I don’t tire of saying it, Akshay is simply one of the most insightful well-articulated obscure young(?) Christian thinkers in the blogosphere.

I’ve been told more times than I’d like to have heard it that religion is the root of all war. The people who say this are generally people who believe that religion is irrelevant, unscientific, illogical and unreliable – the kind of stuff that weak people need to believe in so that they can cajole their insecurities, calm their restless fears and play the sacrificial host to their nagging superstitions – the kind of stuff that helps you sleep at night.

Their views of religion aside, I find it naive and somewhat ignorant that one would assume that religion was the root of all war. Naive, because it assumes that man would not go to war if not for religious beliefs. Ignorant, because it negates all the war and violence in history that was initiated by the most non-religious of men. [eg. Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin]

Men go to war because men have war in their hearts. Religion may fuel the fire, but I find it naive to think that religion started the fire. If there was no religion, would not men fight for the color of their skin, for their place on the ladder of social class, for the borders of their countries, for the expansion of their kingdoms, for the establishment of their non-religious dogmas? Have they not gone to war for those very reasons in the past?

To take religion out of the picture would only mean that there was one less reason/excuse in the world for men to go to war. The fact that men go to war is not the failure of religion. It is the failure of man. It is his greed, his pride, his stubborn rebellion against reason and his insatiable hunger for glory. To fail to recognize that, is to fail to confront ourselves as a people. To fail to confront ourselves, is to set the stage for a world at war with itself. With or without religion.

http://whereisakshay.blogspot.com/2007/10/at-head-of-every-sword.html

Sorry misotheists, I know this is news to you but religion is not to blame; certainly no more than skin colour or social class systems are to blame. Because without all these things men would still have war in their hearts. Religion is not the reason for wars or the cause of our ills. It doesn’t poison everything as one of the four horsemen of the new-atheist apocalypse puts it. Far from it. You see, it’s not skin colour; it’s pride. It’s not social classes or land; it’s greed. It’s not religion; it’s man. Man is to blame. Man and every wicked thing within his heart. The rest is just an excuse. It’s fluff. And as soon as you take your focus off the man to point the finger elsewhere, you’ve taken your eye off the real instigator.

At The Philosopher’s Magazine (TPM) web site there is a fun games and activities section, and one of the available games is called “The Philosophical Health Check” which is supposed to evaluate whether one’s answers to pre-selected pairs of world view questions demonstrate any contradictions or tensions. While not exactly serious it can nevertheless be somewhat interesting. I took the test and was pleased to discover that my world view is remarkably self-consistent and contains zero contradictions.

But it did identify two opposing answer pairs that apparently generate tension amongst themselves. But as the site itself admits, that tension can be removed by finding “some rationally coherent way of reconciling them.” The tension was found between my answers to the following two pairs of pre-selected questions. (For example, they ask you a pair of questions concerning morality that are worded quite differently, then compare them for consistency.)

First Answer Pair Tension

I agreed with the statement that “there exists an all-powerful, loving and good God.” But then I also agreed with the statement that “to allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly when one could easily prevent it is morally reprehensible.” Agreeing with both of those statements generates a tension, I was informed, a philosophical paradox known as the Problem of Evil.

The problem is simple: If God is all-powerful, loving and good, that means he can do what he wants and will do what is morally right. But surely this means that he would not allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly (as he could easily prevent it). Yet he does. Much infant suffering is the result of human action, but much is also due to natural causes such as disease, flood or famine. In both cases, God could stop it. Yet he does not.

It is sheer irony that TPM would be found committing such a basic question-begging fallacy. In reality there is no tension at all between my answers. Notwithstanding my agreement that there exists a God with the above described attributes, I had agreed that it is morally reprehensible to “allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly when one could easily prevent it.” Notice that emphasized word, for it is critically important. If there exists a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent then there cannot exist gratuitous evil or suffering, for the two are mutually exclusive in the same way that an Irresistible Force and an Immovable Object are. One can posit that my two answers are incompatible only by begging the question (fallacy) that some humans suffer needlessly; to assert that gratuitous evil or suffering exists shoulders an enormous burden of proof in a critical evaluation of the God of Christianity.

