As I am a non-believer in religious exercises, it may seem unbecoming for a fellow with my mind bent to raise the issue of the power of prayer. In this essay I do so not with an accusatory sense of purpose. My interest is purely curiosity. I do not wish to deride those who believe in prayer, which I have never done. In pursuit of this question, I would like to know whether the target of the prayerful considerations has been met and whether it is acknowledged.
I suppose that history will tell us that there has never been a shortfall of frauds who claim that they are acting on intelligence directly from God. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, two Protestant preachers, fall into this category. Significantly, when they claim that they are acting in the name of some superpower such as God or the Holy Ghost, there is no acknowledgement that such is the case. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson can tell their followers that they have been directed by God to do something but there is no validation for that action. It is taken totally on faith in Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the thousands of other preachers whom I consider to be borderline frauds.
I spent 43 years in the communications business and I am here to tell you that I do not see how prayer is accomplished. In those 43 years, we have accomplished the means of transmission through wires or, in later days, by radio waves in the atmosphere. In short, I do not understand how the prayerful message gets from here to there and whether it is ever acknowledged. Parsons and preachers may tell you that the answers to prayers are delivered through the heart. To my knowledge, there are no listening devices in the heart or soul. So I must doubt this. Politicians are prone to say that they are running for elected office because God told them to do it. If you ever meet such a person, I hope you send him on his way promptly to avoid contamination from his esoteric ideas.
So you see, what I am asking in this fumbling essay is how the pleas of mankind are delivered to the Higher Power. As a general rule, prayer is conducted in a low voice that will not disturb others. There are several instances in which prayer is said in silence. I would like to know how the gods or the Holy Ghost is able to discern such prayers. When a god or the Holy Ghost answers the prayers of a politician, how are we to tell that the politician received advice from God to run? How are we to know whether the politician has made up his mind to do something and simply reports to you that God has ordered him to do it?
The best example that I can think of at the moment is George W. Bush. Mr. Bush contended, first, that his running for the Presidency had the approval of God. For a person such as myself, that would be an unlikely claim. If I am not mistaken, former President Bush started the Iraqi invasion under the same premises. What I am asking in this essay is how fellow Christians or even fellow citizens can tell that an action by a politician is God-driven. To be more specific, Pat Robertson has made at least one or two quests for the Presidency of the United States. Has anyone ever had the temerity to ask Pat Robertson for validation of his claim that his quest is God-driven?
To bring things closer to home, my father was a religious man. He attempted to read the Bible every evening before he retired. This of course became impossible once blindness set in. In fact, he was blind for the last 11 years of his life. My father was a taciturn man who shared his confidences – if he had any – with no one. But I suspect that the elder Ezra never prayed to God to lift blindness from him. As I have mentioned earlier in essays, he was unschooled and completed only the second “reader.” But he had undergone several procedures or operations in the hope that the loss of sight would be arrested, but certainly not cured.
In point of fact, my father understood that there was a physical and a heredity hindrance to his eyesight and as far as I know he never prayed for those hindrances to be lifted. Knowing what I know about glaucoma, the old man did the proper thing. He followed the advice of the Post brothers, two ophthalmologists, instead of appealing to a superior power. Even he, uneducated as he was, knew that there was no chance that his eyesight would be restored. Can we really believe the Biblical stories that eyesight can be brought back to those who have been blind for years? I tend to doubt it. I am willing to listen to explanations to the contrary.
What I am getting into here is where the miracles of the power of prayer stop and where the miracles of mankind tend to take over. This is a murky area and I suspect that in many cases the power of prayer may have been exaggerated. But at my age, which has taken on Methuselah-like proportions, I am willing to listen to almost any proposition that makes some sense. But I am not willing to listen to explanations that deal with a god or the Holy Ghost or the Virgin Mary suggesting that George W. Bush should have run for the Presidency.
