Praying like a begging dog

I'm a sucker for dogs, too. My social networking name on Beliefnet is "doxieman" for my dachshund.

But I still think there's a big difference between dog-begging and human prayers.

absolutely, we must pray as sam...

"We have gone long stretches of time - months - without giving her anything. Still, she will follow and sit and look up at us with her big, big brown eyes and make us feel guilty about not giving her food. She doesn't whine. She doesn't bark. She just sits and looks.

I just gave her a poached egg and then it dawned on me that I need to pray like Sam begs for food - constantly, expectantly, and with big eyes."

In behavioral psychology, we call what you do to your dog "intermittent reinforcement".

Animals who are NEVER rewarded for a behavior quickly cease performing a behavior and after a few unsuccessful attempts to gain a reward, find something else to do with their time. Animals that are rewarded every time they perform a behavior perform that behavior a whole lot, but will quit doing it if the reward is permanently removed. However, if you want an animal to perform a behavior over the longest period of time, you only reward it occasionally, unpredictably, stretching out the spaces between rewards until you rarely or never give them a reward for the behavior. By that time, the behavior may become either so intrinsically rewarding or so ingrained, that the animal may continue to do it forever, habitually.

So, assuming prayer has all the possible award scenarios above, and their outcomes, what does that say about what our expectations should be when we do it? If we pray to get something, and don't, what does that do to our subsequent use of prayer? If what we expect to get is something intrinsically rewarding- a sense of peace, or direction-won't that be the most rewarding use of prayer?