How Should We React to Their Prayers?

“Or does it just make you mad when you hear that’s the recourse people are taking?”

Nah. 🙂

The mayor here in Saskatoon has a prayer breakfast scheduled for tomorrow. I know my Freethinker group was hoping to contact the media to have a say about that nonsense, but I haven’t heard how that went yet. I also know that at least one of them wrote a letter to the paper about this. A Christian evangelical-sponsored $30 breakfast is hardly the way to celebrate Saskatoon’s cultural diversity.

hey, it worked for gas priced 2 years ago, right?

What are you thinking when you hear about others’ prayer attempts?

It’s like a chocolate-covered turd. There are those who taste only the chocolate, and they’re happy. There are those who suspect the centre isn’t as appealing as the outside, but politely play along with the first group. And there are those of us who would be happy enough to let the first group be happy if they’d stop offering us a bite and telling us how wonderful it is.

Whether it’s praying or sacrificing goats or swinging dead cats over your head or holding seances to commune with the dead, it’s all putting effort into an activity to change the future. It is a way for people to be doing something to feel in control.

The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything. Therefore the all the effort is wasted. So instead of preforming an activity that really has a chance of working, they comfort themselves with the idea that they are supernaturally altering events. It’s a very ineffective placebo. This is pretend, and although, it may be fun, pretending you’re growing food doesn’t really do it. Pretending you’re building shelter doesn’t get you a house. Pretending you’re changing the future into what you want it to be doesn’t truly do it.

And by the time you realize it, it may be too late. And there lies the danger.

Blessed Atheist Bible Study.

Actually, if you know that people are praying for you, you tend to do worse. This is what the study of the effects of prayer on heart patients found. If you knew that people were praying for you, then you tended to spend longer in hospital and have a worse outcome then the control group. So I tend to prefer if they keep their meddling prayers to themselves if I’m ill. I already have enough to deal with without having to fight against damaging prayers, too.

First off, prayer “studies” are total bullshit because of the fact that there’s no possible way to tell if the groups that are not being prayed for in the studies aren’t being prayed for by family and friends. Not to mention that there was absolutely no difference in overall mortality between the two groups in the biggest/most well known prayer study. (Here’s a wonderful critique of that study: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/gary_posner/godccu.html)

As to whether or not prayer pisses me off, the answer is yes. Yes, it does. It pisses me off that there are so many people who are that ignorant. And it pisses me off that a group of idiots would rather stand around talking to their invisible friend instead of taking action to help the situation.

I recently underwent chemo and radiation treatment for cervical cancer and I can’t begin to count the number of “I’m praying for yous” I received. While I understand they were given with good intentions, it still made me want to scream to hear it. How about save the prayers and do something that would actually be of help? You know, offer to babysit or bring over some food so my poor husband could catch a break? Grrrrr.

Given that Acuff’s blog is one of my other favorites, I’ve gotta’ stand up and say that he has also rallied some huge support to build two kindergarten classrooms in Vietnam because his daughter asked about a little boy who didn’t have food to eat. He could have just asked for prayer support, but he also asked people to do something, and they did. I believe in less than 24 hours, they raised enough for one, and had the second paid for within a week or so.

Prayer coupled with action is fine by me, because as far as I can see, everybody wins in that situation.

I just think, “What harm can it do?”
Clearly it is a waste of time, but is there really anything this church can do? If praying helps them to feel that they are doing something, then so be it.
What upsets me is what they can do in the voting booth.

Actions speak louder than prayers.

Prayer without action is hopeless. Action without prayer is efficient.

I see their prayers as way for them to “feel” as though they are doing something to help without really doing anything at all. I find it rather disturbing and dangerous. This form of inaction has the potential to leave critical issues unaddressed, so the issues worsen and potentially lead to some demise.

So I react with disgust and disappointment.

This is like an e-mail I received earlier this week. It was asking me to pray for a cure for cancer. My response was to give a donation to the American Cancer Society. “The hard work of one does more than the prayers of millions.”

I see prayer as someone having an internal dialogue with themselves.

(I tried to post a comment to a different article here a few days ago and it never got through, so I am testing posting before I post a real comment.)

I wouldn’t say that prayer makes me mad per say. It does however annoy me. What is annoying is that people think they are “taking action” to fix their dilemma. Praying to end your unemployment doesn’t hep anyone, but applying for jobs does.

Prayer isn’t too bad when it is something that is truly outside of our control. Natural Disasters, tumors, etc.; we can’t effect these things and praying does give some people solace.

I am only irritated because I am irritated that people still believe in god at all, even though I used to be one of those indoctrinated people with a similar blind-spot in my ability to reason when it came to god and I believed in god for many years. Now that I know he doesn’t and never existed, I feel like someone who lives in a society that worships Zeus and tries to push him on people like us who know he is fake.

I just try to focus on the wonderful fact that more and more people are realizing and admitting that there is no god (or at least admit there is no “personal” god, and just continue to think there is “something” out there). And my main concern while the mental virus of belief in god continues to exist in so many people, is not whether or not they prayer but that we keep those beliefs they have that are silly out of government and laws.

I’m always at a total loss for how to address these prayer efforts. The problem for me is that they simultaneously serve to do two things which are of conflicting value, and whether to address it leaves me thinking I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

On the one hand, it IS a coping mechanism, and I’m very reluctant to barge into someone’s personal coping mechanism. On the other hand, it’s also too often a substitute or a barrier to actually doing anything useful, because “we’ve just put it into God’s hands”. So in order to deal with the inevitable inaction, I must also step on the coping mechanism. The Christians do have a way of putting us in a really awkward position, don’t they?

