PRAYER IS A COVER FOR FEELING IN CONTROL AND THIS IS SELFISH MISUSE OF THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS

People seem to be okay with others praying for them in times of trouble. They too often settle for that, when they should not.  And the ones praying may have the means to help them and use prayer instead.  If they do not have the power to give actual help, they are still getting the reward of looking good in their own eyes.  "I am good for all I can do is pray and I am doing so".  And what if they have more power to help than they think?  The risk is obvious.  Prayer can diminish effort.  And to try and feel you help when you are doing nothing is making the suffering of others about you, you turn their pain into something to exploit spiritually.  In time prayer will make you exploit in other ways too.

The Christian believer in answered prayer compartmentalises. You would be considered touched in the head if you did this too much. Yet if answers happen that would be fine. You try to make the belief sound saner than it is by being selective. There is no honesty in cherry picking. If you really think prayer is that great or works you will not be ignoring possible answers to prayer to focus on a few handy ones.

An answered prayer is a answered prayer and so to cherry-pick is a way of calling answers unreliable while going into denial about it. It is no surprise then that people protect their prayer or magical beliefs from being shown flimsy or false. Examples. The medium won't be too clear and the clients themselves want the vagueness. Messages from John do not carry the same presence as even a minute in John's company would when he was alive. It does not sound or feel the same. And nobody in the séance room cares. Prayer like the medium deliberately goes after things that maybe happen anyway and is careful not to be too detailed. If prayer works then you can ask for John to convert to Jesus at 12 noon tomorrow at the diner. Nobody does that. They ask for conversion and if it does not happen they reason that it might have in some hidden way.

We see that they reason that prayer always helps when it does not.

We see they are clearly getting others on board too. The one who prays for x to happen is trying to involve others. They also have to help or at least not hinder this person's prayer and their claim that the prayer works.   If you think somebody is praying, you may feel good about doing nothing yourself.  You don't have to be praying yourself for that to happen.

The person wants to feel that they did something by praying or whatever even if it is not true. Spell-casters do the same thing. In that sense, prayer has no right to claim to be wiser than magic.

People are lenient with religion even in the face of all the trouble it causes. They are are softened up by the thought of people praying for them. It is harder to be against somebody if they present themselves as doing something for you. Prayer has done so much damage by creating such a perception that it outweighs any alleged benefit.

To say that people are not inherently/fundamentally good bad or neither is boasted as a way to invite and assist tolerance. It seems obvious that this guarantees tolerance and respect for it is about seeing a person just as a person. It's not about what they pray to or where they come from. All get equal justice and respect.  That attitude is more important than billions of prayers.  Thus prayer is never put first by anybody which makes it a mystery why religious people are claiming that God as in the being you need to pray to comes first.

Prayer is linked to and expressive of your values.  As it is about giving worship to a value: God who naturally you hope reflects your values you are always implicitly praying for more than what you consciously pray for.  If you would side with your country in war and not care that war is just terrorism with the appearance of a just cause that is there when you pray though at the back of your mind.  When people say only prayer helps the helpless in time of war read between the lines. They are saying it empowers you - either personally or as part of your warring country - to kill the enemy.  They are saying they will see any victories or mini-victories as a response to prayer.  That is dangerous for it leads you to think God is on your side when he may not be.  You are going to interpret things as evidences that he is on your side when these are not evidences at all but are just interpreted as evidences.

Is prayer using the pain and vulnerability of another person for you need to feel you deserve to have your prayer answered? Yes but why do you deserve the answer?  Is it because you are righteous and deserve this reward of answered prayer? Then prayer is pompous. Because you prayed? Then prayer is even more pompous. Religion teaches that God cannot even hear prayer unless you deserve to be heard so prayer is self-righteous.  It is not prayer unless it comes from a righteous person with a respectful attitude to God.  To ask God to help another while you are bad to people would be hypocrisy.  So deserving comes into it.  Some would say their prayer should be answered for they FEEL they deserve it.  That is dreadfully arrogant and makes your feelings a condition on which God must help another!!  What egotism!

Is prayer using the pain and vulnerability of another person for you need to feel you can have prayer answered?

