Can national prayers change Gods will?
By Guest Writer More by this Author  After at least three national prayers organised by the highest office in the land, there is still no evidence that anything has worked for our good. If anything, things have only become worse. Its not immediately clear why the President now thinks that a fourth attempt with a public holiday for good measure will do the trick this time and get Gods attention. While people who say prayers claim that God can directly intervene in human affairs and tragedies, there has never been any demonstrably clear evidence for this. Prayers seem to only give them comfort, making them feel like they have exerted some sort of control on a situation that is out of their hands. It is the last resort of people who have run out of ideas. There is a very real down side to praying. It lulls the believing faithful into a false sense of accomplishment. However an application of simple logic shows that any prayer that asks God for anything is pointless. Both of these are not possible with an omniscient deity. On the contrary, if God is all knowing He must already know what our prayer requests are without needing to be told. Do they hope to budge His divine calculus with whispers of supplication?. A prayer for God to do something He was already going to do is unnecessary; a prayer for Him to do something He was not already going to do is futile. We cannot solve our problems, much less the worlds problems by praying. From a purely logical stand point, prayers without actions are useless and yet those same actions render the prayers irrelevant. To paraphrase the great Robert Green Ingersoll, the hands that work are holier than the lips that pray. I have no problem with prayer as an act of meditation, an act of silent self-reflection, in fact many atheists understand the benefits of silent self-reflection. The delusion occurs when you think that someone else is hearing your thoughts and acting on them. Again quoting from the secular activist Ann Nicol Gaylor, nothing fails like prayer. And seeing all the national prayers that have been held in Uganda, the evidence is very much on her side. Advertisement  Simon Nuwagaba, Kampala