For a number of years, I was very close to a telephone worker named Harry Livermore. There was a point at which I even roomed with Harry Livermore after the transfer in my employment from Kansas City to Chicago. Harry was one of the toughest men I ever knew. At the same time, Harry was pious to such a degree that he always recited evening prayers to himself. Following the death of Jean Livermore, Harry’s wife, he told me that he had appealed in prayer to Jean to save him a place next to her, presumably in heaven. I have never been able to escape from reality with the thought that I would put my trust in prayer. If Harry actually believed that Jean was holding a place for him in heaven, I would only say to my good friend Harry, “Go get it.” That is what he believed and it gave him comfort; so be it.
Before leaving this subject of the power of prayer, we must consider the case of Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is a fraud, and I mean a gold-plated fraud. Newt has a peculiar penchant for making people disbelieve. When he ran for the Presidency in 2012, he of course had to deal with two former marriages. On one occasion, it is fairly well documented that Newt Gingrich told his former wife, who was confined to a hospital bed, that he wished to divorce her. In my estimation, you can’t get much lower than that.
Newt presented himself to the American public as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, saying that he had been forgiven or excused by God. I assume that the only way to reach God or the Holy Ghost is through prayer. No one has ever demonstrated a different source for reaching the top level. Newt presented himself in 2012 as a fresh-faced kid from Georgia who had been excused from his former sinful ways by no less than God. In my life I have never been involved in Republican politics. But if I had a vote, I would cast it overwhelmingly against Newt Gingrich. I believe him to be a liar, a mountebank, and a complete fraud. But Newt is Newt, and in 2016 it is quite likely that you will see his likes on the campaign trail once again.
This is not the first time that I have addressed the subject of the power of prayer. In my last attempt to understand the power of prayer, I arrived at the conclusion that the main beneficiaries are those who pray. Those who pray think that they have done the proper thing and I support them. Whether their prayers go anywhere beyond six inches from their mouths is probably beside the point. In any event, an observer who reads these essays assured me that the power of prayer certainly resonated with the one who had done the praying. If that conclusion was appropriate three or four or five years ago, I am unable to improve upon it. If prayer proves comforting to the pious, I would have no argument with that conclusion.
But at the same time, I would hope that those who subscribe to the Gospels understand the position of a non-believer. In my own case, to use one example, I am perfectly pleased with the present arrangement, provided that the God-driven do not seek to convert me. I take great pain to avoid attempting to convert my believing brothers. I would hope that we could reach an accommodation that would be acceptable to all of us.
But in the final analysis, the power of prayer is elusive. Obviously, I put no trust in prayer. But that should impede no one in pursuit of prayer. I am basically a live-and-let-live sort of person. But in the final showdown, confirmation of the power of prayer seems to elude everyone at least that is my conclusion. I sometimes wonder how the Muslims, for example, can pray five times each day and yet show such hostility to the rest of the world, particularly Christians.
I suppose none of these questions can be settled within my lifetime, which does not promise to be too extensive. But it is food for thought, and the only thing that I firmly and totally reject is the idea that Newt Gingrich has been totally forgiven and that he will presumably occupy a place in heaven close to my box seats.
E. E. CARR
May 14, 2012
Essay 656
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Kevin’s commentary: To me, this issue of how to contact God seems to have been best approached by the Mormons, who I’ve had on the brain a good bit lately. Their solution is just to put God on a star called Kolob a few parsecs away. That way, whenever any scientists or other thinking people ask them for proof of God, or how to talk to God or whathaveyou, the Mormons can just be like “hey, build us a fast enough spaceship and get some better telescopes to find Kolob with and you can go give him a high five.”
Definitely the most fun way to approach that question, in my opinion. Hats off to the cultists!
Regarding the power of prayer specifically I remember reading a pretty thorough scientific study that prayer doesn’t actually help, say, the sick whatsoever. It was done with control groups and random selection and a large sample size and all that, and it found either that it has zero effect if the people being prayed for didn’t know they were being prayed for, and an adverse effect when they were aware that they were being prayed for. This latter one baffled the scientists somewhat (who assumed that it would at least have the placebo effect) but yeah it turned out that people like, relaxed and didn’t fight as hard against the disease or something? I’ll try to find it.