Passing on the National Day of Prayer

Yours truly is going to pass on the national day of prayer. This is not because of any particular anti-religious fervor on my part, but it is based on a practical conviction that prayer alone just won’t do any good. When my students conducted a well constructed experiment, prayer couldn’t even help beans grow better, so I doubt it’s going to help with the national debt. Asking for gods’ continued guidance (Here use of the plural is deliberate so as not to offend any believers, e.g., in gods we trust.) does not strike me as particularly sound course of action because of late this hasn’t resulted in very impressive leadership given our unwise military actions, unwise business practices, and our policies reflecting considerable religiously rationalized bigotry. Perhaps messages are mixed, coming as they are from so many different deities, after all President Obama did invite “all people of faith” to join in, so maybe the one true God (mostly likely Odin) is pissed to hear so many prayers so wrongly directed, so the guidance delivered may be deliberately poor. And lastly prayer just strikes me as a bit childish and naïve, a rather poor substitute for hard-nosed pragmatic thinking, a most uncommon national practice.