Forced Prayer

[Arkilogue]

I am not telling him what to believe, I am telling him what he can do with the time and ritual his parents are forcing him to participate in, in a language they would understand so that he can put their mind at ease and get them off his back.

If you are forced to kneel and touch your forehead to the ground, you can either repeat in your mind "f-you Islam, f-you Islam, f-you Islam." Or you can spend your time being grateful for, among many other things, the space of the atom's that compose your body and the trillions of stars that had to die to make them. Thus you are not some random burp of existence by a capricious God but a summation of universal order that has accumulated over billions of years.

So you're telling him to send a mental thank you to something that isn't sentient and can't receive that thank you anyway. Sounds like another form of prayer to me.

Of course that assumes there is nothing to receive the prayer, but even that is sideline to the affect of gratitude on the human body and psyche.

There is no preconception of deity required and that completely gets in the way of fluency.

A preconceived idealization of this or that "God" to receive a prayer is static.
Expression of gratitude is fluent.