Since facing my unbelief and coming out to my TBM DH I am a much calmer and grounded person. Because of a scary childhood I found comfort in pray from an early age. The last 3 years have been my unbelief years but also some tough situation years. My Dad died,
put my Mother in a home,son had open heart surgery, husband had a stroke, son has another rare medical problem, blood clot in my leg, just to name a few. At first I wanted to melt into pantic mode and start frantically praying. As time has passed, I am much more capable when I just stand up and face the problem. All that praying and wanting intervention from outside was just crazy-making. Anyone else have this experience?

I often prayed hysterically as a child for my non-active stepdad to come back to church. It gave me so much anxiety to know that I just needed to pray HARDER and more and just be PATIENT and God would answer my righteous prayer. I made myself sick over it. I never want my kids to feel that way!

Absolutely!

When I realized that the outcome of all the situations in my life didn't change whether I prayed or not, I became a much calmer person.

I hate to admit that TV sitcoms have a larger influence in my life now than ChurchCo ever did. Whenever I start to get anxious about situations that I feel I have no control over, I just do the "Serenity Now" chant that Frank Costanza (on Seinfeld) was advised to use when he thought that his blood pressure was going up. It helps a lot.

...all that strength we got from prayer was only ourselves coping, not some magical assistance from the invisible man. Or that the comfort we felt in times of anxiety or pain was just us letting go and allowing the situation to pass. We're strong and resilient little F-ers.

Not only calmer, but more stable. Nothing was more demoralizing and destabiling to me than trying to guess why a prayer was or was not answered and why I was a bad person if it wasn't. I made myself nuts trying to puzzle it out and be better and better and better...what a joke. Now I know things happen and we deal with it the best way we can. Since when did humans decide they needed a cosmic guarantee for everything that goes on in our lives? Once I grasped that concept I felt liberated beyond words.



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+1

Exactly.

Yes. I started meditating and found the same result but with much less angst about my personal issues. I think the good feeling of prayer comes about because of the meditative aspects.

Yes! Accepting that there was absolutely no causal connection between prayer and events in my life released me from the frantic and constant pleading for the thing I wanted. It was like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. When you are programmed to believe that you can change outcomes if you're righteous enough, pure enough, sacrifice enough, etc. you expend an inordinate amount of energy chasing your tail and being miserable. Letting that go felt like, for the first time in years, I was not living a life of constantly hitting my head against an immovable brick wall.

Exactly. I also felt (and sometimes continue to feel) great anger about it too because the myth is so pervasive and so aggressively perpetuated by church "authorities". So many people suffer from paralyzing depression because they feel they aren't good enough to warrant divine attention, and the church not only does not mitigate this problem, they exacerbate it beyond what I can articulate. It's sick, it's wrong, and it still pisses me off bigtime.

to ask someone else to help or guide me. But in general I think it was disempowering.

Why?

Because, if things turned out okay, I had to believe that it was because of God's blessing, NOT because of my resiliance, good thinking, or hard work (although I thought I was also required those things were required of me to deserve God's help).

And if things turned out badly, it was because somehow I was unworthy, or hadn't worked hard enough.

In fact, what I just said is ringing a bell for me. It's reminding me of an online test that had to do with confidence. What I learned from that test was that when confident people are successful, they generalize and say "I'm good at _____________". People who are less confident tend to say they were fortunate, or they worked really hard, etc. [maybe they might even say they were "blessed"]. Basically, they don't give themselves enough credit.

Guess what type of person I am? 13 years after I stopped believing in God? I'm the second type. And I didn't realize that isn't a good thing, according to that little test I took.

I think prayer erodes independence and confidence. Perhaps a religious person might come to believe that they can't do something difficult by themselves, and even if they CAN do it themselves, they are still obligated to give credit to a higher being.

A god who wanted his children to grow up into fully functioning adults (or maybe even GODS), would NOT want them to be asking Him to solve every problem or question in their lives, right down to finding their car keys. He'd be telling them to grow up, learn to make their own decisions, and get organized so they can find their own damn keys.

I'm an atheist who doesn't condemn prayer. Sometimes I talk to the sky, and I expect no answer. There is no God. But the universe doesn't mind listening. I've had no complaints about my "sky talking." I think it's a form of meditation. It's reflective and quiet. There are no boundaries in thinking.

We were actually talking about this in my psychology class today. It's called "self-talk" and as soon as we can talk we start to do it to help ourselves through stressful or complicated situations. Heck, I did it last time I had to change a tire. (all this time I was directing it skyward and calling it a prayer)

then the daily time God has available for each human is 1/81000 of a second. Over an 80-year lifetime an individual human's cumulative share of God's time is less than 3/8 of one second.

When I do a factual analysis, such as the above, it makes the idea of a God that watches over me seem completely ludicrous. When I became an atheist at age 14 it made life a lot easier. The supernatural God horsepucky had been cluttering up my mind and I immediately felt a lot better when I stopped believing in God.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/25/2013 09:25AM by saviorself.

of a second of God's attention for when they REALLY need it, and not to waste it on routine prayers.

...staffed by the spirits of those who have died and those yet to be born.