{"id":2102,"date":"2009-06-05T07:41:26","date_gmt":"2009-06-05T15:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2102"},"modified":"2009-06-05T11:03:32","modified_gmt":"2009-06-05T19:03:32","slug":"the-conundrum-of-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-conundrum-of-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"The conundrum of prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Saturday, the New York City Police Department\u00a0 experienced the worst misfortune that can befall a police department: one officer mistakenly and fatally shooting another.\u00a0 The loss of Officer Omar Edwards to friendly fire is an unbearable tragedy, for which the entire city grieves.\u00a0 (Despicably, New York\u2019s race hustlers, including the New York Times, are trying to turn the incident into a racial one, as I describe here<\/a>.)\u00a0 In the wake of Edwards\u2019s shooting, New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly discussed<\/a> another friendly fire incident in\u00a0 2006, in which an off-duty NYPD officer with a gun was also shot by his fellow officers:<\/p>\n

On learning that [Officer Eric] Hernandez had been shot, the entire [precinct] football team assembled at St. Barnabas Hospital. They kept a vigil day after day, but all their prayers could not save him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Daly is using a commonplace expression, of course, but one that in its very frequency carries ponderable significance. Isn\u2019t it the least bit puzzling to believers why some prayers get answered and others don\u2019t?\u00a0\u00a0 Theology and metaphysics are serious disciplines, we are told<\/a>, worthy of deep study.\u00a0 Surely the divines can explain what distinguishes the moments when prayers do save someone from those when they don\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0 Is it the targets of prayers that are distinguishable, or the people doing the praying?\u00a0 Perhaps someone could keep tabs and analyse the results, in the spirit of scientific inquiry.\u00a0 Or does God just have priorities wildly different from ours?\u00a0 But who can possibly imagine a reason why God wouldn\u2019t respond to prayers to save an officer\u2019s life, but would respond to the petitions that we are regularly told have produced a divine affirmative\u2014to get someone out of debt, say, or to cure someone of illness?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I take it that believers do not ascribe such inconsistent results to capriciousness on God\u2019s part, but rather to their own limited capacities to understand God\u2019s ways:\u00a0 \u201cThy Will be done.\u201d\u00a0 But why continue directing any psychic energy to a being so lacking in sympathetic correspondence to human needs and values.\u00a0 It will not do to say: \u201cGod does respond to our prayers, but in ways that we cannot fathom.\u201d\u00a0 Saving a child from cancer and letting a child die from cancer cannot both be a sympathetic response to prayer; if we had wanted a stricken child to die in order to secure an earlier entry to heaven, we would have said so.\u00a0 And if premature death from cancer is such a boon, why doesn\u2019t a loving God provide it to one and all?<\/p>\n

It is humans who work with passion and commitment every day to try to save their fellows\u00a0(and a range of other creatures) \u00a0from suffering and sorrow.\u00a0 Emergency room medicine is constantly evolving to try to ensure that gun shot victims and people crushed by cars survive.\u00a0 Doctors and hospital staff work frantically throughout the night to try to revive a failing heart or a shattered brain.\u00a0 They do so out of love and compassion, while God, who could restart an exhausted heart in an instant, demurs.\u00a0 The only source of love on earth is human empathy.\u00a0 Transferring our own admirable traits onto\u00a0a constructed deity just obscures the real human condition: we are all we have, but that is saying a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Saturday, the New York City Police Department\u00a0 experienced the worst misfortune that can befall a police department: one officer mistakenly and fatally shooting another.\u00a0 The loss of Officer Omar Edwards to friendly fire is an unbearable tragedy, for which … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[169,182],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2102"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2107,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102\/revisions\/2107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}