How Does Prayer Work?

I have spent a lot of time in my life praying. I obviously don't any more. (If you're new here, I'm a former Catholic, now atheist.) I have prayed for big things and little things. Prayed for strength, prayed for others, prayed for guidance, prayed for a boy to fall in love with me. (Ok, that last one might be a tipoff that it's been a long while since I believed in the power of prayer.)

But back when I DID believe in the power of prayer, I don't think I ever really thought about it. Now that I'm an atheist, I find it utterly bewildering. My list of questions about how prayer works has grown longer the more I've thought about it. He are some of the highlights:

Does God ever respond with specific intervention based on prayers? Why? Why would God help guide you to your lost wedding ring, for example, but not give the folks in Japan a heads up about the tsunami that's coming. If the tsunami is all a part of God's master plan, then didn't he have a plan that involved you losing your wedding ring? And if his plan also involved your finding it, doesn't that mean that He wasn't really answering your prayers so much as following the master plan He had already laid out? So basically, God really only follows His own master plan and will "answer" your prayers if it's something He was already planning on doing anyway.

Also very perplexing for me: prayers to saints. Now I have heard people say hundreds of times to pray to such-and-such a saint for assistance with some particular problem. First off, I thought the first commandment says to put no gods before me. If you're praying to someone other than God himself, that seems a little close to the line on that one. I've had a devoutly Catholic friend explain this to me this way: you're not praying TO the saints as though they are answering your prayers, it's more like you're asking them for help, like you would a friend. That sounds a little better to me, but I'm still a little perplexed. 1) I think there are a lot of people praying to saints who aren't making that distinction. 2) If you're gonna ask someone for help, why not go directly to the big guy himself? Why ask for help from some saint when you can ask God. You know He's listening anyway. 3) Why would you need help from a saint anyway if God's on your side. Is God swayed by a good word from St. Peter on your behalf? (I'm assuming not.)

Anyway, I just know that most everyone I know believes that God answers their prayers. I think that most people also believe that God has a greater plan that we do not fully (or even slightly) understand. It would seem to me that these are conflicting beliefs. I don't get it.

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Just a reminder. I'm open to all comments, whether you agree or disagree with me, so long as you're respectful

Signs from God and Other Faithless Ramblings

Oh how I loved your responses to my Why Do You Believe? post. So much good stuff to think about. Such great challenges to my assumptions. Truly wonderful. So today, I will answer a couple questions posed to me and also share some thoughts on your comments.

Signs from God
A couple years ago I was having a conversation with a very religious friend, let's call her Abby, who mentioned that she had prayed about something and God was "telling her" to choose a particular path. Well, the non-believer in me of course thinks that this is her seeing what she's now keyed in to see. So I thought to myself, "Let's see if I can see some signs. I would like to see some signs that Abby is right." For the next several days, everywhere I went and everything I saw was related to Abby in some way. Driving home I was behind a car with a U of I sticker (Abby went to U of I), another car had a volleyball sticker (Abby played volleyball), another car had a license plate with her birthday in it (just the month and day), the street I was on was also her birthday, a mile marker sign had her volleyball number on it, and on and on and on. For days I could not stop seeing things in someway related to Abby. A sign from God? Or am I just noticing things that I hadn't noticed before. It's not like I took a different way home, the street was the same street I always took, I had just noticed the birthday connection. So part two of my thought experiment: look for signs that there is no God. For this I'll look for things that remind me of another friend of mine, Kelly, who happens to be an atheist. Again, everywhere I looked I saw Kelly things. Kelly's car, Kelly's favorite "character", Kelly's birthday, Kelly's name. Everywhere.

After this week of suddenly noticing things that I hadn't noticed before, it is now very easy for me to understand how people see "signs." It's like when my husband first bought his Camry and suddenly I noticed the hundreds of other Camry's on the road. Up until that point, I just hadn't noticed. We filter out so much of what we encounter every day, but when we're ready to start looking, suddenly things start popping out all over the place.

Your Questions for Me
If I don't believe in heaven, does that mean I think death is the end?
Unfortunately, yes.

If so, is it correct to assume I don't believe in a soul either?
Yes. No soul.

If no soul, do I believe the keystone of humanity is the mind?
If you mean what do I think makes us human, yes, I would say our mind. But for clarification, not our intelligence, our mind.

