Atheist Confession II

As an atheist, prayer was always suspect to me.  How can one solve life's problems merely by talking to oneself?  Is this wishful thinking?  These are some of the questions I asked whenever I saw fellow classmates pray before exams, or witnessed Muslims spread out a rug and pray in the middle of a public area.

Atheists claim that prayer does not work.  To them, it is merely superstition.  This is interesting because prayer is the means by which believers "talk" to God and "listen" to God.  I say this is interesting because atheists always demand incontrovertible proof of God's existence.  Logic dictates that if prayer is the means by which believers experience God, then atheists would try it if they were seriously interested in proof.  However, this does not happen.

Prayer is really the only tangible way one can have "proof" of God.  I can prove God via many channels such as theology, philosophy, psychology, physics, biology and so on; however, these proofs will not present a living God as I present myself as a living human being to whoever I am having a discussion with.  We have to "test" for God.

What about the "don't test God" thing? (Luke 4:12)  Well, this is not really a test in the sense of challenging God as Satan was doing with Christ in the desert.  Prayer is the normative manner in which believers communicate with God, therefore, it is logical for an atheist to use this to "test" for God's existence, so to speak.

As an atheist, prayer gave that extra push to what I already discovered via the sciences and reason.  Any atheist who truly wants evidence of God must pray and talk to God.  There is no other way around this.  I had the courage to take that step, so if you are an atheist and are reading this, you can as well.