Prayer seems to be a practice as old as humanity itself — an act that was likely born out of feelings of intense anxiety or fear or sometimes as an obligation to show gratefulness for good things undeserved.

When you are suffering or others are suffering and answers seem to evade you and you cannot make sense of pain, calamity and pretty much any negative human experience, then what?

If you subscribe to one of earth’s several organized religions, then you PRAY. Prayer is in large part, mankind’s attempt to control chaos. And oddly enough, the people I know personally that are “prayer warriors” are some of the most stressed, anxiety-ridden people I know.

Prayer also gives you a sense of both accomplishment (cue the dopamine hit!) and a sense of confidence and hope that your negative experience (or someone else’s) will be diminished.

And honestly —- take your pick of any religion; they all have someone to pray to.

Religions all assert that only their God/Gods are the ones that will hear and maybe respond to your prayer.

Christianity - God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit
Islam - Allah
Judaism - HYWH, Adonai, HaShem
Hinduism - Brahman, Vishnu, Shiva, Lakshmi, Durga, Ganesha
Buddhism - Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Mahayana, Theravada
Sikhism - Waheguru
Taoism - Dao
Shinto - Kami
Indigenous / Tribal - nature spirits, ancestors
Bahai Faith - God

Webster defines the word:
PRAY : (v) To make a request in a humble manner. // To address God or a god with adoration, confession, supplication, or thanksgiving.

The traditional view of this word usually involves a human closing their eyes, perhaps making some gesture with their hands, possibly aiming their closed eyes up and it involves them thinking thoughts or verbally expressing the deepest and most vulnerable thoughts. (And make sure you take your hat off, because all-powerful deities that are somehow always located ABOVE you can’t hear you if there is cloth on top of your hair. 😉)

So what do you do when you make this super natural phone call and nobody is actually there on the other line?

I mean — when there is nothing truly audible on the other end of the line.

You don’t hear anything, you just have thoughts — which of course, also happens when you have internal dialogue with yourself and get lost in your thoughts.

Thoughts about yourself; thoughts about others. Thoughts about everything. 🤔

To dismantle prayers from being supernatural and being nothing more than inner dialogue or spoken thoughts, let’s examine two primary types of prayers, where one prays for self and one prays for others (this is often referred to as intercessory).

My commentary on prayer is specifically with the “asking of things” (eg - “vending machine God”), not the “being grateful for things” part of prayer — I happen to believe that gratefulness/thankfulness are healthy behaviors and since they do not require a deity to actually respond (or not respond), I’ll leave that out of this particular blog.

Prayer for self:

Many years before I dropped a belief in Hell, I had started suffering with chronic pain conditions that plague me to this day. Unrelenting widespread pain, 24/7; nightly prayer/begging/pleading sessions had become the norm.

I’d do anything to get out of pain — “why wasn’t God sparing me from this?!?”

I’d try making deals with God, try living a more moral life, ANYTHING… not to mention all of those (who knew of my affliction) praying for me shortly after that time.

Around 2009, I finally realized that my prayers were quite literally doing nothing… they didn’t change the condition I was in; they frustrated me and they certainly didn’t convince some sort of higher power to heal my disease.

I realized that prayer was not sort of cosmic vending machine ritual and that… well, that it didn’t do anything.

So I stopped.

And my frustration stopped. 😲

My pain? Oh — that continued, but my mind was at peace with the fact that there wasn’t anyone/anything keeping healing from me because I wasn’t praying the right words or praying enough.

It is a form of self torture to be suffering and to be told that this all-powerful kind and loving deity that COULD heal you is just deciding NOT TO.

—

I also remember the anguish of my dear sister Joy had when she repeatedly begged for relief from God from her mental health battles only to be met with decades of suffering and eventual death as a result of inability to cope with the mental pain.

There was NO answer to her prayer or the prayers from all of the friends and family that also desperately wanted relief for her.

I remember reading her journals after she passed and there were so many pages of confusion and frustration of God “not answering her prayers”…

Unanswered “prayers to a loving God" do not match up with a life experience that has such intense suffering.

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Also, how does one reconcile “God deciding to answer MY prayers” while ignoring those of others, especially when people pray for trite meaningless trinkets while others are begging for relief from torture?

Prayer for others (intercessory prayer):

Further movement away from prayer led me to see the insanity of it all, arrogantly attributing divine intervention to selfish choices while being blissfully ignorant of those in absolute anguish… the whole “thoughts and prayers” movement further created a distaste for this behavior especially when used as a replacement for actual effective action.

Sure, there may be good intentions with prayer, but it is in effect, a practice that when used during a time of need, doesn’t ever accomplish resolution action for the party/parties in question.

I’ll concede that the act of prayer may help the one praying as a form of meditation, but it doesn’t change any outcome of anything external (whether for yourself or for others).

I like this anonymous commentary on the concept of praying for others:

No, prayers aren’t nice at all.
Prayers are dangerous.
Prayers are a way for people to convince themselves they’ve done something, when they’ve actually done nothing.
Prayers seem to absolve people of taking on the responsibility of demanding change.
Prayers pass the buck onto an imaginary being.
Prayers ensure that the problem will persist.

Interestingly enough, studies have been done to actually prove that intercessory prayer does not change any outcome.

On the subject of answered/unanswered prayers:

If you get what you pray for then do you believe that “God answered you and that prayer works”?
Confirmation bias is real, folks.
If you pray for sunshine and the sun shines, did you cause it by praying?
…or was the sun already going to shine?
What are the odds that the sun was going to shine on that particular day?
Also, why are nearly all prayers for things that can and do happen naturally?
Why doesn’t anyone pray for wings or for unicorns to spontaneously appear?
Try staring at a raw egg and pray for it to be cooked. Shocker: it never will.
If you were choking, would you prefer that someone perform the Heimlich maneuver on you or prayed for you?
And if your prayer is not answered how you prayed it to be, then well, is it reduced to “God works in mysterious ways”? Prayer is like chronic gambling — you never talk about your losses, you just use your “wins” to legitimize going back to it.
🫠

So — as a former praying Christian, where am I now?

Well, for starters, I have much less heaven-sent anxiety, frustration and disappointment in my life as I know there isn’t a deity withholding good from myself or others.

This provides much internal peace and lines up with all I understand and have experienced in both life and what I’ve observed in suffering and death.

For obvious reasons, I take issue with the “thoughts and prayers” movement, which I see horribly abused on social media, reducing a human’s response to someone else’s plight to this:

🙏🙏🙏

Yeah… we click a prayer emoji button three times. Gross.

Sure, some people might have “thoughts” after they click, but we all know that many just click a button and then go about their merry way while someone else is still suffering and there is something we can do about it.

So yeah — I don’t pray at all anymore and haven’t done so in many, many years.

I don’t pray when I’m worried about myself.

I don’t pray before eating food.

I don’t pray for others when they are suffering.

Instead:

I do work on personal health, trying to reduce disease and living a healthy and peace-filled life. I work hard to manage personal finances to the best of my abilities. I control the controllable.

I am oh-so-thankful for food and make an effort to display that gratefulness to those that prepared the food.

I do my best to be aware of others so I can tangibly help and encourage them.

If humanity lifted a finger and acted each time they felt the impulse to pray, the benefits to themselves and others would be immeasurable.