Prayer

This is the ritual of taking a moment of silence to ask god to do stuff for you---from giving you a really great parking space, to healing your loved ones, to getting a promotion at work. Or, in some cases, it's simply asking god to do "His Will". And BTW, now's a good time to interject that I used to do all of the above. But, the truth is, there is not one scrap of conclusive evidence that "prayer" actually does anything(aside from acting as a placebo). Prayer is, IMO, redundant at best; a complete waste of time, at worst.

Take, for instance, the god to whom Christians pray(and to whom I once prayed). An omniscient god, by definition, possesses all knowledge, including the past, present, and future. If god knows the future, as Christianity and its Christians proclaim, then this god knows, with absolute certainty, the outcome of the future set of events. If this god knows the outcome of the future set of events, then logic says that the future is fixed; the future is carved in stone, so-to-speak. Thus, this god knows what your needs, desires, and preferences are before you "pray". This is problematic for another reason, too, and that is that this god is not a free agent if he is omniscient. For example, an intercessory prayer for the purpose of healing a loved one is a pointless endeavor, simply because god already knows if your loved one will live or die, and more importantly, he cannot change this outcome. For god to be able change the outcome of any future event would mean that this god never knew the future to begin with.

Then there's the quagmire of why the god to whom believers pray answers some prayers with a "yes", but others with a "no". If you view this from outside the believer's bubble, you'll see that it's simply a case of bad luck versus good luck. Curiously, the aforementioned yes/no "answers" yield the same results we'd expect to see in an uncaring, impersonal world with no guidance, whatsoever..i.e...sometimes we get lucky and get a great parking space; sometimes we don't. Sometimes our ill loved ones recover; sometimes they don't.

Another question that surfaces if one digs a little bit deeper, is why the god to whom believers pray will (presumably) suspend the laws of nature, say, for someone's grandmother to recover from her bunion surgery, but yet, will let untold millions starve to death, including children. Again, what is going on here? What's wrong with this picture? The simplest and most likely explanation is this: No one is suspending any natural laws, whatsoever. Children die of hunger for the pure and simple reason of the location they're born. Someone's grandmother has a successful bunion surgery for the pure and simple reason that she may have been born and raised in a civilized and developed country, which lends itself to having good medical care.

In conclusion, the only meaningful prayer that can be uttered is to ask god to do his "Will". But even that is totally redundant since his "Will" was established from the on-set and cannot be changed. Thus, when people say, "God has a plan", they really, really mean it! This is not to say that most people's prayers aren't well-meaning; in a lot of cases, they are. But the down-side is that it can give a sense of false hope.