(A very liberal 'Christian' view of prayer, which I believe, though well-written is heretical! Rowland).

The Religion Works

August 24, 2008

Raining on the Guy's Parade

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook Today across our metropolitan area, people are being urged to offer up prayers for the salvation of the local and national economies. They have been bidden to this act by the minister of the nearby Renaissance Unity Church in the Detroit suburb of Warren. Recently I was quoted (accurately) by a Detroit New columnist as being dismissive of that idea. I said that "man-made problems require man-made solutions." Predictably, a torrent of reaction surrounded me on every side with not a few critics asking, in effect, "How can a little prayer hurt?" The question misses the point. Where praying for the improvement of the economy is concerned, I suppose "a little prayer" or even a big one can't hurt. Though I don't see how either can help. All the praying neither held back the flood waters of Katrina nor hastened, nor made effective the Bush government's response to the catastrophe. Yet if it would make the economy pray-ers feel better for having cast their fears, resentments and aspirations out upon an uncaring universe, who am I to dissuade them? Rebellion in the streets, the dethronement of a few bloated CEOs and voting in a regime that would take its economic clues from a source other than the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal might have a better chance of effecting what the pray-ers desire.

High oil and gasoline-at-the-pump prices have nothing to do with the music of the spheres and everything to do with geopolitics, burgeoning Asian economies and - at home - the American love affair with the private automobile until recently the bigger the better. Likewise, the collapse of the nation's credit system and the bottoming out of the housing market are easily traceable to human greed, incompetence and, so to speak, risky dice-rolling. One of the critics of my remarks to the newspaper columnist taunted me, saying, "So what if the economy does improve after the mass pray-in?" I said I should be very glad. "Won't you feel pretty stupid then?" was the rejoinder. "No," I said, "Because the cause-and-effect of mass prayer and, say, lower oil prices or a sudden spate of higher wages and benefits would not only be improbable but unprovable." To the angry wagging of my interrogator's head, I went on to say that rather than standing in a downpour and praying for it to stop is the more practical alternative of seeking shelter - an idea that has the added value of being true. The notion that human beings praying to a deity for redress of grievances or intervention in human or natural affairs is the soft underbelly of a philosophy of religion known as "theism." Judaism, Christianity and Islam are officially theistic religions. Theists generally believe against all available data that the deity they posit was and is responsible in a direct way for the life of the universe, that they can attain a personal relationship with the unseen and invisible deity, that they can engage that deity in a conversation of sorts, that they can bargain with that deity to do or not to do, to allow or not to allow this, that or the other thing. The locus classicus of bargaining with a deity is found in its most amusing form in the biblical document called "Genesis" at the eighteenth chapter, verses 20-33 wherein the patriarch Abraham is imagined as dickering with a god bent on the destruction of Sodom and barely willing to hear Abraham's lawyer-like plea bargaining for the deliverance of any therein who might be righteous. In an argument as persuasive as any Clarence Darrow might ever have made, Abraham gets Yahweh at first to agree that, if there were 50 righteous men in the city, Yahweh would not destroy it. Oh, well, then, if there are 45 . . . and on down to 10. Sodom was vaporized, but at least Abraham was depicted as trying. Perhaps pondering Abraham's storied last-ditch effort to save the pit that was Sodom, my clergy neighbor was moved to issue his call to prayer. But are there even 10 righteous men in charge of this thing we call the economy?

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.