VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Dinah|DATE|1386619907|CONTENT|Prayer may be beneficial for some people in the same way meditation is, by helping them to reflect, calm down, and perhaps find their own answers to problems.  However it takes a huge leap of faith to believe it can be effective in protecting children from harm, curing the sick or obtaining any kind of outcome which subverts the laws of nature.  In order for this to happen requires three things:

1.	For some kind of deity, supernatural entity, higher power or whatever you wish to call it, to exist.

2.	For that entity to have both the ability and the desire to listen to the spoken and unspoken prayers of millions of human beings simultaneously.

3.	For that same entity to have both the desire and the ability to grant the wishes of some of those pray-ers.  Clearly, it could not answer all prayers, since some pray-ers would be praying for opposite things.

There is absolutely no evidence that if a God exists it answers anyone’s prayers; even some believers recognise this to be the case.  Of course, some pray-ers believe their prayers have been answered when lost children are found, desperately ill people recover and lottery tickets win the jackpot, but these favourable outcomes are much more likely to be the result of human agency or sheer luck.
  
Many believers insist their God answers some prayers, but is a God who is capable of doing something, but stands by and does nothing when innocent children are tortured and massacred, really deserving of their worship?
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