There’s nothing to be won or lost by including outside context or narrowly defining the meaning of each word to prove what is or isn’t contradictory.

You’re the one who’s been calling it contradictory.

This isn’t an argument over what the language means.

You said it was “contradictory” and “completely different” and implied it was not “rational”. The only way to prove that is to define what the language means.

You keep adding something that was never in my original post, then arguing against what you yourself added to try invalidate the exercise on the basis of your personal interpretation.

Your personal interpretation of the language is irrelevant, it’s the priest and/or the smoker’s interpretation that matters.

You made up a scenario that can’t exist in real life by making each word only have one definition to the priest/smoker, not clarifying what definitions the priest/smoker have and what the grammar means to them, then asserting that they would answer the question differently based on your personal interpretation of the words (which you haven’t proved that they would based on their definitions of the words). It’s nonsense and doesn’t tell us anything about real-life behavior because the premise is flawed.

Just like the trolley problem, it’s a self-contained thought exercise. But instead of illustrating a difficult ethical choice, it demonstrates a point about language shaping reasoning.

In both cases, there is no conclusion due to the lack of context. That is their similarity.

If you believe, like I do, that the answer changes because their reasoning was shallow and contradictory, also valid.

You haven’t come up with a scenario that actually proves that.

If you dislike my example this much, create your own.

If we take your example, add in the context of an average English speaker but with the assumption that the religion only has one way to pray, the priest understands that smoking while praying is problematic, and the priest understands that praying while smoking is helpful, but has never put the two ideas together, then the answers could be contradictory. But that is because of a flawed thought pattern with different ideas being activated by the two different questions with different focal points, not because of the sentences themselves.

Take a priest who has put those ideas together. Then because the priest understood that praying while smoking is helpful, the priest’s religion is probably not strict about it, so the priest could logically assume non-strict definitions of the word “may” (because the strict definition doesn’t apply here) and that the main action of the sentence is mandatory, then give those responses as a ranking based on what is ideal so they aren’t contradictory.

If the religion does strictly prohibit smoking and praying simultaneously, then the priest would only answer “yes” to either of those questions if they didn’t know or remember that fact, they were distracted, they were lying intentionally, or they were in a mentally unstable state that caused them to say “yes” for a different reason.