People pray because it makes them feel better, imo. What I don't get is those who still praise god when their prayers don't get a positive response. A case in point are the people who have had many prayers offered for their healing, yet their prayers go unanswered. When challenged some Christians will say that god sometimes says no for the best of reasons. I am thinking of a particular case, which has being going on for about 18 months. Prayers have been offered on their behalf yet their condition has worsened in such a way it must be very hard for the person concerned as it appears they are suffering emotionally and physically. It must be terrible for the family having to witness it. What sort of god would not do anything to help if it could?
I suspect that at some point most people will have seen a quotation widely attributed to - but almost certainly never actually said by - Albert Einstein: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result." (In some versions it reads: "... a different result"). This is one of those internet meme thingies which has been attributed to everybody and anybody. (Mark Twain is another perennial favourite). In actuality, nobody has ever been able to trace this quote to anywhere in Einstein's writings. On balance, he most likely never said it.
Nevertheless, somebody, somewhere, at some point in time
did say it, so let's take it on its face. It sounds pretty much like the hallmark of petitionary prayer to me - expecting that the Creator of All That Is can have its presumably perfect plan swayed by human beings speaking internally to it in their own heads with their eyes closed. The most casual and cursory glance at the Prayer Thread here ought to give anyone pause as to exactly how well that little exercise works out; it ought to, but doesn't, because the belief in a prayer-answering god has its own inbuilt unfalsifiability where absolutely any and every state of affairs no matter how horrendous is interpreted as bolstering the belief, not falsifying it. Prayer offered; desired outcome = thank you Lord! Undesired outcome = ah well, God knows best, his ways are not our ways - thank you Lord! This abysmal travesty of reasoning is made to be compatible with
quite literally everything that happens (which in a tremendous number of cases is of course the result of sheer random chance, not the cunningly-concealed arbitrary whims of a capricious agent). In normal, that is to say rational cases people would, after several endeavours of this kind, regard the experiment as a failure and the hypothesis falsified ... but we're not talking about normal and rational cases.
I could specify some concrete examples of this woeful phenomenon at work, but I shall forbear, save to say that one has to wonder just how many times an undesired result has to show itself before more or less normally-constituted people start to wonder if their activity is having any distinct effect of any kind whatever.
It strikes me as a little like a domestically violent/abusive relationship - it'll be different next time ... it'll be different next time ... it says something about the psychology of some humans that in the teeth of all evidence they would sooner insist on believing in the whims of a capricious, random and arbitrary agent indistinguishable from capricious, random and arbitrary events rather than cutting out the middle god and going straight to random chance. It says something, and nothing complimentary.
