The Logical Atheist

I don't get prayer. Why, for example, are believers asked to pray for the pope? God is said to be perfect, which includes being all-knowing and all-good. But praying implies that God needs help in making decisions, that he lacks relevant information or good will. How can that be? The only way to reconcile this conflict is to believe that God enjoys seeing human beings, whom he allegedly loves, getting on their knees and abasing themselves. He values the sight of people groveling and acknowledging their inferiority. Some would call that pathological. God seems to be the cosmic Trump.

What do you infer from the supposed fact that that a just God ought to be prayed to in support of a just cause? Does that mean that this just God would let a just cause fail if no one properly asked him to lend a hand?

[Religion] is quite simple at bottom. There is nothing really secret or complex about it, no matter what its professors may alleged to the contrary. Whether it happens to show itself in the artless mumbo-jumbo of a Winnebago Indian or in the elaborately refined and metaphysical rites of a Christian archbishop, its single function is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those power to be be friendly to him. That function and that purpose are common to all religions, ancient or modern, savage or civilized, and they are the only common characters that all of them show. Nothing else is essential. --H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930

What we have, then, is a conflict between the role of a worshiper, which by its very nature commits one to total subservience to God, and the role of moral agent, which necessarily involves autonomous decision-making. The point is that the role of worshiper takes precedence over every other role which the worshiper has -- when there is any conflict, the worshiper's commitment to God has priority over any other commitments which he might have. But the first commitment of a moral agent is to do what in his own heart he thinks right. Thus the following argument might be constructed: (a) If any being is God, he must be a fitting object of worship. (b) No being could possibly be a fitting object of worship, since worship requires the abandonment of one's role as an autonomous moral agent. (c) Therefore, there cannot be any being who is God. --James Rachels, "God and Human Attitudes"

Kneeling down or groveling on the ground, even to express your reverence for heavenly things, is contrary to human dignity.   --Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Principles of Virtue

Once again we were urged to pray for the people in the path of danger, this time Hurricane Laura. And again, I have to ask: really? Do those who do such urging ever think about what they are saying? Would an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful deity really need to hear from us before deciding whether to keep people safe from Mother Nature, which after all is supposedly the deity's creation and fully under its control? No matter how hard I try, I can make no sense of this. Is the deity so narcissistic or whatever that it would let people die horrible deaths or suffer devastating damage unless lots of people pleaded for it not to happen? If that is the case, I would like to hear why this deity is worthy of adoration and worship.

What's the deal with prayer? Think about it: it seems aimed at getting Yahweh to do what he otherwise would not have done. Let's leave out the football players who pray for victory and stuff like that. We'll confine ourselves to serious things: praying that your very sick child will recover, or that you'll be able to feed your family, or that we won't go to war. Why would Yahweh need to be prayed to about such things? Doesn't the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe know the right thing to do without being begged by suffering supplicants? And besides, wouldn't Yahweh have foreseen the whole thing: the tragedy, the prayerful response, and his own response? Is this a game he plays, sort of like the cruel game he and the devil played with regard to Job? I just don't get it. By the way, whenever a pope is deathly ill and looks to be heading to his great reward, I hear Catholics urged to pray for him. Come again? If we...