> This whole prayer thing. I don't understand it.
>
> Let's take as given that there's an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful Supreme Being known as "God". Why is there need for prayer?

The fact that God is all-knowing does not make prayer ineffectual. I think that most of the difficulty people have with the concept of prayer in light of God's foreknowledge has to do with "sneaking in" of dimensions of time. It is true that God is eternal, but He is not eternal in the way that angels or humans are; technically, God could be called timeless, that is, He is Himself unaffected by time.

Because of this confusion, people seem to think that prayer cannot matter. God already knows everything anyway, so what is the point?
The point is that God knows what "will" happen because it happens. God knows that you "will" get up tomorrow (if you will) because your will in fact get up; you won't get up tomorrow BECAUSE God knows it.

This perspective is crucial, I think. God tells us to pray because prayers are accessible to God at any time. Technically, one could pray now for events that are now past to him or her, and those prayers would affect those events.


>Is God a democracy?

No, but He does seem to choose to incorporate the free prayers of humans into His plan. The bible is utterly clear about this.

Take, for example, the time in Abraham's life when God's angels were about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham discussed what would happen with God, and it mattered, not to the outcome, but to the conditions for it.

A better example is Daniel, who, knowing that God had prophesied that Israel would be free from Babylonian enslavement, prayed and fasted so that it would come to pass.

This only seems foolish if one has bound God into anthropomorphic notions of existing "somehow" in time. God freely chooses to use prayers for His ends, and can promise to answer prayers that people do not even know they will make now, because God sees all times equally.

I think the best example is what Jesus said about prayer. He promised that if you "seek first the kingdom of God, all these things [physical and other needs] will be added unto you". But when He instructs the disciples about the manner in which to pray, he tells them to pray for just those simple, everyday needs that have already been promised to them.

It can sometimes become confusing, but the instruction to pray outweighs the lack of understanding of "how it works"

frum