The prayer of praise to God and the surprising dark side of it
Let us leave aside the fact that praying for something even a bike is a prayer
of praise in the sense: "I know you are good and I can ask you this." Let us
think of prayer as being directly about praise.
Context: You rejoice in God that you have a charmed life. What about those who
have not and who went without while you lavished food on the table that is
worse. If you put others first you will be wishing they had it not you.
Anyway there are two scenarios.
Scenario 1, You are praising God for making the dice fall in your favour albeit
randomly.
Scenario 2, You think there is no random and God planned it all.
Either way you are glad you have these things even if they have been taken from
somebody else. If you deny having that attitude that makes you a worse person
not a better one.
It does not matter if you are giving permission or a command to randomness to
hurt or destroy your target. It does not have to make sense in order to show
what you are - the kind of person you are. You defy reason and turn to magic or
the irrational to try to send evil to your enemy and evade responsibility by
using the random to do it. By definition the random is not your fault.
They think the villain getting killed by lightning is random so they are happy
that if evil is going to happen to anybody it is good it happens to anybody bad.
They know that random evil does not care if you are bad or good but if it
strikes a bad person that is the bad person suffering unfairly in the sense that
the suffering is not happening because of his badness. And how can you celebrate
what happened for random means you could be the next target? Random is still
random if it happens within a boundary or if it is contained. Believers must
think they are outside the boundary and it is good that the enemy is within it!
They think they slot into a more divinely planned framework.
As bad as the villain is, being glad that nature treats him to its ruthless
aimless side is a sort of victim-blaming. To see the world as good leads to
victim blaming. So see the world as being more than just good for God is in it
and made it leads to more victim blaming as if it needs reinforcement! If the
world is good then the bad person is to blame for the random evil that hits her
or him and the victim made her or his attackers strike.
If there is no God and people think prayer works enough then it follows that
people are rejoicing in luck and it is all random and down to cold mechanical
nature.
When people are like that with random strikes of nature that dispatch evil
people we need a lot of convincing that they are incapable of trying to condone
or belittle the suffering of others in the name of God.
Thus believers condone what the random does and what risk it puts people in as
an act of worship even if this is not explicit. God is held to approve of the
condoning and condones it himself too.