actual use in prayer?

Great Debates
21

So what do you pray about, then?

If the prupose of prayer is simply to develop your relationship with God, can’t you be saying ‘Hey Big Guy, how you doing up there, man you wouldn’t believe what happened to me today, it’s a great story, real funny man, but not so funny as you, oh holy one! Not that you are funny, with the wrathfulness and the hurting, but I’m sure if you wanted to be comedic, you could be downright hilarious. I mean, funnier than Seinfeld, funnier than circus clowns, and even funnier than those guys on Jackass! So anyway, I was at work today, and Perkins asked if he could borrow a stapler - you know Perkins, guy with the beard - well, I says to him I says…’

I mean, can’t you just get all conversational with him? Do you?

22

There’s all kinds of prayer. Yes, you can get conversational if you want. You can be emotional. You can be reflective. You can be contemplative. You can be meditative.

Prayer is communication with God. You can communicate with God in just about any mode in which you can communicate with anybody else. Why not?

23

This sounds like a scene from the old Peter O’Toole movie, “The Ruling Class.” But if I’m right, you’re reading the whole thing wrong.

O’Toole’s character is supposed a be a lunatic who thinks he’s Jesus Christ. And when someone asks him WHY he thinks he’s Jesus, he answers, "“When I pray I find I’m talking to myself.”

24

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.” ~ Lao-Tzu ~

25

It’s not about power; it’s about love.

26

Yeah, that’s great and all, and you’re all laying the humanistic/spiritual sentiment on me, but none of you have actually disproved my original point: you don’t get anything out of prayer besides assurance and maybe a nice conversation.

27

I do not speak an behalf of all pray-ers, christians, or religious people, but I am sure some would agree with me. To answer your question “Why do you pray?”: In my experience, it works. I communicate with what I believe to be God by giving thanks for all of the wonderful things in my life, and for the troubles in my life that have made me stronger, and I ask for things that I have little effect on, or just for help and/or determination. And it works (for me). Just like for some people who kiss an egg before a race, tap a sign before a big game, or rub a fake rabbit’s foot before stepping up to bat, (all of which I find ridiculous) it works for them.

By saying it works, I mean that from an action (which may seem futile to some) , they see positive results, and repeat the action.

As much as my views have oscillated from reading the threads here, the one thing that keeps me believing God exists is that I put no faith in it just being a coincidence that my thousands of prayers have yeilded my desired results.

28

Even if that’s all we get out of it, so what? If the person wants to spend their time praying, as long as they feel they are accomplishing something positive, what’s the problem?

Zev Steinhardt

29

Yeah, whatever feels good, right? :wink:

30

Look, any evidence one way or another that “prayer works” in terms of effects in the here-and-now world, as opposed to inside the heart of the believer or on the God on whom we don’t seem able to agree, is subject to refutation by the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. But if I’m aware that there’s a 1:1 correlation between, say, the number of times I give {insert name of poster I am friends with and see regularly} the finger and the occurrence of tornadoes in Oklahoma, I will think twice about giving him/her the finger, partly out of superstition and partly to test the correlation.

Prayer brings me the sense of peace, the knowledge that I have done something worthwhile in a situation that I cannot otherwise affect for good, a sense of being part of a plan larger than myself and devoted to good, a sense of communion with that which is Love personified. Are these not good reasons to pray, from a purely personal non-metaphysical basis?

And, leechow (is it “Lee Chow” as I initially assumed?), I was not setting out to disprove your contention nor to prove my own, but to share my reasons and justification for my prayer with you, in response to your one-size-fits-all OP. You’re a free agent with the right to believe and do what you wish, as am I. As I pointed out on Persephone’s thread, a successful thread does not necessarily have to be one in which all parties end up agreeing; it’s one in which there is a clear exchange of views and understandings that broadens all parties’ perspectives. I think we’re working towards that here.

31

lekatt said:

Placebo. Placebo effect.
As you’ll notice in the first link, the word ‘placebo’ means ‘I shall please’, and it comes from the Roman Catholic vespers for the dead. So a ‘placebo effect’ is one that pleases. (I never knew where the word came from – thanks for nudging me to look it up.)

It’s interesting to note that when someone says that prayer is a placebo they are, in effect, saying prayer is a prayer.

So, anyway, the ‘placebo effect’ is when a body is pleased with a neutral substance the mind believes is medicine. We can spin that however we wish
[ul]
[li]a placebo is a catalyst for the body’s own defences[/li][li]an imaginary cure trumps an imaginary illness.[/li][li]mind over matter, etc[/li][/ul]

But, in the end, we understand very little.

As an agnostic, I do not pray – perhaps because I don’t understand what I might or might not be praying to – although I see no problems with an agnostic praying as a form of meditation. Nor do I see anything wrong with a believer meditating as a form of prayer… Ouch, this fence is hard on the arse today.:wink:

32

Good.

I wasn’t trying to disprove that prayer was without effect, as the somewhat erroneous thread name suggests, I was just trying to get some opinions, and I received a lot of opinions.

I know that prayer may have non-practical, non-tangible benefits. As someone not religious (I like to think of myself as non-denominational) I don’t like to place blind faith into things and thus I don’t believe in any inherent capability of prayer. But it obviously has benefits, even if they are only for the spiritual.

33

leechow09
actual use in prayer?