Second Answer Pair Tension

The idea that it is “reasonable to believe in the existence of a thing without even the possibility of evidence for its existence” was something I confidently disagreed with. But then I agreed that “atheism is a faith just like any other, because it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God.” That creates a tension, they told me.

In disagreeing with the first statement you are acting consistently with the general principle which states that in the absence of good grounds for believing something it is not rational to believe it. … This is not to be thought of as a matter of faith but of sound reasoning. But asserting that atheism is a faith just like any other, because it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God, contradicts this principle.

Not, it does not. I wonder if anyone else has ever noticed the bait-and-switch employed here. The first statement said that it is reasonable to affirm P (e.g., “God exists”) even when there is no possibility of evidence for it. I disagreed with that statement, for I think there is nothing reasonable about that. If there are no good grounds nor even the possibility thereof for believing P, then doing so is actually contrary to reason.

The second statement said that atheism is a matter of faith (which TPM interprets as belief without good grounds) because it is not possible to show that P is false (or that ¬P is true). And I agreed with that statement, having in mind the agnostic or ‘weak’ atheist who readily admits that God might exist but does not himself believe it. When we look past the epistemological component to the metaphysical structure of his world view, we observe that he must take it on faith that P is false (or that ¬P is true) precisely because it is not possible to show that it is. (There are those who say that atheism is the negation of a belief, not the assertion of a belief. They are simply wrong, for atheism is the positive belief that “no deity required,” that no feature of our world requires deity to account for it.)

But I want you to notice the bait-and-switch that TPM engages in. In their criticism they assert that it is not rational to affirm a proposition (whether P or ¬P) in the absence of good grounds for doing so, but it cannot escape our notice that this is a very different sort of beast. The clever switch they pulled may not be obvious but it is certainly clear. Their criticism regarded believing some X exists without good grounds for doing so, but the original question they asked regarded believing some X exists for which it is not even possible to have good grounds, which is a very different sort of thing. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the question of whether or not John has proper warrant to believe some X exists is a very different question from whether or not that warrant is appropriate for Peter’s belief that some X exists. (For example, if an alien is before John then he has proper warrant to believe it exists, but for Peter that evidence is anecdotal and may not be appropriate for his belief that it exists.)

At any rate, according to TPM it is not reasonable to believe some X exists when there is not even the possibility of good grounds for doing so. And I agree. But if by pairing this with a question about atheism they wish to suggest that such is the case for belief in the existence of God, they shoulder a heavy burden of proving that said belief is beyond even the possibility of having good grounds.

(The ‘strong’ atheist is in a worse position, for he draws a metaphysical conclusion from an epistemological argument, that is, he claims to know that P is false because it has not been shown to be true, or that ¬P is true because it has not been shown to be false, which commits the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam.)

Third Answer Pair Tension

This alleged tension was so erroneous it barely deserves attention, but I am mentioning it for its comedic value. On the one hand I agreed that “judgements about works of art are purely matters of taste,” while on the other hand I agreed that “Michelangelo is one of history’s finest artists.”

The tension here is the result of the fact that you probably don’t believe the status of Michelangelo is seriously in doubt. One can disagree about who is the best artist of all time, but surely Michelangelo is on the short list. Yet if this is true, how can judgements about works of art be purely matters of taste? If someone unskilled were to claim that they were as good an artist as Michelangelo, you would probably think that they were wrong, and not just because your tastes differ. You would probably think Michelangelo’s superiority to be not just a matter of personal opinion. The tension here is between a belief that works of art can be judged, in certain respects, by some reasonably objective standards and the belief that, nonetheless, the final arbiter of taste is something subjective. This is not a contradiction, but a tension nonetheless.

