Religion and prayer
It's not often I make a "serious" post on this blog, probably because I tend to spend most of my time just trying to stay afloat rather than form opinions on things, but this is something that's been bothering me for a while. So I thought I'd write about it. Here we go:
What's the point of religion? Do people who pray every day really believe that their lives are made better by the act of prayer? Or do they just believe that if they don't pray then their lives will be made much worse?
I know that people take comfort in the words of the bible. Is that because they can't think of a solution to their problems on their own? They have to turn to a "how to do it" manual?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there is a God. Only one God, and he is omnipresent, and omnipotent. He knows everything that we are thinking, everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen. So, by extension, he knows if you're inherently a good person, or inherently an evil person. He knows that good people can occasionally do bad things, and feel sorry about those things, and he knows that bad people can occasionally do good things (although I have no idea if they feel good about those things or not. But God knows. If he exists). Anyway, feeling good about yourself or feeling sorry for yourself does not change your inherent nature. So, given that God knows all this, and given that we are going to go to heaven or hell based on whether we are inherently good or evil, will praying make the slightest bit of difference?
Let's also say, for the sake of argument, that Bob Geldof does not believe in God. Does that mean that he is going to hell because he is a non-believer? But Bob is an inherently good person, he saw that something was wrong with the world and set about changing it, improving the lives of millions of people. So should he go to heaven because he is an inherently good person? (Actually I wrote this a while ago and chose Bob as an example here because he's pretty well-known as being a "good person". I had no idea if he believes in God or not - according to this interview, he doesn't).
I'm not sure if I believe in God, or heaven, or hell. I do know that it is better to be a good person than an evil person, that treating fellow human beings with respect and kindness will have its paybacks. What goes around, comes around. But just because I don't go to a specified building at a specified time of the week, and read specific words from a specific book, does that make me a bad person? You can teach children right from wrong without touching the bible (or any religious writings). They learn what they need to know from fairy tales, fables, ghost stories and all the other stuff that kids lap up. My son knew that lying was bad after he watched Pinocchio, we didn't have to quote the bible to him to teach him that.
The human brain is a remarkable thing. Given enough time, it will usually sort out its own problems. When we sleep, when we dream (or daydream), this is our brain making sense of the outside world. If you have a problem rattling about in your head, a moral issue or whatever, how do you go about solving it? Do you write out a list of pros and cons, an action plan? Do you go to church or wherever and ask God for guidance? Or do you sleep on it? I would wager that whichever option you chose, you'd come up with a solution to the problem within a few hours. Now, did you logically work out a solution? Did God answer your prayers? Or did your brain make sense of the problem while you were sleeping?
I have a feeling that people feel comfortable with prayer because it acts as a way of distracting the mind from the normal day-to-day problems, and gives it some space to sort things out on its own. Meditation does the same thing, I would imagine yoga does too. The brain also has time to think about the day's problems while you're at the gym. So if prayer is simply a means to distract the brain, why not go for a walk instead?
My parents are Jewish and although no-one in my family is observant I was sent to a Jewish school. I learned how to read hebrew and how to say the prayers. But I don't remember being taught all that much about what the prayers actually mean. So when I go to synagogue (about once every 10 years if current stats are anything to go by) I can still just about read the hebrew words and tell where the rabbi is up to, but the rest of it is like watching a foreign film with a blindfold on. And I get the impression that 98% of people that go to synagogue when I go (Jewish new year and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement) are only going so that other people can see that they went. I don't think anyone really goes to atone for their sins, because the most obvious sin is that they haven't set foot inside a synagogue for the last 12 months.
There are many different religions in the world, each believing different things. Some religions are more tolerant than others of people that either don't believe, or believe something different. Over the course of history, how many people have died as a result of religious fighting? If people are praying to God and calling for an end to war, do you think he's listening?
Dear Dan of UK,
I came across your blog looking for a Daniel Freedman of Idaho. Although you are obviously not he, your question just begged me to answer. I not only know the answers to all these questions and can answer them, I can fully explain and document them. However, time does not permit all of that tonight. So I'll do brief answers for now, and if you wish for more information, we'll see what we can do for you.
P2Q1 (Paragraph 2, question one). Yes.
P2Q2. Yes.
P3Q1. Yes.
P3Q2. Yes.
