It is indeed a great metaphor for life. (See one of Alun’s comments above.)

No Birdman, I don’t think you’re a “stupid Christian.” I don’t challenge anyone’s right to believe things that I don’t. I object when these beliefs form the basis for social organisations. I appreciate your goodwill in offering to pray for me, even if I see no point to the act.

Karen
Again, such thoughtful honesty. Total respect for you (like Ted Goas above)

My own thoughts on your friend would be to offer the unsolicited advice, on a “do as you would be done by” principle. You’d want someone to tell you if you were risking your life and other people’s lives. She could kill people. That must be more important than her resenting your meddling.

And yes, I know I’m offering unsolicited advice myself, here. 🙂 I always do. It’s usually ignored. I get plenty as well and usually ignore it.

So for me, this morals/ethics stuff needs a lot of continuous thought, but I do have a guiding rule.

As for eternal love and hope, I’m a geologist; I think a lot about Deep Time, and I have enough trouble getting my mind around the 4.5 billion year history of our planet, never mind eternity. My hope is to continue expanding the circle of people that I love, and caring for them. I’ve realized the human capacity to love is quite expandable, and the more you love others, the more others you can love, and the more people ultimately get cared about. And love, in all it’s myriad forms, is the true source of joy. (I think I learned this growing up Christian, too. It just took awhile before I could articulate it.)

BTW, I don’t believe anyone here has characterized you as a Stupid Christian. We may not agree with your beliefs, but we appreciate chatting with you. Characterizing the core of belief and non-belief is really difficult to put into words. I suspect talking helps all of us.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been saying to Heather all along. At its most basic level, prayer takes those “two things” I mentioned earlier. I disagree with you that you think Heather can’t on a one-time event take all the issues she has and present it to the Creator. She’s sharp. She can think deep enough to do it. She can also go back to being an Atheist afterwards if she “chooses” to. One of the aspects of Christianity is that God will hear what she has said and act accordingly. If her prayer is genuine …then her life will change as a result.

Karen Writes: “It’s just been a continued activity of asking pointed questions and getting vague, evidence-free answers”

Karen, I get a lot of vague, evidence-free answers from Atheists when they are faced with questions about morality, meaning for life, purpose and what happens to you after you are gone. One of your non-vague, evidence-packed solutions to obtaining a meaning for your personal existence is to inquire of cats who happen to walk on your keyboard. When I’m sucking O’s on a respirator during my last moments of life your fancy feline formula will most certainly offer great hope. I find in many replies from Atheists that they are spiteful and resentful that Christians feel that they have something wonderful that offers hope, purpose, and everlasting life. How dare someone come along with a concept of eternal Love and Hope. If I want to REALLY get blasted by an Atheist, just mention any of the “responsibilities” and “sacrifices” that go right along with it.

Heather,

You wanted to know what prayer was, what it means to someone who prays and why people pray the way that they do. I gave you a very clear, well-defined answers based on sincere Christian belief. The rest is up to you. As stated early on, nobody is placing a gun to your head and saying, PRAY! Regardless of any scientific or philosophical theories, …It all comes down to personal choice.

If you can walk away with anything from this particular blog that you didn’t have before you posted your original post, …know that some stupid Christian out there jones’in in on your “What is Prayer?” blog is out there praying for you. …One of my many prayers is that you find whatever you are looking for.

-Birdman

You mentioned in one of your early posts that someone could choose not to believe. I really don’t think that’s possible if a person is an adult, and honest with his/herself. I don’t think such a person can choose to believe or not to believe. As an adult, you perceive reality through whatever filters you’ve acquired. Those filters have evolved from childhood to adulthood, and eventually acquire more or less of the filter of critical thinking. (Filters can be subject-related, too; there are many believing engineers and scientists, who tend to be masters of critical thinking, at least on certain subjects.)

As a child, I believed what I was taught. As an adolescent and young adult, I became an apprentice in the art of critical thinking. I started reading about other past and present religious beliefs, and started to question what might be true, and how I might know. As an adult who has asked a whole lot of questions that religion(s) can’t answer to my satisfaction, I can’t choose TO believe in something that I don’t have any evidence for. My personal critical-thinking filter is not subject-limited.

And, before you try to psychoanalyze me, I don’t have any “bad experience” baggage that has made me turn away from religion in general and Christianity in particular. It’s just been a continued activity of asking pointed questions and getting vague, evidence-free answers.

Oh, and before you try to give me “evidence” to the contrary: anecdotes are not data. I’m no stranger to the lies that one’s own mind can tell oneself. Honest, continued self-examination chases most of them to the surface eventually.

