Blogson GEBIV of There's One, Only! left this comment on my original atheist prayer post:

Who does an atheist pray to?

Harv, you're an agnostic. You don't know if God exists or not. You don't deny He exists.

Regarding the first part, as I said in the original post, I will pray to the empty, Godless sky.

Regarding the second part, I'm not an agnostic. I do deny God's existence. Or at least, I would if I were asked. I'm not an evangelical atheist out looking for converts, so I don't usually bring it up.

As to whether I "know", that brings up epistemological niceties about what knowledge is, which I'd rather avoid. Suffice it to say that I know it as well as I can be said to know anything about ANY complex abstract phenomenon. That is, the absense of God causes fewer contradictions in my personal knowledge base than a belief in him would.

As to WHY I don't believe... that's another VERY complex topic that I'm not fool enough to try condensing into a single post. It took a good 10 years or reading, study, and conversation to get to the point where I felt comfortable saying "none of the above". Even if I could reproduce it all, it wouldn't necessarily be persuasive, because that particular set of data was only sufficient to convince someone with my personal life experiences. If you've lived a different life, you'd probably need more or different information to reach the same conclusion. Since, as I said, I'm not evangelical, I have neither the time nor the desire to discover and deliver that critical mass of information for anyone else. That's a personal choice.

For informational purposes only, the VERY short answer is this: I looked at THE fundamental question:

Where did the universe come from?

Most people answer that question with "God created it", and if asked "Where did God come from?" they'll answer "Nowhere. God was just always there".

Which is my answer to that original question.

The universe was just always there.

All the matter and energy that currently exist have always existed, just changing in form and/or location over time.

And, realistically speaking, outside of a window of a few million years in one direction or another, I have no need to know the specifics about that form. So I don't waste a lot of thought on it. I know the laws of physics here and now in this part of the galaxy, and that's plenty to get me by. The rest is just the rest, and the niggling details are Stephen Hawking's problem, not mine.

Again. Not persuasive. Not by a long shot. It wasn't meant to be.

Getting back to the subject of atheistic prayer, The Humble Devildog of Random Firing of Neurons asked me a very good question on Saturday night while we were out enjoying scotch & cigars:

WHY would an atheist bother praying?

I'll toss out a parable here. If, for example, Nick were to have asked me, "Harv, my wife is sick. Would you please flip a coin until it comes up heads three times in a row so that she'll get better?" I wouldn't answer, "Nick, that's just coinist foolishness. I don't believe there's any relationship between coin-flipping and a woman's health."

No, I'd grab a quarter & start flipping. Why? Because I like Nick, I know he's suffering, and if there's something simple that I can do to make him feel better, I'll do it.

I'd probably even let him keep the quarter afterwards.

I suppose that, technically, this attitude towards prayer makes me as bad as the Pharisees - doing my prayers in public to be seen by men. God probably just rolls his eyes at such foolishness, and I won't win any favor in his eyes.

But then again, my intention is to please those I care about, and if an atheist's prayer will do that, then - to paraphrase Matthew 6:5 - "Verily I say unto you, I have my reward."

Posted by: Harvey at 09:54 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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