What Is Prayer?

One of the burning thoughts I have always had about prayer over the years since my deconversion is that all prayer seems to be is speaking words that you expect to either be psychically or magically heard by forces unseen, unheard, undetected and undiscernible.

When a pastor or someone in a church prays, they're not so much praying to God as they are speaking words so that the people hearing them feel better about something - the more emotional conviction you put in to your prayer that other people are hearing, the more social weight it carries.

Because if God truly answered prayer based on whether the prayer aligns with his will or not (which then leads to the question: if prayer is to bring about God's will, then why do we pray to change a situation when it was obviously God's will that the situation that you're praying about is happening in the first place) that was spoken like a personal dialogue between two people, then shouldn't prayers be full of things like expletives, personal attacks, snide remarks, complaints and other things that don't line up with grandiose verbosity said to please an audience?

Especially when the prayer is said in to a camera - like what is happening with churches being forced to do services online - the grandiose prayers of a clean shaven pastor with a nice suit, or a youth pastor with funky facial hair, are meaningless in terms of the actual prayer, but completely meaningful in terms of tickling the ears of the audience hearing the words.

What I'd really love to hear is a prayer from a church service where the pastor prays infront of their audience exactly as they would pray in their office - expletives, insults, judgement values, everything, and then seeing the reaction of the people who were personally offended by the prayer...

TL:DR - prayer isn't for God, prayer is so someone feels better.