Doing Nothing

Welcome welcome, today's topic is prayer. Yes that's right, it is time to take the magnifying glass to another building block of faith, or as I like to picture them, ants.

Such a serious topic. You disagree? Go look at the search results for 'prayer' on google images. Look how serious those people look!

If this guy was any more serious, he'd be in a gravitas-off with Stone Phillips. Alright, so we've established that prayer is a central, important activity for the faithful, and even extends beyond the boundaries of one religion. It makes its presence known in each of 'the big three', as well as variations in many other spiritual outlets around the world. However, prayer obviously comes in as many flavours as Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Some light candles, some get out the doormat, some wash, some make a sign, and some don't eat. Whatever the case, what actually happens when someone prays?

I recall wondering this same question when I was a child and feeling disappointed that everyone else seemed to 'get it' while I had no idea what was going on. I was told that prayer was a chance for me to 'talk to God' or 'have a conversation', and when I looked around at all the other kids deep in concentration, I figured they were actually conversing with God. I didn't understand why when I closed my eyes and concentrated, nothing happened. Literally. I heard my own voice in my head, then waited for a reply, only to be greeted with silence. I wondered what I was doing wrong that all the other kids got to hear what god sounds like, but I couldn't. It wasn't until I was much older that I became aware that I wasn't the only one getting god's answering machine. So without all the pomp and reverence, prayer is:

Closing your eyes, concentrating, then talking to yourself.

How, then, is praying any different than making a wish, or even daydreaming? You go through the same actions, although maybe thinking about a different subject, and you get the same answers. Oh, but prayer is addressed to God, you say. I used to address my christmas list to Santa until I figured out that unless my parents were cc'ed a copy, I probably wouldn't be seeing those presents. There is physically nothing different when a person says a prayer for their sick child and when they wish for them to get better. Labelling it as a 'prayer' doesn't somehow send out a beam of spiritual energy to empower the petitioner. Apparently, a few religious leaders have realized the stupidity of this 'talking to oneself' and come up with a new form of prayer they call Listening Prayer which involves convincing people that the reason they're not hearing god speak to them is because they're doing it wrong and simply aren't 'tuned-in' to god while they pray. Oh my, aren't we being pretentious now? Well I can be churlish, so for the rest of this post, we'll refer to prayer by a new name: Doing Nothing.

When someone says to you "I'll pray for you", I don't thank them, I say thanks for nothing, because in essence what they've said to you is "I care about you, but not enough that I'd actually get off my ass and do something to help you".

But prayer doing nothing works, you say! Does it? Well, despite what your personal experience might lead you to believe, when you take large numbers of people (an appropriate sample size) and run the tests under controlled conditions, there is no effect. Perhaps your great aunt's miraculous recovery gained its strength from the fact that she had the social support of a family that loved her and hoped she got better, or maybe another phenomenon that is not fully understood played some part, such as the placebo effect. Francis Galton showed this over one hundred years ago with his study on Royals and the efficiacy of doing nothing. It does nothing to further our understanding of what is happening by attributing the reason to a force that is beyond our comprehension or control. In fact, I have always considered the 'God is beyond our understanding' argument to be incredibly weak, simply because if he was truly beyond our understanding, that invalidates any claims that the religious can make about him. Unless of course those who say this are actually arrogant enough to believe they posess mental powers that the rest of the population does not, as Bill Maher so eloquently put in his film Religulous. I'm getting off-topic though.

In the end, I think we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we're so special that when we close our eyes and open our hearts, there will always be a person listening to us and to us specifically. No matter how lonely we our, how much everyone else hates us, there is an operator on our mental line who never needs to put us on hold. What a comforting, yet naive thought. What it comes down to is the reason for your doing nothing. Do you want to actually do something about the problem, or do you just want to feel better about it? Atheists such as myself don't have the luxury of this choice, although I'm sure actually doing something about a problem would probably have a greater effect in the end.

As Robert Ingersoll once said, "Hands that help are far better than lips that pray".