Y’all keep describing prayer as if it were a favor-begging process, like kids sending their Christmas list to Santa Claus or streetcorner beggars rattling their empty coffee cups at you and asking for change.
Of course, a lot of the theistic folk describe it that way, too.
I don’t think reality warps around a person’s wishes. Could be wrong about that, but I’ll remain skeptical. It’s in the same category as Wiccans performing magic rites to conjure outcomes into place.
Prayer for me is communication. One prays for understanding, for insights. Maybe not directly, one may pray for a new car for all that, but the sense in which praying for a new car obtains you a new car is not ::cue special effects:: <ta-daa>! Car! … if praying for a new car actually causes you to end up with a new car it’s as a consequence of you seeing things differently, rearranging priorities in your life as a consequence of prayer getting your head together, of having a better understanding of yourself and your relationship to your world.
Praying for a new car is a deliberately trivial example, but visualize that streetcorner beggar I mentioned earlier, rattling the coffee cup. Imagine him staring at somone getting into a car and wanting it (and the entirely different life that is symbolized by being a car owner) and feeling that with a lot of emotional intensity; things long unfelt and unacknowledged well up, angers and self-pity and awareness of misery, a sense of ruined pride, fear of trying something and failing, fear of caring strongly and becoming bitterly disappointed again, all that stuff. And in an emotionally-intense process, the guy sees his life as if from a great height, gets perspective, sees what-all has led to him being on this corner rattling a coffee cup, sees possibie futures some of which don’t involve being on this same streetcorner still doing this ten years from now. And so let’s say attitudes and behaviors change. No instant transformation but slow changes. Ten years later, the guy takes out his car keys and opens the driver’s side door of his car.
You may be on the verge of saying “But there’s nothing supernatural going on there”. Well, duh! If you define supernatural as “stuff that isn’t real”, lo and behold, the only stuff that’s supernatural is stuff that isn’t real! Which means it isn’t real! Wow!
Religion exists because there are aspects of reality that aren’t readily discerned the way you can see the chair or the tree in front of you. Its subject matter becomes described as “supernatural” because it seems different / apart / beyond everyday reality.
But if something is real, it can be described with more than one set of vocabulary words. If you said to me “freedom, liberty, volition — that stuff doesn’t exist”, I could debate with you using other words, working towards getting you to acknowledge that something I’ve described is true in your estimation, and then I would say "OK, now that’s freeom, that’s volition, that’s what it means. And if you weren’t trolling when you said those things didn’t exist, yet you acknowledge the point I made, you realize that the words “freedom, liberty, volition” as used by me describe something that is real to you, although they may represent a slightly different take on things than what you had normally considered those words to mean.
Well, obviously if I use the word “ghost” to refer to a bowl of ice cream, ghosts exist, but that just means I’m using the word wrong. So it’s only valid, what I said about words and meaning, if the slightly-different-perspective isn’t foreign and unrelated to the word’s everyday usage.
And I’m telling you that despite the admittedly large contingent of people for whom praying is the out-loud repetition of memorized poems, or the equivalent of asking Santa Claus for prezzies, prayer for many people is a process such as I’ve just described, and they would recognize it by my description although I didn’t use words like “God” and other theological terms within it. It’s real, dude.
