(September 17, 2014 at 9:38 am)Celestine Wrote: Prayer is not only for the theists, my time spent as a Catholic taught me how to pray. Whenever I prayed if I prayed sincerely I would feel something powerful rising within me and I would strengthen my resolve in what I had been praying for. Even as an atheist when I prayed the prayers of the Hail Mary and the Our Father I still felt that something. Why would I pray those prayers as an atheist? Simple my family was pressuring me to be confirmed a Catholic, and I will never admit to my family that I am an atheist, and least not while my grandparents are still alive. May they die in peace of mind.

Anyways I am an atheist now and I am very interested in praying once more, this time not prayers to honor a god, but prayers to honor humanity, and to constantly remind me to be respectful of others and not let my pride allow me to mistreat others.

If it makes you feel better, why not?

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I prayed for my uncle while visiting my family last month. We were at a thing, and everyone there gathered around his medical bed, and I participated. I prayed for a cure and promised to do my best to believe if my uncle could get out of bed and walk, speak, and be free of dementia. I didn't believe it would help, but it couldn't hurt and I thought my family would appreciate it. It was the first time I had prayed in several years.

I really have huge trouble with even the most basic prayers. I come from a hardcore french roman catholic family which insists on saying grace before meals. I can't bring myself to even bow my head to their invisible sky god for their pagan meal prayer. So far nobody has noticed.

If you want to get into more "real" prayers I seriously laugh out loud when people pray to god for miracles. Even if the god works through people prayers destroy ambition meaning that an honest scientist might pray for answers rather than discovering them himself which hurts humanity. Even if this sky god was real why would he care about you? I mean prayers are just the most ridiculous thing of all time. It is simply a way of pacifying the masses with the hope that their magical god can cure everything. It's really a tool for dictators to exploit more than anything. Prayars are one the worst things ever invented preventing scientific discovery via "divine intervention" which slows humanity down at every step.

Can some "athiests" pray? I guess, there are Buddhists who do not believe in any gods, but they pray to a statue and repeat Buddhist prayer which is as superstitious to me as praying to a god. It amounts to wishing for good luck either way.

Prayer works like Ouija boards and horoscopes. If you want to believe bullshit works bad enough, you will.

I've always "prayed" in my mind even when i considered myself a convict atheist. But this "prayal" was always at wishing that the best outcome of the possibilities would happen, not asking for "a god" to do a miracle.
I think humans inherently depend on feeling "hope" and expecting positive outcomes/luck as instinctive to pursue their ambitions and to justify big efforts on trying to achieve that, i feel that if we humans were entirelly rational then we would most certainly be pessimists/skepticists and act alot less in regards of those ambitions and trying to challenge the odds, which is interesting.

In several fields, success doesn't commonly result from just intelligence or inherent ability, a lot of effort has to be put on some activity if you want to excel, and you see several places where the most "successful" people aren't necessarily the most intelligent, in fact, they were seriously "dumb" enough to not doubt their ability on achieving success, and so they succeded.

Even when I was a x-tian I would only pray when in serious trouble or if I was violently spewing in the dunny.
And that was always a trade off anyway.
'God, I'll stop sinning as much if you help me out here.'
If things worked out, which they often didn't, I would conveniently forget my promises. :-)
I'm a natural back slider.
That sounds so wrong. :-)

Saying 'there exists a praying atheist' is almost as egregious as saying 'there exists a married bachelor'. The definition of prayer invokes God or some other object of worship; like George Carlin's skit where he prays to Joe Pesci with wish fulfillment rates being the same as when he used to pray to God. I don't think this is what the OP is after though.

The OP is out to change the definition of prayer, where prayer becomes essentially any thought activity: introspection, concentration, wishful thinking, etc. If prayer is to be so broadly defined and stripped of a beseeched deity then the query 'do atheists pray?' becomes nonsense as it describes activities executed by any normally functioning human.

(September 19, 2014 at 8:16 am)Cato Wrote: Saying 'there exists a praying atheist' is almost as egregious as saying 'there exists a married bachelor'. The definition of prayer invokes God or some other object of worship; like George Carlin's skit where he prays to Joe Pesci with wish fulfillment rates being the same as when he used to pray to God. I don't think this is what the OP is after though.

The OP is out to change the definition of prayer, where prayer becomes essentially any thought activity: introspection, concentration, wishful thinking, etc. If prayer is to be so broadly defined and stripped of a beseeched deity then the query 'do atheists pray?' becomes nonsense as it describes activities executed by any normally functioning human.

It's the same thing as that thread where someone was trying to redefine 'miracle' as 'anything we currently don't have a complete understanding of'. Not sure what they think is gained by trying to get atheists to use religious terms.

(September 17, 2014 at 9:56 am)Rhythm Wrote: Does that ever strike you as strange (and are you sure that this is the case)? Let me give you a little example from my life. I'm pretty handy in the kitchen so I cook the meals in my household. I like falafel so I fry that tastiness up all the time. I mean, I really really like it, I talk about how good it is, and jokingly say that anyone who doesn't like falafel is probably a -insert ridiculous psuedo insult here- (communist is one of my favorites). So my wife has eaten alot of falafel (and I mean alot). Here's the kicker, she hates it. I didn't know that until very recently. In fact, I thought she was as much a fan as I am. I thought that because she gave me that impression - for years.

When she finally did tell me that she only ate it out of courtesy (and love...the woman just loves me silly), do you think that I was upset that she didn't like falafel, or that I'd been putting garbage on her plate for all that time? That fried bean cakes didn't rock her world, or that she didn't feel comfortable telling me that I should just cook her a drumstick - something so simple? Are you sure that your family wouldn't find it more troubling that you feel that you cannot share something like this with them, that you have to play church - and as catholics....wouldn't -that- be troubling to them? That you're taking sacrament and kneeling in the pews and reducing their faith to theater?

You're missing a crucial point: Religion is divisive and food is not. Equating the two is ridiculous.

Maybe Rhythm is saying that his cooking can make food pretty divisive.

(September 19, 2014 at 8:36 am)Tonus Wrote: Maybe Rhythm is saying that his cooking can make food pretty divisive.

Noted: Don't eat anything cooked by Rhythm.