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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 9, 2014 at 10:59 am
1. No - I try and do something constructive instead to get myself out of the predicament.
2. When playing sport I might shout at the ball, or the sea if I'm surfing/windsurfing . I'm pretty sure this acheives nothing and is completely irrational, yet I still do it. In the same way an Atheist might not feel praying will achieve anything, but it may make them feel better/calmer etc so they do it.
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 9, 2014 at 11:09 am
I prayed to become an atheist. . And guess what?
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 9, 2014 at 12:04 pm
I pray to football jesus to help my glorious Steelers win. Lift my hands in prayer to the almighty god of football and pray that his son smiles favorably upon my team.
The Steelers went 8-8 last season and missed the playoffs.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 10, 2014 at 1:51 pm
Praying to a god is like yelling at the telly, it makes you feel better, but serves to make absolutely no difference to the outcome.
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 10, 2014 at 2:08 pm
(February 9, 2014 at 3:16 am)Rayaan Wrote: 1. Have any of you atheists here while you were an atheist, prayed to God (or gods) in certain circumstances in your life, especially like in desperate times or in troublesome times? I haven't. I prayed plenty when I was a believer, though there came a point when I stopped doing so regularly. By the time I came to the realization that I was an atheist, I had stopped altogether.
Rayaan Wrote:2. A small percentage of atheists said that they do pray (at least weekly or monthly) even though they don't believe in God. Are those people really atheists, then? That depends on the person, though someone who regularly prays to a deity with the expectation of some outcome doesn't strike me as an atheist. That (regular prayer) seems a lot different from the guy at the racetrack muttering "come on, number 6" under his breath or the person who whimpers "oh no, don't tell me it's going to rain" as she prepares a picnic basket.
I still use "good heavens" as an exclamation, but it's not because I think there's a heaven. Well, not the one in the sky with god and angels, anyway...
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 11, 2014 at 12:01 am
I pray mockingly
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - Edward Gibbon
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 11, 2014 at 12:08 am
1. Only as a joke, as in "Goddamn it Zeus, let's get this traffic moving."
2. No.
I generally find little point in talking to myself which is all that praying is.
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 11, 2014 at 12:21 am
I meditate each week with a bunch of Buddhists. If you asked them what they hope to achieve by meditating, I'm sure you'd get all sorts of crazy mumbo jumbo answers. Me, I meditate, but I don't embrace all the mumbo jumbo. I think you're mistaking the form for the function. Something may have the same form, yet not serve the same function. I also have artwork in my home from various religious traditions. That I appreciate many of the same things doesn't mean I pray to the same gods.
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 11, 2014 at 12:53 am
I don't know if you would call this a prayer.
But last week I was afflicted by bad lower back pain. If you've experienced an episode like this you'll have some sympathy with my attitude that I was ready to deal. Labor pain hasn't much on this and at least labor is time limited with a good thing (baby) usually at the end of it.
I was willing to accept a miraculous healing if it would make the agony go away right away. I so expressed myself. AND THE PAIN WENT AWAY!!! a few days later.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
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RE: Atheists and Prayer
February 11, 2014 at 12:58 am
Ah... what the jesus freaks call a "miracle!"
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