Then you are worried about your feelings and not the person. The person is not your feelings so feeling you want them to be helped and for them to be helped BECAUSE you feel it is selfish.

Prayer could be one or both of those.  And it is.

It makes out your loved one is special to God when all are special to God

If it is arrogant to pray for your loved one as if the dying baby down the street does not matter you are as good as telling God not to help. No wonder royals despite all the prayers said for them are never any holier or healthier than anybody else. People who pray for their own healing have the same recovery rates as those who do not pray or who pray to the “wrong” thing – maybe the Buddha statue.  Prayer is not really about God - it is about using God.

Prayer and the quest to feel in control

Prayer expresses a low-grade narcissism where people think it gives them the power to get others to think and act a certain way. It comes from our incorrigible notion that we can control how others feel.  We always act as if we can do that and we never learn.

God is important to believers as the alleged being who is pure love and on your side. If you cosy up to an entity who has great power you will feel power for you decide to accept his decisions and make them your own as well. To feel powerful it does not follow that you need to have vast power yourself. People who seek absolute power are corrupt. And getting the power or thinking they have it corrupts them more. But in reality there is no absolute power unless you have power over reality and truth to shape them according to your will. You have no such power so you make do with the sensation that you do have it. If you think the God of the universe hears and answers your prayers and is still working for you even if you seem to get no answer you hope for it being answered in a surprise way different to what you expected. That is the crave for power at its most extreme. It explains why religious believers are often nasty and dangerous. If somebody is nice just because they have a sense of having absolute power that niceness is a facade. A really good person will be good whether or not they feel powerful.
 
A gunman faces the couple, a young man and young woman. The young man throws himself on top of her when the gun is emptied at them and he prays that he will take the bullets and she will be okay. That seems noble doesn't it?
 
The decent person will want to believe that this goodness was all the man's and nobody else's. The man is the creator of his goodness.
 
God is not involved and should not be thought of as involved.
 
The man is only degrading himself and what he has done for her by praying.
 
Also, if he is such a big believer in God's will he is throwing himself in faith that he will get the bullets not her. He is using prayer in an attempt to change and control fate. If that is okay then why is it wrong for Islamists to blow themselves up in markets for God? It cannot be necessarily wrong. But the atheist believes it is necessarily wrong which is why the atheist should be wiser than the believer.
 
The person who cares about you will only give you evidence based information and urge you to learn for yourself. Cheap care for others is not care. Those who say they get support and results from prayer are selfishly counting the hits and leaving out the misses. When a woman prays that she will not hit her child next week and she hits the child she will forget that. She will see the week in which she refrains from hitting as a result. She is attributing too much significance to luck. Also, like everybody else, she will make mistakes in trying to judge what good things or bad things can happen and how and when they will happen. Do an experiment. Try to foresee all the results of some action and you will see how often you are wrong about the probabilities.
 
Christians say that counting hits is important. They say that if you refuse to count the hits that is no good. There is no point in counting the misses only. That is biased and unfair. That is what they do. Both hits and misses have to be looked at to see if it makes sense to think that some power helped. And many of the hits are not really hits. For example, Lucia makes a speedy recovery from flu after somebody prays for her and it's amazing - until she falls down the stairs the next day and ends up crippled for life.
 
If you start to feel lucky with prayer that could get dangerous. People do not encourage feeling lucky. And for good reason! It leads to arrogance and wrecklessness. Even if you think luck is down to chance that can happen. If you think you are manipulating luck with prayer or magic it can happen even faster.
 
Believers look at miracles and dramatic and seemingly supernatural answers to prayer - eg when somebody who is dying rises from the bed healthy. They say that these things are not likely to happen. Perhaps at times they are nearly impossible. So they are improbable. But then they contradict this by saying they probably happened after all! You cannot have it two ways - it makes no sense to say that an event is too unlikely to have happened and then that it likely did happen. Believers are actually saying more than that! "Jesus probably did not rise from the dead and because that is unlikely he therefore probably did rise from the dead." That is insane. It is more extreme than saying, "Jesus probably did not rise from the dead. In spite of that, he therefore probably did rise from the dead."

To make a world of suffering about your wish to feel your prayers help is shameful.  It is simply exploitation of the innocent.

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