Thoughts On The Purpose Of Prayer.

Like the ancient Greek philosophers and 17th century Deists would point out, there's no point in prayer. God transcendes space and time. So he already knows how the story ends. And he didn't save the dinosaurs, so why would he help you find your keys?

No, all prayer is just positive thinking.

 

Lotta people praying to Jesus today...lol!
Sorry, Charlie. Jesus got sent to a prison in El Salvador! and you know what that means, right?

 

We occupy a multiverse within a singularity, that ensures the Peter Principle applies to even physical objects, making prayer sometimes mandatory. Whether you believe in God or not.

 

I had a friend in college; as a child, she told her priest that her father was raping her. He told her she must submit to her father like the Church submits to Christ. Despite her fervent prayer, God did nothing.

I had a badly broken child on a gurney from a multiple fatality MVA. I was her 'guardian angel'; there to try to resuscitate her if she coded between ER, X-Ray, CT, and OR. We were stopped in the hallway on the way to the OR so a priest could administer last rights. In that moment the very notion that she was sinful in need of remission or in any way divorced from the love of god was the most obscene and monstrous lie ever perpetrated by man; every cell of my being rebelled against it.

I transported a very elderly woman; her Alzheimer's had left her perpetually terrified; loudly crying, begging, pleading with god not to condemn her to hell; all day, all night. Nothing could comfort her. I couldn't help but marvel at a dogma so malevolent as to plant such a malicious seed in her brain, or a god so malevolent as to allow her to be tortured in such a manner in his name.

I once attended the funeral of a witch. The minister made a point of dead-naming her, mis-gendering her, and openly ridiculing her life, her beliefs, and her faith. His cold-as-ice commitment prayers were spit with a venomous sneer through a malevolent rictus grin.

I attended the funeral of a kid who enlisted on his 18th birthday to fight the perpetrators of 9/11. Instead, we sent him to Iraq; an unprovoked imperial war of aggression which killed a million people. His eulogies from friends, lovers, and family were a long litany of how deeply he was loved, but no matter how fiercely he was loved or desperately they prayed for him, in the end, he couldn't stay. They'd killed him in Iraq, but only on the inside; and all the sincere prayer in the world couldn't resurrect his soul, and he couldn't continue living without it There were no military honors rendered...yet somehow a civilian white supremacist and fascist demagogue who'd never served a day in his life was Horst Wessel-ized as an exemplar of militant White Christian manhood to the glory of god.

Pray to your imaginary friend and all the saints if that's what gives you comfort, but I've seen behind the curtain.

 

Well, anyways. Just to round off this discussion. And to make clear my beliefs if I haven't by now, on religion, etc. There might be a higher order to things. Maybe you could even call it God. But religion as an explanation for anything is still nonsense.

Just because someone put eggs throughout your house doesn't mean it was the Easter Bunny.