The problem, of course, is that my answer to the second question was a matter of personal taste! I did not pretend that my agreement was somehow an objective judgment. I could either agree or disagree with the statement, but to disagree would have been false. So I had to agree, aware of the weak and obvious trap they were laying.

(And notice the “you would probably think” statements they impose on me in their criticism. No, I would not probably think that, because I had just said that judgments about art are purely a matter of taste.)

Since David’s essay was a response to mine, I thought that this response back to him should take the form of several responses to selected excerpts. Without further ado:

“He was simply repudiating as personally irrelevant various reasons anecdotally given for why a person would be an atheist.”

Yes, that’s a succinct and correct way of saying it. My short essay was perhaps bordering on a rant, with little content into which one could sink one’s intellectual teeth. However, David makes a valiant effort, and succeeds. I hope I can satisfactorily explain the points of contention.

“And this world view of his, which we may grant is atheistic, in fact is much more than a mere absence of belief that God exists.”

My world view is scientific. Let me qualify this. I’m not a practicing scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but I love reading about and learning about science. In the field of competing ideas, I’m on the sideline, cheering science on and waving my banner. My atheism has little to do with my world view, except insofar as it describes my stance on the question of the existence of gods.

“So biographically Havard believes that God is not required to explain the intelligibility of the human experience, but that raises the epistemological question as to whether or not he has good reasons for that belief. Unfortunately, he did not get into this; but since it was not the point of his article in the first place, he cannot be faulted for it. However, it is hoped that this encourages him to perhaps write more on this point.”

I have, on occasion, confessed that my reasons for being an atheist might not be entirely based on reason, and I stand by that. Asimov, struggling for years on whether to call himself an atheist or not, said, “I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.” This has become a favorite quote of mine. The only positive evidence that I can point to is the apparent lack of evidence for His existence. Now, I say “apparent” because naturally, I am only one person and may be missing vital evidence that, if provided me, would convince me. It sounds trite because of the repetition, but for me at least, it really is true: There are lots of things whose existence I don’t believe in, gods included (I trust I don’t have to reproduce the list).

“The nature of rebellion is made evident by other atheists who have stated quite frankly that, even if the existence of God were made conclusively evident to them, such that they would have to believe he exists by force of the evidence, they nevertheless would still refuse to obey or glorify him.”

This is an interesting observation. If God’s existence was made conclusively evident to me, I would certainly have no choice but to accept that He exists (naturally). Whether or not I would obey or glorify Him depends on His nature. Would I obey Him if He commanded me to slay the unbelieving tribe living down the valley? I would hope that I had the courage to refuse. Would I obey Him if He commanded me to love my neighbor? Yes. Would I glorify Him? Well, would He want to be glorified?

In a similar vein, David asks:

“Even if the existence of God were made indisputably evident to him, fully satisfying whatever criteria he might posit, would obedience to God depend upon Havard’s own personal evaluation of his commands?”

This is an extremely tricky question. Again, it utterly depends on the commands. But you specifically restricted the evidence to show only His existence, not necessarily His omnipotence or His omnibenevolence. Suppose he was an evil God with limited knowledge? In that case, I would certainly trust my own reasoning above His. But if His superior knowledge and goodness could also be made indisputably evident to me in some way, then I would have no choice but to obey, since I would then know perfectly well that it all works out for the greater good. In truth, I’m extremely unsure about how to answer this question.

“Every moment in which, and every means by which, they knew that God exists will be exposed and inescapable. They can get away with it before man, but they won’t before God. That is the eternal gamble they make of their lives.”

This strikes me as a veiled accusation of dishonesty. If it isn’t, then I apologize, but if it is, I can do nothing more than (yet again) repudiate it. I honestly don’t believe in any god. If all the facets of my inner life were laid bare to me and it could be shown that, yes indeed, here, here, and here is where I know God exists, then I would simply be baffled and then have to come to accept it. Maybe I just lack the requisite introspection?