But for the rest….. to a mythical figure will somehow

(a) I resent the ill-judged cold-reading. I am not burning with a desire to learn to pray. I reckom every living human has suffered something painful in their life. The clock is ticking on us all. In fact I’ve been pretty lucky in my life. By the standards of 90% of the world’s population, I have been comically lucky. There is certainly no philosophical hole in it.
(b) You are recommending that I carry a magical ritual on a belief system that I do not hold. The placebo effect doesn’t work if you don’t believe it.
(c) You suggest that I surrender my will and reason to an imaginary being – who knows everything and can do everything but somehow has to be reminded constantly. As Alun pointed out
“If you’re as omniscient as you claim, why do I have to pray to tell you something? Shouldn’t you know already?”
My own cold-reading.: Your belief system doesn’t really satisfy you. Every time you come close to seeing the holes in it you have to rebuild the edifice. You have lingering doubts that you work off by trying to convert others to it.

Karen
Thanks for your contribution. I really appreciate your honest attempt to explain the inner experience.
Alun
Mornington Crescent? I don’t think I’ve ever played it. Unless its slightly like Connect 4 on a circular board with things like backgammon pegs…

Hey! Aun was the one who wanted to take a long walk down philosophical lane. …Although your “omniscient gameshow host” slam was rather funny!

As far as being “bludgeoned” into conversion goes, all I really suggested was that you “try” doing prayer and looking at prayer the way a Christian does. You can’t expect someone to explain to you what ice cream taste like without having them hand you a spoonful, ya know?

Basic “Prayer” takes only two things, Heather:

(1) Belief in an ultimate Creator
(2) Genuine desire to speak to this Creator

You wrote: “The kneeling, the pointy-hands, the bowed head, all the ritual stuff.”

Okay, (((NONE OF THAT))) is necessary in prayer. That is all more of a way to place people in a proper frame of mind. An example would be soldiers who are trained in boot camp to salute, shout, “Sir, Yes Sir! and spin quickly on their heels during a parade march. None of these talents come into play when they are dodging enemy fire, right? What this training does is condition the mind to properly “handle” battle. Those “pointy hands” you see are saying to the mind “FOCUS on what I am about to say!”. The kneeling is a way of lowering yourself and saying to this Creator that you honor His authority. I can simply hand my future wife a wedding ring as opposed to kneeling at her feet. …But which way says that I honor her?

Let me make this perfectly clear; MOST PEOPLE do not genuinely pray. Churches that require the congregation to repeat monotonous phrases as prayer are probably doing so thinking that “forced prayer” is better than none at all. This is why babies get sprinkled with Holy Water early on as opposed to later in life when this person could make their own conscious decision for Baptism. They are treating Baptism like a Holy Insurance Policy and are unknowingly removing the sole purpose of Baptism.

What I am telling you, Heather, is that the Creator I believe in wants to hear what you have to say just like you would want to know what your children would have to say. God doesn’t care what direction you point your hands or which way you are facing as long as you are speaking what is truly in your heart.

Lastly, there is a high probability that you have suffered something extremely painful in your life. It stole your joy. You’ve lost your hope. You keep looking for something to balance that pain and all you are finding is more and more layers of pain ..all the while you see that clock ticking away. You have experienced elements in life that are so horribly bad that you have been rendered unable to place any trust in some mythical Supreme Being twho has a pot of gold waiting for you at the end of the rainbow of life. In your heart of hearts, you feel that the unending stream of horrors and evil that pops onto your TV screen every day far outweighs any arguments some stupid Christian blogger can make about the existence some cartoon-like God who supposedly “cares about people”.

…So am I anywhere close, Heather?

‘ll cut to the chase, because I DO consider your question perfectly valid. You would not be posting these “prayer” questions unless you had a tiny bit of hope inside that there might just be an answer floating around somewhere in Cyber Space. So if you TRULY WANT TO KNOW about “God” and SINCERELY DESIRE to understand prayer, …then take every single ounce of anger and pain that has been ripping your heart apart for so long and present it all to the Creator in prayer.

Take a chance, Heather., because there’s no other way to truly understand prayer.

-Birdman

P.S. And yes, it really pisses me off when I don’t get an answer. …Worse than that is the embarrassment I feel when I do.

Some of it was praying about things that were bothering me. Later, I realized that this was a way of verbalizing difficulties and focusing on sorting them out. For some of us, a spoken idea is more powerful than an in-head idea, and its consequences are greater. I never had the sense that any deity was actually responding to my prayers, just that s/he was a good listener.

Now the cats in my household serve this function, when we aren’t arguing about why they shouldn’t walk across the keyboard. (Rocky, Paddy, Natasha, no!)

I still haven’t lost my sense of awe observing natural phenomena; in fact, it has increased, now that I know more about the scientific explanation for it. But now it’s just, “Hey, this is really cool! WOW!”