Apart from spreading the message of rough times within the closed community of the church group, I don’t see Prayer has having any real effect. — Again a coping mechanism for some.

But the fact is apart from taking action – write congress, petition, offer job placement etc. It might be in [other] cases nothing can be done. ‘Prayer’ then is a colloquialism for offering sympathy.

Granted it falls flat when ideas of God, or the purpose of prayer differ.

The new proposal has the potential to put a lot of people out of work, depending on how the budget is implemented.

Simultaneously true and not true. It will indeed put people out of work in one area, but the overall budget is just moving the money to a different area, so it’ll create an approximately equal amount of new jobs in the different area and the overall effect on the economy will be nil. In situations like these, I think people have the tendency to forget that government isn’t magic: it should be treated exactly like any other corporation, except that it has the capacity to kill or imprison you. As a result, it can shift production from one area to another to benefit a favored constituency/campaign donor, or it can make laws that ban production in certain areas entirely, but nothing it can do will logically lead to their being a single job more than there would have been if the government ceased to exist altogether.

hoverFrog: b) Write to your representatives in local and state government expressing your concerns and seek some sort of plan to mitigate the job losses. Defer the action to someone with power.

An action so much worse than useless it makes prayer look good in comparison. Power exists to serve the powerful, which the jobless are not, pretty much by definition. The politicians will ignore the letters they receive unless the letters advocate what the politician was planning on doing anyway, in which case they will be trotted out as evidence that the politician is serving the “will of the people.” And, just as prayer, it gives people the illusion that they’re doing something, thus preempting real action.

I roll my eyes at this sort of thing, but it doesn’t bother me beyond the sad recognition that they could be spending the time and organizational efforts doing something actually useful.

What DOES bother me is when something good happens (or something bad improves) and people chalk it up to “the power of prayer,” knowingly, like because a few people put in a good word with God, everything turned out alright. They’re aware of all the people who die in horrible pain despite lots of prayers, right? Or the people who stay unemployed and impoverished despite prayers, right? The “power of prayer” assertions just leave me with the impression that the people saying it are extremely callous and self-congratulatory, as if they had a hand in what was really luck or skilled doctors or professional search-and-rescue teams, etc.

I hate prayer. Like many mentioned above, I find only the lazy pray. Some do it as a coping, but in the end they are just to lazy to do anything out of there ‘routine’. Case in point: I was in the hospital, and I found out all my loving friends and family just prayed. I have a large family, and not one card showed up, or visit. Yet they all expect me to send them stuff when they are in the hospital.

Um, excuse me?

The universe is a vast and frightening place. To some of those people, the thought of being adrift, alone and vulnerable in such a universe without having any input at all is beyond terrifying. Others get a sense of smug self-satisfaction knowing that they are so important that the creator of the universe saw fit to listen to their special requests. It all comes down to the imagined ability to effect change in your environment. Motives may differ from one believer to the next, but it is always about control in the end. Some want control because they are afraid and others because they are smug and arrogant jerks. Prayer is an equal opportunity vehicle for the deluded.
Yes, there are many people who use prayer as an excuse for doing nothing, but I am not convinced that this is something they all do consciously. Many really do believe that they can and do have a chance of exerting some degree of control over others and the world about them by prayer.
How to react? Accept it as part of the human condition and move on for the most part. If someone tells you that they are praying for you or a loved one, I would respond graciously and if my needs went beyond that, I would request physical assistance. If their offer of prayer came from a true desire to help, they will gladly help you. If they refuse to help or start to squirm uncomfortably, tell them not to worry about it, and that they can pass on the prayers as well. To be honest, most of these types don’t really pray for others anyway. It’s a Christian way of being polite, that’s all. Now, if there’s a chance to put on a public or group display of piety…well, that’s quite often a different story. They’ll show up in droves for that.

@Miko,
Again, speaking in absolutes, a sure giveaway that someone with little to no real world experience is pontificating. You offer no alternative to hoverfrog’s suggestions. Also, you offer absolutely no proof to back up your blatantly false assertion. I know from personal experience as well as the experience of others that communication with those holding political office, can, on occasion produce results – of course, not always and certainly not always the results we want. Your assertions are at odds with reality. Not a good sign for someone whose non-belief is supposed to be based in an adherence to logic.

It really can’t be stressed enough that science and prayer, by their current nature, can NOT measure each other.

The studies showing the same brain activation, regardless of what the person is praying to/practicing magic with/whathaveyou are much more relevant to these debates.

I’m going to go with *facepalm* on this one.

It just hit me what they’re doing. People created religion to explain the universe before they had the science to explain it properly. Now they use prayer to feel like they’re doing something useful in a situation where they’re powerless to do anything.

That would be fine, except that they also use prayer even when they’re not powerless and could be doing something useful instead.

It’s a compete waste of time but at least they’re occupied with something that won’t cause any harm. Heck, I wish some RRRWers would pray 24/7.

Then why on earth did you just spill so much ink decrying and mocking it? Is this how you make a difference?

Brad, there’s a difference between criticism and denying people the right to do something. You have the right to pray, and we have the right to criticize you for doing it. That’s part of living in a free society. You are likewise free to criticize us for doing things that you disagree with.

I’ve never seen anyone on this blog say that legal action should be taken against people for engaging in various religious activities. However, the vast majority of us do not believe that those activities are helpful or virtuous or moral simply because they are religious in nature. Most of us would disagree that faith is some kind of virtue.

If someone really believes in an all-Powerful Creator. Would they not be doing something wrong if they did not ask Him to help?
If I really believed in a place called Hell (and I do) and never warned you about it, how wrong would I be then?
It should not make you mad that we pray. If we are wrong (like you think) then words do not hurt anything, but if we are right…