“In other words, he actually does not find meaning in his personal life, because there is no meaning to be found; rather, he experiences a certain biochemical state of affairs when placed in particular circumstances. [...] If someone were to ask Havard how he can bear living under the view that there is no objective purpose or intrinsic value to life—i.e., how he escapes the joylessness that haunts nihilism—he would evidently shrug his shoulders and disclaim ‘I just do.’”

Thankfully, then, I am no nihilist. And in any case, if the universe turns out not to have an overall purpose, well, that certainly should not (and in my case, does not) put a lid on my jar of joy. I live on a wonderfully rich, lush planet, with people whom I love very much, and friendships that run deep. I value and cherish these things, and my knowledge that all things must die (as Tennyson put it) does nothing to dampen that. (Tangentially, that Tennyson poem should really be all that needs to be said on the subjects of death, in my opinion.)

“I should like to understand how it would be a ‘waste of time’ any different from, say, playing video games or reading a book (which I know Havard rather enjoys).”

Maybe I was a bit too glib in that remark of mine. I retract it. What I meant by it, anyway, was that it’s a waste of time if there turns out to be no one listening. Of course, prayer and church-going are by no means a waste of time—or at least no more a waste of time than playing video games—for the comfort of the individual doing it. I would not be so crass as to suggest that prayer has no benefits for the believer. It just isn’t for me, you know?

‘Twas the night before Jesus came, and all through the house
Not a creature was praying, not one in the house.
Their Bibles were lain on the shelf without a care
In hopes that Jesus would not come there.

The children were dressing to crawl into bed,
Not once ever kneeling or bowing a head.
And mom in her rocker with baby on her lap
Was watching the Late Show while I took a nap.

When out of the east there arose such a clatter,
I sprang to my feet to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

When what to my wondering eyes should appear
But angels proclaiming that Jesus was here.
With a light like the sun sending forth a bright ray
I knew in a moment this must be The Day!

The light of his face made me cover my head.
It was Jesus, returning just like he had said.
And though I possessed worldly wisdom and wealth,
I cried when I saw Him in spite of myself.

In the Book of Life, which he held in his hand,
Was written the name of every saved man.
He spoke not a word as he searched for my name.
When He said, “It’s not here,” my head hung in shame.

The people whose names had been written with love
He gathered to take to his Father above.
With those who were ready, he rose without a sound,
While all the rest were left standing around.

I fell to my knees, but it was too late;
I had waited too long and thus sealed my fate.
I stood and I cried as they rose out of sight.
Oh if only I had been ready tonight.

In the words of this poem the meaning is clear;
The coming of Jesus is drawing near.
There’s only one life and, when comes the last call,
We’ll find that the Bible was true after all.

— Audrey Patricia Woolverton

Click here to read Dr. Albert Mohler’s explanation for why he chose to sign the Manhattan Declaration. In my estimation, it was a powerful testimony of the necessity, passion, and courage of this document which addresses three central issues that threaten the very stability of contemporary society. The thoughts which Dr. Mohler closed his article with were especially strong, which I have included here in the hopes that it compels you to read the full article.

Finally, I signed The Manhattan Declaration because I want to put my name on its final pledge—that we will not bend the knee to Caesar. We will not participate in any subversion of life. We will not be forced to accept any other relationship as equal in status or rights to heterosexual marriage. We will not refrain from proclaiming the truth—and we will order our churches and institutions and ministries by Christian conviction.

There will be Christian leaders, pastors, seminaries, colleges, universities, denominations, churches, and organizations that will abandon the faith on these issues. They will bend the knee to Caesar. Far too many already have. The signatories to The Manhattan Declaration pledge that we will not be among them.

I want my name on that list. I surrendered no conviction or confessional integrity to sign that statement. No one asked me to compromise in any manner. I was encouraged that we could stand together to make clear that to come for one of us on these issues is to come for all. At the end of the day, I did not want my name missing from that list when folks look to see just who was willing to be listed.