P4. No – Praying doesn’t change where you going. The premise is in error however. People do not go to heaven because they are good or go to hell because they are bad. They go to heaven because they believe that Jesus Christ, who is God and man in one unique person forever, did everything necessary to provide the opportunity for eternal salvation from hell. You only have to accept/believe this and you, too, will go to heaven. He was qualified, willing, and able. He died on the cross and paid for all mankind’s sins, past, present and future. He was buried and rose again (resurrected) three days later. If a person is willing to accept what Christ did for them as all sufficient, they will go to heaven. That is all it takes. No prayers, no “being good,” no nothing else. Just accept this gift from God. Period. We are all inherently sinful. We just judge each other on a relative scale. For a Biblical reference see Romans chapters 1 through 3.
P5. See P4. Yes Bob Geldof will go to hell if he has not accepted Christ as his savior before he dies.
P6. Going/not going to a specific building, or reading/or not reading from a specific book is not what makes you good or evil. You are unrighteous before God because of your position in the first Adam who fell/sinned. You are unrighteous because you are a sinner. You are unrighteous because of the fact that you do not think like God, live like God, or labor together with Him in what He is doing. See P4 to fix this problem.
The rest of the paragraph is full of great examples of alternatives to thinking and living like God, and laboring with God. They will not make you godlike. They will not provide for your eternal salvation – or your children’s. The issue isn’t for people to “be good” or “nice” or “do philanthropic activities.” The issue is: are you righteous? It is through P4 that you gain positional righteousness that God can accept. Trying to be all these nice things are substitutes – fakes for what God wants to teach you to be AFTER you are saved. So these are ways to try to attain a godliness without God, doing it your own way. Again, this won’t get you saved, won’t get you to heaven. Neither will it be godliness, no matter how hard you try. It can’t. You are unrighteous. Your thinking can not possibly match Gods, nor can you if you are unrighteous live like God, nor can you if you are unrighteous (unsaved, see P4) labor together with God in what He is doing. You – no one - cannot fulfill what you were designed/created for if your are unsaved (i.e., unrighteous).
P7. Men do come up with many, many alternatives to the perfect and unsurpassable solution God has for every single problem man has. If one chooses prayer, God does not whisper the answer in someone’s ear. He expects you to know His word and be able to use that information to make your decisions. That is what thinking like God provides: it results in living (making all those decisions that you face on a moment by moment, daily basis) like God and it also results in you knowing and understanding what God is doing right now, what He has set out to accomplish, and wants you to be working right alongside Him in that business.
P8. I agree. Just because people pray doesn’t mean they know what it is for or what they are doing/how to use it properly. In which case, a walk might do them just as good. That is not to say that God doesn’t hear all prayers and can decide whether or not to respond in some way to those prayers. For example, your entire blog, if directed toward God, could be perceived as an honest desire to know something about the truth of God. That’s certainly how I took it. In which case, how about that – you got your answer!
P9. Again, you are right. Just because someone goes to synagogue or wherever means nothing as far as salvation/atonement of sins. See P4. As for whether or not going to that synagogue in 12 months is a sin – a sin in whose eyes and why? Another whole can of worms I’ll pass on right now.
As a sidelight, you might be interested to know that a majority of the Bible (the Jewish scriptures along with the so-called New Testament of the Christian scriptures) pertains to Israel. It is only the Pauline epistles that are about something else entirely (what God is doing today). What your Jewish scriptures look forward to, the Messiah, occurs in the opening books of the Christian New Testament. If you care to investigate this, please use a King James Version for the most accurate presentation of God’s word to us today in our own English language.
P10. Again you are right. Lots of religious fighting – even among Christians themselves. I wrote a song with the following line referring to the Bible (with both the Old and New Testaments): “It’s the book, Satan took to use against you and me!” Most Christians do not know their own book, let alone know how to properly approach it. This is why no one can agree on this or that even in the so-called same religion.
Final question: praying to God for an end to war, is He listening? He hears it. But if you knew what He was thinking, you’d already have the answer and wouldn’t have prayed it to begin with. You’d know.
For details and answers to these and many more questions, I can heartily recommend several resources, but the best place to start would be www.EnjoyTheBible.org. I am in no way related to this organization except that I recommend it as often as people like you give me the opportunity.
I don’t know how this blog site works. I will bookmark it and check back later to see if I can be of further service to you.