Prayer

2002-11-12 - 5:18 a.m.

Okay, so a perfunctory entry is really not fair to anyone who was actually waiting for an entry.

Church was weird. In part because Pookie and I heard completely different sermons.

I think Pookie is waiting expectantly for me to suddenly come around and stop with this foolish agnostic nonsense. I can confess that I make a poor example of an agnostic, what with my intermittent moments of belief in stuff, but the thing is, I don't think I'll ever be a complete theist. Pookie says that he doesn't always believe things, but I think we're looking at this from two different perspectives. I'm not going to suddenly decide that there's a lot more to this world than the phsyical, even if it seems like it sometimes.

The thing is that all of this religion stuff seems sometimes like a nice story, one that's well-read and comfortable, with some surprises along the way, but one you can repeat to yourself when you're afraid or unsure. It's useful in the moment, and some of the names are similar to some of the names outside the story, but in the end, it isn't real.

I'm okay with having to wait until I die to find out if God is real, most of the time. It's frustrating, sometimes, because having faith of some sort seems comfortable, and the moments when I've been weak or lost a loved one, or even moments when I just want to send out positive thoughts into the world, I turn to prayer and God...but I don't think that qualifies as belief. It qualifies as desperation, or it qualifies as the laziest way to improve the world.

Pookie and I bickered after church, because the theme was "The Power of Prayer," and I found that some of what the sermon was about was more like magic: you pray, and God gives.

To me, that equation is completely unsatisfying. If there's a God, he's going to give or not give whether you pray or not. Every mother who has watched her sick child battle for life has prayed, but not every, or even close to every, sick child has pulled through. I don't think God works that way, and if he does I think he's not a just God at all.

If there's a God (<-this is my handy agnostic disclaimer), I think he's set things already: he already knows when everyone dies, who gets sick and who doesn't, who will be beset with trials and plagues and problems their whole lives and who will seem blessed. Whether we pray or not does absolutely nothing for the outcome.

What prayer does, and which is more valuable, is that it allows us to feel better. If there's a God, I think he's with us all the time, whether we acknowledge Him or not, and he's loving us eternally and infinitely, whether we love Him back or not. Prayer isn't for -Him-, and it isn't for the people we pray about, because His love, and our destinies, are already forgone conclusions. Prayer is just so that we can accept that we are loved and that sometimes we are powerless.

A lot of the belief systems that rely on the "If you do this, then you will get that" bother me. I guess I'm even a socialist in my theology, but what's the point of unconditional love if there are conditions attached?

This whole entry has been really sloppy. I think I'm going to work on this stuff and come back to it later...this entry was really supposed to be about what happened Friday.

Cheers,

The Magus

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