In establishing
a covenant through Moses, the “children of Israel” were given the Ten Commandments which
then formed the basis of law for a social grouping that would accrue to the
benefit of the people. In return, the people, through their congregation,
subsequently owed their allegiance to God who would judge their individual
adherence to the laws provided. The basic tenets of Islam also surmise injunctions
with the provision of a mechanism through which each person’s obeisance of the
law is rendered. Thus, we see the foundation of a religious trust
infrastructure and a basic policy infrastructure. It is within this environment
that prayer has true meaning. The laws of the policy infrastructure establish
the manner in which members of the social system are allowed to interact with
each other and the base covenant relationship provides a framework of trust
within which the individuals can interact with the deity. Certainly, within the
foundation elements of the United States government we can identify all of these
same characteristics, albeit with the primary purveyor of trust, the
Constitution, being purposely distanced from deity through the establishment of
freedom of religion. However, we will later consider this positioning within an
encompassing higher ecosystem.
Well, by this
point, we’ve immersed ourselves a bit in the specific theologies of Christianity,
Islam and Judaism. Hopefully, this still very cursory view is moderately
accurate with respect to a layman’s understanding of the basis of these
religious structures. However, the real intent of this discussion is to
reinforce the idea that prayer forms a structured interaction mechanism among
the members of a covenant relationship; further among people and their god or,
in associated forms, as with a call to the President for clemency, among people
and their government or other trust infrastructure. What is interesting about
this is that the covenant in question then defines an infrastructure of rules
within which interactions occur; interactions which include their own specific
rules. Thus, many rules, considerations and consequences flow from this
infrastructure as opposed to solely from the specific interaction in question.
This, then, becomes a recursive mechanism through which hierarchical trust and
policy infrastructures can themselves interact.
Prayer seems to
serve at least two common functions. At its most basic, prayer constitutes a
ritual process that reinforces the trust infrastructure of the social system.
Beyond this basic construct, the act of prayer also forms an individual or
collective, highly structured interaction mechanism that encompasses interactions
with a deity. While the mechanism reaches a level of almost formal
specification with more recent religions, this extended facility may have
evolved from forms of animism in which various spirits (minor deities) were
ascribed to most of the common objects encountered by people in their everyday
lives. Within such a context, virtually any interaction involved some
association with such a deity and hence was related to prayer. This perhaps
belies the observation that modern prayer, at least in some religions, often
seems to adopt a near-conversational style.
As we said,
trust and policy infrastructures are organized recursively, which means that
there are trust and policy infrastructures that are included in and subordinate
to other trust and policy infrastructures. When we use the term trust
infrastructure in singular and without qualification, we mean in general the
top trust infrastructure of the social ecosystem as well as subordinate trust
infrastructures within that ecosystem; and similarly with the term policy
infrastructure. We say that a trust infrastructure governs a policy
infrastructure to formally express that policy infrastructures are subsumed by
trust infrastructures.
We then consider
prayer to be an interaction of persons within a group that involves the trust
infrastructure of the social ecosystem within which that group exists. This
description encompasses religions such as Buddhism that do not involve deities.
Prayer follows the rules of the social ecosystem’s trust and policy
infrastructures to create an interaction involving both the
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