What Is The Point Of Prayer?

[Whateverist]

I know you meant this as a joke, but I'm sincerely curious about this idea.

Sometime when faced with hard decisions, theists (my only exposure is to Christians) will "pray about it." I heard it all the time growing up.

...

I'm going to go out on a limb and postulate something. This postulation comes in two parts:

1) God is very powerful, but is not all-powerful, despite what Christians tend to claim. He is really just another term being used to reference the universe in general.
2) When Christians pray, they are not actually praying to God. They are praying to Jesus.

Prayer makes a lot more sense in this context. When you pray to ask God for something, you are not begging an all-powerful, timeless entity to change his eternal plan. Instead, you are praying to an intermediary (Jesus, or one of the saints) to lobby on your behalf to a great being who has his hand on the steering wheel of the universe.

I can't do anything with God or Jesus or a Creator or an All-Omni power. None of that resonates for me. Pleading doesn't make any sense to me either. Sorry.

But I can attribute a tangible good to prayer if it is done out of an admission that you don't have an answer or perhaps don't even understand a question. If someone prayed for understanding they could be opening themselves to answers from outside themselves. But the outside would only be outside your conscious, rational mind. In the depths of your psyche there is more, and that more may be what can redeem the prayer experience.

Now that wouldn't make sense if what you really wanted was a specific event to occur. But if it were understanding you sought, why not? It could be that God does exist and in the exact same way that "you" exist. In other words, both may be products of our amazing meat brains. Who knows how 3 pounds of neuronal and other sorts of gray matter produce a sense of self, but it does. Perhaps it can also produce a sense of a higher power which can interact with the "you" which it also produces. Could be.

I should warn you that, as an atheist, I hold a lot of wild, unsupportable beliefs which I haven't received from any atheist guild. Take or leave it, but if you take it I recommend you add more than a grain of salt.