On Casting Lots, <i>Amor Fati</i>, Prayer, and Magic

Have you ever reflected about casting lots in the bible? Why don’t modern Christians use this decision-making mechanism? It’s biblical, is it not?

My friend Matt Richie just posted on this topic. I made the following comment to Matt’s post:

I’ve often struggled with this [issue of casting lots]. Even in the NT we see casting lots to make important decisions. Why don’t modern Christians do the same?

I think the issue boils down to ancient versus modern views of human agency. Ancient people were much more fatalistic, and in a good way. Amor fati was a big deal. In our modern world, we don’t like amor fati. We like to think we control our own decisions. Plus, we feel the need to make our decision come out “right.” We fear the sub-optimal outcome. Why? Because our inflated sense of agency makes us feel responsible for the outcome.

Thus, I don’t think we cast lots because we have lost our amor fati. We want to CONTROL the outcome. We are not interested in RECONCILING ourselves to outcomes. Thus, although we “consult” God in prayer we rarely let the choice fall completely outside our powers. We won’t, literally and figuratively, roll the dice.

All this makes me think of the distinctions anthropologists make between religion and magic.

Generally, religion is relational. That is, in a religion, to use an economic metaphor, “goods and services” are exchanged between the people and the gods. The gods have expectations of the people (e.g., worship, gifts) and the people have expectations of the gods (e.g., protection, good harvest, rain in West Texas). And because religions are relational the dance between people and the gods can get complicated, with lots of potential for hurt feelings on both sides (read the Old Testament for just one example of this emotional rollercoaster ride).

Magic is different from religion. Magic is not relational. Magic is a kind of spiritual technology where a “spell” is performed to compel some supernatural agent to perform an action (e.g., curse or attack an enemy, cure an illness). Note the idea of compulsion or force.

Sometimes I wonder about prayer as a form of magic. This may be a strained comparison as I do think prayer is more relational than technological, metaphysically speaking. But sometimes in church it feels like people are praying to get a very specific response from God, like a sign or a cure. I don’t know, but those prayers feel “magical” to me, as a way of using prayer as a spiritual technology, a way of compelling a response from God.

But, oddly, casting lots strikes me differently. When you cast a lot you’re just trying to get some information. You don’t really have an expectation about the outcome, unlike with a prayer for a specific outcome you want to see. Thus, compared to certain kinds of petitionary prayer, casting lots looks a lot less magical to me.

Now, how weird is that? Casting lots as less magical than prayer.