But… what about the people of other religions? And what about atheists? Why isn’t their life absolutely miserable (or at least noticeably worse), since they don’t have a deity taking care of them and answering their prayers?

Consider this likely example: a Christian comes down with a flu. He prays to God to get better, and, after a couple of days, he does. “Thank you, God, for healing me! Praise the Lord!”, and so on.

Meanwhile, the atheist next door gets the flu at the same time, and, coincidence of coincidences, also gets better at the same time.

What happened here? Did God require prayer and faith from the believer, but not from the atheist?

Or is the believer just projecting supernatural explanations onto something that happened naturally?

If prayer worked, if God intervened due to prayer, then either unbelievers would remain sick forever, or, at least, believers would get better much more quickly. I would say that a miracle — a direct intervention by the omnipotent creator of the universe — should be pretty easy to distinguish from a natural occurrence. Yet we don’t see the impossible happening to believers. We don’t even see the beneficial possible happen sooner, or more often. In fact, everything happens just like it would if…

…there was no God at all.

The idea is that, supposedly, praying for things to happen, for the object of your desire to “fall in your lap” by magic doesn’t work. Instead, you’re supposed to try, and try hard, and then God will help you.

While I believe that telling people to, pardon the expression, “move their asses”, instead of just sitting in prayer and waiting for things to happen, is a good piece of advice, I wonder why more people — including believers — don’t notice the obvious dishonesty implicit in it.

First, there’s the unconscious realization of a fact: miracles don’t happen. At least true miracles in the “magical” sense. Much like the way people pray for a disease to “get better” (which can happen) but not for a limb to grow back (which can’t), most believers, these days, when they think of miracles, they think about approximations of Jesus’ (Caucasian!) face in slices of pizza, finding a lucky parking space in a crowded place, or someone changing their mind to their advantage. Not “biblical-like” miracles. So, since they know “magic” doesn’t work, they teach that you have to try, and only then will God help you. In other words, first you make sure it’s naturally possible, and only then do you ask God — who is supposedly all-powerful — for it.

Second, this is an utterly unfair double standard. If you succeed, it was God’s doing. Praise the Lord! If you fail, however, either “God has a better plan”, or, more often, it was simply your fault. God automatically gets the credit for any successes, but not the blame for any failures. Like always, anyone would spot the obvious unfairness of it… if we weren’t talking about religion, a subject that prevents most otherwise rational people from spotting parallels, contradictions, or errors of logic in general. (we’re talking about minds, after all, that find no problem in the “God exists because the Bible says so; the Bible is true because it’s the word of God” statement…)