Goodness, it’s been a long time. Good to hear from you. We really must keep in touch. My email address is johno{at}ilovetypography.com.

Hope all is well.

It just occurred to me today that I hadn’t seen an update from you on Facebook for a while. A little digging soon revealed the reason why!

Interesting to read your thoughts on prayer, and on religion generally. It seems you and I have pursued similar paths to similar positions on the whole issue. I think I fully jettisoned the last of it about 5 or 6 years ago, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes revisit the discussions with others.

Thank you for an elegant treatment of the subject. You always were a thoughtful chap, and I’m glad to see that hasn’t changed!

Best,

Marc

I think what you write is pretty reasonable, and not so far removed from my own views. However, I must admit to being a little baffled by such vague notions or definitions of god. I struggle to see how something as amorphous as ‘love’ can sustain the universe, let alone bring it into existence. It also raises the question, why? Why would something, a force, whatever, create a material universe that he-she-it has absolutely no interest in? And, more importantly, what is to be gained from professing faith in, or praying to, something outside of space-time, outside of what is knowable? Surely it’s no different to praying to, say, a piece of rock or a solitary quark that exists in some alternate reality, an alternate space-time, which by definition is unknowable, and which again, by definition, can have no relationship to anything within the space-time we inhabit.

My article is aimed at the hundreds of millions who, unlike you, do obeisance to and have faith in the anthropomorphised psychopath in the sky; many of whom profess belief in a blatant contradiction: on the one hand they claim their faith is a ‘personal thing’, but then they proceed to belie that personal profession of faith by extrapolating and tenuously teasing out the strands to an objective and unassailable universal truth. But it doesn’t end there. The next illogical step is to demand that everyone else subscribe to it (that very thing that started out as a subjective, unfalsifiable, unverifiable, untenable, personal conviction ) — even on pain of death.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Greatly appreciated.

So, I think that prayer is much more some sort of meditation, something you do to connect you self to your faith. It’s not a mean to ask for something. Praying to obtain something specific is called superstition. Superstition is exactly what science battles against, and superstition drives me mad as much as you because it’s a low-level reduction of what faith and spirituality can be. It’s the tooth-fairy vs. the buddhist monk, you see what I mean?

You say “god doesn’t answer prayers because god does not exist.” I’d say that God doesn’t answer prayers because God is not an old bearded man taking care of his 6 billion children. This childish vision of God as a patriarch is simply a self-centered, anthropomorphic interpretation. That’s also why he lets his creation suffer. God is not a father. We are free to think and make decisions. It’s our job to put an end to suffering. Otherwise, free will is totally pointless.

One last thing: at no point here am I telling you “you’re mistaken, God exists”. I totally respect atheism and have no problem with that. Faith is a very personal experience and certainly not something you should try to convince people about. I just wanted to let you know that religion can be much more that mere superstition.