Random Thoughts

• Gilsner: I started reading End of Faith, but wasn't really a fan. Maybe I'll go back and give it another shot.
• Nicole: I have had The Case For Christ on my to-do list since about 1999. I really do want to read it. (Gonna' need to buy it first.)
• Bernadette said: I can't prove to you there is a God but you can't prove to me that there isn't one.
  I don't need proof, but I'd like some evidence. As stated above, random signs don't really do it for me. 
• Sarah said: And how do you explain that innate, unwavering, and sacrificial love that comes with motherhood/fatherhood?
  Easy: evolution. Our species is much more likely to survive if a parent will do anything to protect its offspring.
• Sarah said: Faith is being inspired by our resilience and being awakened by our fragility. Faith is accepting human's failings but loving despite. Faith is forgiveness in dark places. You can still be faithful without the Bible if you are willing to look at humanity as a miracle to begin with, something awe-inspiring and beyond comprehension or explanation. Something beyond science and reason, no matter how intelligent our species becomes.
  I loved this. I would just replace "faith" with "humanity." That and you lost me at, "beyond explanation." But I do think the existence of all life is miraculous. The earth is teeming with life that all evolved from a puddle of goo. It is awe-inspiring.
• I am seriously going to need separate blog. This post has 7 different topics already and I haven't even gotten to the ancient Biblical texts being copied by illiterate scribes, using the Bible as a tool but not a basis for faith, using the Bible as a source for morality when it condemns eating pork but gives a pass to SLAVERY, and my new big curiosity about what people believe about prayer and whether and how they are answered.

OK. One post at a time. This one is a little on the scattered side, but y'all gave me so much to think about.

Why Do You Believe?

Before I get to my "real" post for the day, I feel I need a disclaimer. I wrote this post and then thought, hmm, this really doesn't fit on my blog. But then you, my dear readers, suggested that this is my blog, so I get to decide what goes on it or not. So I decided I'll go ahead and post it here. Who knows, maybe I'll spark so much discussion we'll have to create a separate blog for this topic. Probably not. Maybe I'm the only person who finds this fascinating and I'll go back to ranting about gas stations, dumb laws, and facebook.

The post below is about religion, God, faith, and the Bible. (All holy books really, but most of the people I know are Christian.) You should know that I used to be a Catholic who went to church every Sunday. Somewhere on life's journey, I became an atheist. It is from here that I wrote this post.

And now, without further ado, my ultra serious blog post...

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I just found out that Bart Ehrman has a new book out; it's called Forged. I will be running out to my local Amazon to pick up a copy as soon as I'm done with this post. I can't wait until it gets here. Bart Ehrman also wrote Misquoting Jesus, which is one if my all time favorites. Long before I read this book, it was the idea of authorship of the Bible that I found most troubling with my personal faith. Everything I believed was based on the Holy Word of the Bible. But why the Bible? Why not the Koran? Why not believe just the Old Testament but not the New? And what reason did I have to believe that the Bible was any more divinely inspired than the writings of Plato? My only basis for my beliefs was that this is what I had been taught. And what did those people who taught me about the divinity of the Bible know that I didn't know? They weren't around when the Bible was written any more than I was. It suddenly felt like we were playing a 2,000 year old game of telephone and I was pretty sure that the message had been garbled over the years. Heck, children today are taught that George Washington cut down a cherry tree and that was only a couple hundred years ago. Imagine what a tenfold difference would make. Plus, the New Testament was written at a time when the Roman gods were still believed to be real. People at the time clearly needed to invent explanations for what they didn't understand. Why should I believe that the Bible isn't part of that? Basically, I found that I had absolutely no reason to believe that the Bible was any more divine than any other book ever written. I couldn't really come up with a single good reason to think otherwise. And without the Bible, the entire foundation for faith of any kind disappeared. It was tough to deal with for a long time. I had been a Catholic my whole life and now I was an ath... I could not even say the word out loud for years. I didn't really believe there was a God anymore, I guess that makes me an athe... Years.

I'm over it now. Now I can say that I am an atheist. And I'll tell you the hardest part (for me) in going from being a Catholic to an atheist: no more heaven. (I guess that's not surprising.) News stories about the tragedies in the world are so much harder to bear. Children dying of starvation is tragic for people of faith; it is that much harder to imagine for people without a belief in heaven. To believe that the suffering some people have known is all there is or will be for those people. I've sometimes heard people wonder out loud what motivates non-believers to do good in the world. For me, it is a greater motivator. If there is no God, then we are the only ones who can help our fellow man.

In the years since I lost my faith, I have been so curious how so many people remain true to their faith when I did not. As soon as I began thinking about my beliefs and their basis, I realized that I didn't really believe any of it. I remember often thinking, "Better to believe and be wrong, than not believe and be wrong." And then I realized that this attitude wasn't really a belief, it was going through the motions just in case. I didn't really believe it. How do so many people continue their faith in the face of, what I see as, the utter lack of evidence for the divine. But it is often hard to have such conversations these days without seeming disrespectful. For example, I understand that others believe in God's existence, but to me He is as real as Santa Claus. And for many people, making that comparison in itself is disrespectful to their beliefs. So it's a fine line. But there is so much about faith that impacts the way we look at the world. From abortion and women's rights, to same-sex marriage and public education. So it seems like something we should be talking about more.

So while I wait for my exciting new book to arrive, I thought I'd throw out a question and see if anyone's open to the discussion. To my faithful readers, and by that I mean my readers who are people of faith:

Do you believe that your holy book is the Word of God? If so, why?