Here is an interesting thought to ponder over. (It was something Todd Friel said on Wretched Radio that caused me to do a little research into this.) I know Mathew Hamilton over at Thoughts Out Loud will be interested in this reflection. News reports confirm that a total of 13 people were killed by accused gunman Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, a U.S. military post in Texas. However, one of those soldiers killed was Francheska Velez, who was about two months pregnant at the time. (She was due sometime in May 2010.) For some people this raises the question: Should there be an additional count of murder?

Although pro-abortion advocates tend to answer in the negative, I think they answer much too quickly and with manifest ignorance of U.S. State and Federal legislation and court rulings beyond Roe vs. Wade. There is a law in the United States called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (18 USC 1841) which is applicable when the crime falls within Federal jurisdiction, as this case certainly does. As the Wikipedia article explains, certain offenses come under the jurisdiction of the United States government when they are committed on Federal properties (Fort Hood), against certain Federal officials and employees (Francheska Velez), and by members of the military (Nidal Hasan). In other words, this case satisfies all three criteria, which makes it inarguable that Hasan should be tried on fourteen counts of murder.

It is that fourteenth count of murder that raises further interesting thoughts. In subsection (d) of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, a child in utero is defined as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.” So we observe here the fetus being recognized under Federal law as a child and human being (which qualifies the crime of murder, the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought). So then, how is it that one can be a human child but not a person? Or to phrase the question differently: Why is it illegal to deprive a human child of life under the United States Code, while at the same time it is not illegal to deprive a human child of life under the Constitution?

(And isn’t it strange that United States law grants the status of ‘person’ to corporations and the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, but will not grant the status of ‘person’ to what under law is a human child?)

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest.

But for us it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Thick of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species can migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” This is all too true, and it’s partly the reason for my non-contribution as of late. The earnest truth is that my real life is not too exciting, and I therefore need time for the ideas in my head to ferment. I try to live before I write. With that out of the way and me cleanly off the hook, let’s proceed! (Phew!)

I’ll attempt to describe my atheism in negative terms. That is, I will list some non-reasons for why I’m an atheist; reasons that some people think I have for being an atheist but which are actually not the reasons at all (these are all accusations I’ve met in real life, by the way). This essay could be about refuting common misconceptions about atheists, but honestly, I’m only one person and can therefore only speak for myself. (Although in the back of my mind there’s a nagging feeling that these misconceptions apply to other atheists.) First, let’s tackle the term “atheist” itself. What does it mean? It comes from the Greek word “theos,” which means “god.” The a- prefix negates it, and thus the word means “without God.” I must admit right away that I don’t feel any particular connection to atheism (the philosophy, if such it be) itself. Many other labels exist to describe me. I’m a human, I’m male, I have black hair and blue eyes, two feet, etc. And this is exactly how I feel with regard to atheism. It simply correctly describes my views about the existence of gods (as it turns out, I don’t believe gods exist). Now, since an atheist is someone without a god, that should technically mean that there could well be a god, and the atheist could well believe that God exists, and yet walk “without God” (think about it). But of course, I go with the consensus definition, which is, “one who does not believe in gods.” Now, on to the non-reasons themselves, which I’ve labeled rebellion, nihilism, joylessness, and arrogance. Let’s tackle these in order:

Rebellion

This is the contention that deep down inside I know there is a God, and that I’m therefore in a state of rebellion by obstinately refusing to acknowledge His existence. This accusation is perhaps best disposed of on its face. I honestly don’t believe in any gods.

Nihilism

This is the notion that an atheist must necessarily be a nihilist, meaning someone who thinks life is without meaning (from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing”). Of course, an atheist may be a nihilist, but for myself (and I suspect, for most atheists) this is simply not true. I find lots of meaning in my personal life (books, good company, poetry, nature, a clear evening sky where one can lie in the grass and “look up in perfect silence at the stars,” as Whitman put it). There are also those rare, precious moments when I become enraptured in the beauty of it all and feel, on a visceral level, the awesomeness of the cosmos. These things are entirely unrelated to atheism.

