An Atheist Who Prays

I'm an atheist who prays, not to a god or to some loosely defined spiritual entity—I don't believe in any of that—and certainly not to myself. I was raised Catholic and studied to be a priest, so I'm familiar with prayer and other meditative processes. And you know what? They work—just not the way some religious people claim they work.

John Tierney, who calls himself a heathen in his New York Times, Science Times, article "For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It," quotes psychologist Michael McCullough, whose work has uncovered evidence that devoutly religious people, not pious show-offs, demonstrate greater self-control.

Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion. The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.

Is anyone surprised? Anytime you take time out, cast off your pressing concerns, and open yourself to your mind's infinite variety of options, you start breathing more slowly and deeply. Your heart rate and blood pressure settle down. You feel better. Best of all, you set yourself up for taking a more optimistic outlook and for making decisions that align with your purest intentions and most heartfelt hopes. It doesn't matter what you call the object of your attention in this condition, it's the condition that improves your condition.

Sigmund Freud writes in Moses and Monotheism that faith in God just might help the believer enjoy a richly introspective life. He argues further that the Jewish religion gave its people the advantage of intellectual abstraction. The fact that Freud, an unrepentant atheist, accomplished a whole lot of abstract thinking makes me think that introspection with or without God or gods might just do the same thing.

My most tolerant, believer friends have told me they believe that all religious people actually address the same god by different names. I simply take it one step further. My most intolerant atheist friends have balked at attending atheist meetings in church basements. I refuse to limit myself that way.

So even though I agree with Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great, I have no problem returning to the practices that once deluded me into quietude, purposefulness, and peace. I've just dropped the delusion part.

It's no surprise to me that prayer still works, when it works, no matter how it works.

Labels: atheism, God, prayer