Spirit Seeker

What are my thoughts on prayer? Prayer plays a small role in my life. Over the past twenty years, I've found praying to be a waste of time.  What does prayer achieve and who or what does one pray to?  There have been a few opportunities where I was asked to pray.  I attended a Christian retreat, called Via De Cristo, where I was a prayer/chapel keeper, of all things.  This is quite a job for an atheist to fill. There was some value and intent to my prayers that weekend. We prayed for each of the the presenters before they took the stage.  My verbal prayers focused on encouraging the speaker and helping them relax before speaking in front of a group.  It's strange but I could say nice, intimate things in prayers that I wouldn't say otherwise.  Why not say those things outside of praying? Recently, I began experimenting with prayer again.  This time it is solely for my own purposes.  I tried praying on my walk from the train to my office. ...

If there is an omnipotent, loving god then why is there suffering in the world? Perhaps this is the question someone who plays the victim or pessimist.   The truth is that there a lot of good things that happen too.   Some of my Christian friends tell me that good things are a blessing from God and bad things a God’s way of testing us. A few evangelist preachers claim that catastrophes such as tornadoes and floods are God’s way of saying that she is angry at all the sinning going on.   I refuse to address that last point because I think those individuals are full of crap.             There are numerous events and actions that cause suffering.   Watching a loved one move away or die may cause sadness.   Being sick with a severe cold or discovering that one has cancer can be trying.   People suffer as a result of divorce, job loss, or home foreclosure.   As mentioned earlier, floods, tornado...

This is the start of my new blog, Spirit Seeker.  I chose the "GodlyAtheist" as my URL because I enjoy the paradoxical nature of it.  In some ways, the title describes the paradox contained within my own mind.  I have considered myself an atheist (non-believer of a god) for most of my adult life.  Given the choice, I prefer to go with scientific explanations rather than anecdotal stories or ancient tomes.  The godly part of my brain focuses on two areas.  The first part is based on questions that I have about Christianity that relate back to my Catholic upbringing and understanding the Christian perspective of my friends and others around the world.  In some ways I "get it" and other ways I feel like I don't have a clue.  The second part of my godly focus is a current experiment that I'm doing with praying to a god.  I begin the word god with a lower-case 'G' because I can't tell you which god that I'm praying to.  It's not a Christian o...