Being throughly athestic (and only so because of the devote’s snooty surety that I need prayer more than than the average), my opinion it is in how someone defines prayer. I mean it could be as loose as an Oy vay! - Why in the hell does this always happen to me! - I swear officer I didn’t know she was seventeen! - Damn-it to hell…Or as contrite as a 30 minuet kneeling dissertation to the Grand Hosanna. And I must admit that I hope there’s a higher power up there abouts, because I’d hate to think I’ve lived like this on purpose.

34

gex gex, I have prayed in just that sort of conversational prayer with God. I’m probably about to cast my sanity into serious doubt, but I do talk with God in the form of prayers in a wide variety of forms. Sometimes it’s formally, reciting the prayers in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer along with everyone else in the congregation. Sometimes it’s equally formal, on my knees in my home, complete with full, formal Thees, Thous, and Thys. Sometimes it’s informally, in the car, saying, “God, I’m tired or the roads are icy. Could you please see me (and everybody else) safely home?” I’ve even prayed myself to sleep.

What’s worse, I do get answers. Several years ago, I got into work and found out they were having yet another round of layoffs. I was told my boss wanted to see me. Since I had a pretty good idea what was coming, I remember praying, “God, I’m scared.” I was quite definitely aware of a feeling of reassurance, a sort of, “It’ll be all right.” Well, sure enough, I was laid off, but that lay off led to me getting exactly the job I wanted. No, I don’t know why He hasn’t done that this time around. This Wednesday, as part of on-going treatment for clinical depression, I was aware that I might have a crisis of faith as a result of a therapy session scheduled for that day. I would be reopening some very old wounds and dealing with a lot of anger I carry which was directed toward Christians. It was a grueling session, as expected, but my faith wasn’t damaged. That evening, I prayed, pouring my heart out to God and feeling the warmth and peace of my faith. At the risk of sounding completely disconnected from reality, I swear I felt a flood of affection and sort of ruffling of my hair, kind of like the way a father might ruffle the hair of a loved, but troublesome child. I could also trot out the story of how I was called on to answer my own prayer, but some of you may be sick of it by now.

OK, I’m crazy. Like I said, I have clinical depression, I come from a rather abusive background, and, as the saying goes, I don’t have issues – I have subscriptions! Objectively, prayer helps me calm and focus my mind in situations like driving, or acknowledge and release stress, like when I’ve prayed myself to sleep. I know not all prayers are answered; if they were, Polycarp and I would both have jobs, and a good friend of mine wouldn’t be facing a long slow recovery from a stroke. We might even have world peace. I don’t know why they aren’t, either, and I wish I did. If I ever find out and it comes with cites, I will certainly report it here!

Objectively, prayer does work for me, both on a material and spiritual level. If it’s a crutch, I’m willing to acknowledge that possibility, but I’ll also point out that I’ve got a couple of metaphorical broken legs, which makes walking awkward sometime. I may also place too much emphasis on coincidence, but on the other hand, I sometimes wonder if some people want their sign to be written in glowing six-foot high neon, with nary an electrical outlet in sight. Logic, for me, is wonderful for engineering and programming computers, but when it comes to faith, logic goes out the window, and yes, this does annoy the part of me which was raised on engineering and logic. As I’ve prayed on more than one occaision when my life and faith have taken one of their more unorthodox turns, “OK, God, but You explain this to my priest!” (Conversational enough for you, gex gex?;))

Then again, these are but the ravings of a mad woman, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Or everything.

CJ

35

Ah, Dr. Elisabeth Targ. Here’s a different take on Targ’s research, which disagrees with her conclusions of prayer being “effective”:

http://www.skepdic.com/prayer.html

36

What makes you certain that effective prayer requires blind faith ? A simple supposition that there might exist someone or something that has greater insight than I do about whatever I happen to be praying about frees me to look at things from different, some would say higher perspectives. Perhaps you never get tied up in your own life to the extent that a new perspective is useful, but many people do. For them, prayer has practical, tangible benefits.
If you don’t like the spiritual stuff, you can still pray, and simulate, the wisdom of say, David Duchovny or Bertrand Russell, to lead you through your times of trial. How spiritual is that ?

37

WWDDD?

38

There is also a great article in Wired two months ago about her work. It is quite a sad story – she ended up dying from an incurable brain cancer – glioblastoma multiforme. This just happens to be one of the things she was looking at the efficacy of prayer in fighting. She went down as a poster-child to the cause, even though it was quite clear that the cause was doing her no favors and in fact shortening her life and causing her pain.

That, and of course, her “scientific” double-blind randomized controlled studies that purportedly showed a prayer effect were highly suspect. They were in fact unblinded and they had to scrap around for a measurement with a significant p-value. Basically, they had to look at around 10 values with no effect to find the one value that only had a 1:10 chance of being random chance…

39

Can’t I just convince myself in the strength of my convictions? Wouldn’t that be as equally effective in my “times of trial?”

40

What if you’re not equal to the challenge – if the strength of your convictions, or your ability to maintain faith, should fail. It’s nice to know that there’s strength beyond what you can muster there to sustain you through your hardships. You’ve seen the Christian glurge story “Footprints” – but it’s glurge for a reason: through a bit of schmaltz it conveys the important message that God is prepared to sustain His children, even when they themselves despair.