your angel was attempting to show you something you could not otherwise discover.

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...

whatever.

You made the distinction yourself between prayer and magic.

In prayer we ask.

In magic we tell.

Prayer is passive and is an act of devotion, of supplication, of worship.

Magic is active - and act of Will, Empowerment, and Transcendence.

When we pray, we hope that we will be answered by and in the limitless Wisdom of the Divine, for all the best.

We we do Magic, we ask to be Partners with the Divine, that they may work with us, not for us, to accomplish our ends.

You think the bible seems different when we replace 'God' with 'The Universe'? Try taking 'God' out of it all together - then it's a long history of madmen, endless bloody war, murder, chauvanism, mutilation, and natural disasters. A lot less pretty, isn't it? Funny word, 'God', isn't it?

peace