You’re right about infinite recursion being a problem, but that would suggest that invoking gods is not a meaningful explanation for anything. Believing in the Christian gods, but being an absolute atheist about meta-gods, is as foolish as those people who are rumoured to say they’re 100% certain gods don’t exist. In the absence of any evidence the existence of a meta-god has to be as likely as the existence of a god. You can see the meta-god’s work in the existence of a god, if you accept the existence of a god on the basis that the universe exists.

So where does this leave prayer? If prayer is real and gods exist we cannot know which god we are talking to. We cannot know if the god we are talking has an accurate understanding of reality. Therefore we have to make mortal judgements for ourselves as there is no indisputable moral authority to refer to. This doesn’t disprove the existence of gods or prayer, but it does show the futility of attempting to prove their truth via reason. If it takes a belief in a god for you to live a moral life, I sincerely hope you never stop believing.

As for only getting one letter and ten seconds I think you’ve misunderstood what a metaphor is and possibly Christianity too. The ‘one card’ metaphor is spectacularly bad for a Christian life. The ‘Prodigal Son’ (Luke 15:11-32) makes clear that repentance can happen at any time and Christianity is supposed to be for life rather than ten seconds. This is why life is more like a game of Mornington Crescent.

(I wasn’t looking to be bludgeoned into conversion. That is not even remotely possible. In fact, I hope that, if I ever lose the capacity to recognise myth and metaphor that a kindly passing human will put me out of my misery.
I also suspect that the number of atheists convinced to believe in a deity as the result of reading a blog comment are <=0. Obviously an omniscient - or even half-intelligent - deity would know this and stop his flatterers wasting their efforts. ) I really don't know why I'm bothering to respond here but ..... Let me spell it out again. The kneeling, the pointy-hands, the bowed head, all the ritual stuff. The congregation listening to a public prayer. Karen's mother repeating a cycle of phrases. Or Karen's evangelicals having a dull water-cooler chat. Facing Mecca. Whatever... What makes them "prayer?" How do you know you've prayed and not just meditated or repeated a beautiful psalm or an ugly greeting. Your responses have been: (a) an imaginary one-time audience with an omniscient gameshow host. Even the most anti-religious person probably doesn't see prayer in those terms. (b) a request that you "stay on the right path" (which, as far as I can see involves asking for a favour, despite what you said above) Either you believe you have moral choices or not. How much of a moral choice would it be if someone just directs you? If you can supposedly talk to God, doesn't it piss you off that you never get an answer?

You cheated and asked a two-part question: “If you’re as omniscient as you claim, why do I have to pray to tell you something? Shouldn’t you know already?”

Answer: “Yes”

I don’t think that asking an all-mighty entity that chose to create me on a certain day in history as to “why” He chose to do this constitutes narrow vision? I can’t think of a single person who knows the answer to this simple life question, …but many people have good answers as to why we should pray.

Your last paragraph is equating God to a continuing, infinite god-cycle with no beginning and no end. My God could have a God who made Him, and that God have yet another even bigger God and so on, and so on. Problem with that is which one of these megaGods made “birds”? Why didn’t another megaGod zap them all and make something different? Which one made me? What if my God’s God didn’t like what He created? Did another God (who was parochial in vision) cheat create “you” using my God’s creation template? …..Who gets to be the ultimate decision maker when it comes to making things? Who has final authority on what is considered Good and what is Bad?

You can toss out all kinds of scientific theories and space-time continuum arguments ya want. One peep through a $10 telescope and it’s easy to see that Humans are extremely limited in our understanding of life and universe. The beauty of God is that He is extremely simple and infinitely complex all at the same time. You can see His work and talk to Him.

My opinion: God created you because He thinks you are worth whatever joy or madness you bring into this realm of Life. Your decisions (bad or good) ultimately affect the ones around you. You get to choose your own path (like a microGod”) between right and wrong. The path that God’s has made for yout is easy as following 10 extremely simple Commandments that are infinitely hard live by.

What we Christians do is “pray” to God that we will be able to stay on the right path despite ourselves.

–Birdman

P.S. In life you only get one letter with your wild card and 10 seconds to solve the puzzle. There is no “MegaPat” that will allow you more consonants.

In contrast the “Why do I exist?” question is rather parochial in vision. You’re also taking a bet that a god would know the answer. Even if the universe were the product of just one god, experiments with Langton’s Ant have shown this is not a foregone conclusion. Even if the god could give an answer you couldn’t be certain it was right, because a god could be the product of a meta-god whose aims and purposes are unknown to the god you are talking to. It would be an irony on a cosmic scale if your chosen god were an atheist regard its own creator wouldn’t it?