National Day of Religious Superstition

The first Thursday in May has come and gone, and many of the citizens of the U.S. have wasted time performing a superstitious ritual. This time each year marks the national day of prayer designated by Congress. This is a clear violation of the first amendment, and yet it continues.

The founders of this country were well aware of the problems with combining the church and state. That was one of the primary reasons for coming here and starting anew. They wanted freedom from oppression including that from religion. This is exactly why our Constitution is void of supernatural references. The authors had the opportunity to compose a religiously centered document to govern us, but chose not to.

Thomas Jefferson was adamant about protecting citizens from the tyranny of religion, backed by the power of the government. One of our founding fathers, he was opposed to the state supporting prayer. He knew that individual religious organizations were free to practice religion as they chose, including prayer, but that government did not have the right to decide such things for its citizens.

Surely this annual day of prayer must be helping somehow, somewhere. Millions of people appealing to (who knows how many?) different gods are sincerely trying to affect this world. Does the world seem much different since Thursday? No, not to me either. The local, national, and world news is not reporting that humanity’s major problems have been corrected. Apparently nothing has changed.

The ineffectiveness of petitionary prayer has been studied quite a number of times. Each time the power of prayer is put to the test, it fails. Despite the easily demonstrated failures, religious people are still praying. Why? Because prayer gives those who feel helpless something to do that assures them they can still help in some way. Handing off problems to someone that has the power to handle them is relieving. And if that someone is an omnipotent problem-solver, the relief is that much greater. So prayer does have some function, but it’s not one that I recognize as beneficial in the long-term.

The problem with encouraging prayer for comfort is that it discourages action. There are actually a lot of things that we humans can do to solve our problems. Kneeling and praying for an issue allows people to pass the responsibility on to someone else, a god that doesn’t seem to exist. So instead of taking action that might help, they do nothing at all, but call it prayer.

“The hands that do are holier than the hands that pray.” I’ve heard this in various forms over the years. I don’t know the source, but I wholly agree with it. Prayer never seems to fix anything that might not have been fixed anyway. And often times, humans are thanks as being manifestations of the power of a god to answer the prayers. The evidence that any of it trickles down from supernatural goodness is nowhere to be found. There is a blindness that religious people have that cheapens the humanity and our abilities as a species. It’s unfortunate that so many are willing to ignore their talents to improve the human condition and instead give credit to absent divinity. I haven’t yet seen any god that deserves credit.

Like the existence of a god, if there was good evidence to support the power of prayer, I wouldn’t mind a day for it encouraged by the government. It wouldn’t violate anyone’s faith or religious beliefs. It would be a scientifically supported fact like gravity and germ theory that clearly benefited us all. But this is not the case, and it’s easily demonstrated. Prayer is a waste of time, and one encouraged by the U.S. Government. Forget prayer and the national day of prayer. Be reasonable, do something rather than nothing, and recognize the national day of reason.

Tags: constitution, politics, prayer, reason, religion, superstition