Why do you think so little about yourself?

There’s a sadly recurring theme among religious people, and it basically comes down to not liking themselves enough. I’m talking about the tendency of religious people to attribute everything that went well in their lives to God and prayer.

The thing is, if you passed an exam, that was you passing the exam. When you scored a goal that was you scoring the goal. Do you honestly think that a supernatural being had anything to do with something so petty?

A very religious mind is a messed up thing. It basically can reject whatever effort is made in favour of an idea that the creator of the Universe intervened personally to help with a college exam, for example. I even got the hint that they feel that if they congratulate themselves and acknowledge their own accomplishments somehow their invisible friend God will be upset and won’t help them again. How messed up is that? This is what happens when religions are allowed to have such overwhelmingly huge impact on children. Children become very dependent on the fantasy they learned and they even in adulthood undermine their own accomplishments just to keep the illusion alive.

The plain truth is: if you don’t study, you don’t pass an exam. If you don’t practice to become a better actor or tennis player or singer or whatever others are going to beat you and no amount of prayer is going to change that. The bottom line is: Prayer does not work.

There have even been scientific studies to try to show whether prayer had any effect. As you might have guessed, the only thing proven was that prayer does not work. In some cases, patients were even feeling worse.

When you consider all the things that God could potentially be doing (hint, hint – wars, hunger, poverty sick children…), to think that in reality, a miracle occurred just so you could pass an exam, borders on insanity.

To attribute good things happening to God’s intervention is to deny responsibility for making progress in one’s own life. The deal is the same with bad things, where one would actually deny responsibility for things going wrong and pray that god has some kind of plan. People who think like that are exhibiting cowardly behaviour. Don’t be like that.