Joylessness

This is the idea that because one is an atheist, one must therefore feel no joy in life. “How can you bear living if you think there’s no ultimate supervision of things?” My own simple answer to this question is “I don’t know! I just bear it.” In truth, whether one finds joy in life or not shouldn’t hinge on such an academic point as whether or not one believes in God. (At least, I think it’s an academic point. For many people it’s an emotional point.)

Arrogance

Perhaps mislabeled (I couldn’t find a better word for this non-reason), the arrogance charge is one that says, “How unbelievably arrogant of you to assert that there is no God!” First of all, no rationalist worth his salt would insist on the non-existence of anything (excluding, perhaps, logically inconsistent things like triangular squares and male females and so on), and I certainly don’t insist there is no God. I simply don’t believe in Him, and I would hate to waste my precious time in worship to something which, it might turn out, doesn’t exist. Second of all, if we amend the charge to say, “How unbelievably arrogant of you to assert the probability that there is no God!” we’re closer to what I actually think, and I can then properly refute the accusation (it’s strange how often one assumes the other person has perfect conviction in what he says he believes, when it might turn out, as in my case, that he is not expressing perfect conviction at all, but is merely uttering a probabilistic statement). To my mind there is a huge distinction between what one believes and the conviction with which one believes it. As a trivial example, I am as close to 100% as I can be that I am, in fact, writing this essay right now, and that I’m writing it on my computer with a keyboard. I am about 80% sure that tomorrow I will finish the book I’m currently reading. I am about 70% sure that my friend Kai is in the city of Bergen right now (I haven’t heard otherwise, and I live pretty far away from Bergen, so I can’t know for sure). I believe all these three things, but to varying degrees of certainty.

In short, I can’t do much more than to deny these accusations and provide explanations of them, which I hope I’ve done.

So what I’m wondering is, how do you ever have any idea whether or not your prayers are ever answered?

Quite honestly? At first you have no idea. You pray for things and look for the answer to it, hoping he bends to your will, but you never really know for sure. Sometimes you’ll experience a result that corresponds positively in some way to your prayer and you take that to mean God answered you. But in that quiet corner of the mind you don’t want to admit or talk about, there lies the festering doubt produced by your inability to distinguish between an answered prayer and a weird coincidence—a fire that gets fueled by the infuriating ratio between positive corresponding results and the far more frequent absence of discernible results. It’s a dissonance that cannot be tolerated long. You eventually reach a schism in your conscience and you can go one of two ways.

Most people call the positive results weird coincidences, shake their fist at what they consider divine silence, and eventually lose their faith. But some people find themselves struck by the epiphany that they are not infallible, that among the things possible for them to be wrong about, prayer might be included. So, questioning some of their basic assumptions, they decide to look up what God has to say about the nature of prayer. They might examine the template Jesus Christ provided, not only by what his own prayers looked like but also the nature of The Lord’s Prayer, which he described as "how you should pray" (see Matt. 6:5-15). They may even notice that he said, "This is how you should pray," and not, "This is what you should say." After a while they begin to realize that they had been treating God like some cosmic Santa Claus, going to him with a list of their wishes along with promises that, if he answers, they will be good little boys and girls. As they learn what authentic and genuine prayer looks like, they are struck by how absolutely backwards they had it. They finally understand that prayer is not a shopping cart or wish list. That God is not their butler waiting to do their bidding, nor sitting around waiting for someone to pray him into awareness of what he already knows. And perhaps most important of all, that prayer is not about seeking their will but God’s will. That he already has their best interest in mind. And that informing an omniscient being about something is sort of contradictory. Ultimately they begin to understand that authentic and genuine prayer is not a wish list but, rather, an act of worship, an intimate nexus of communion between them and their Father in heaven.

They know such authentic prayers are answered… because in that act of worship they experience the faithful presence of God.