Recently in the Chinese "chats" section of this website, there was a topic "do prayers work?" that attracted some 20K reads and quite a number of comments. Here I want to address this issue again. So, do prayers work? My short answer is yes, they do work - if you pray the right way.

For those doubters out there, you may start calling me "superstitious," "a silly Christian" or worse...but please hold your judgement. I am not even a Christian first of all. Secondly, although I have been praying consistently only recently, I have tried to pray for many years. More importantly, I have witnessed the huge impacts praying have had on many people who are doing it. If you have personal knowledge or experience proving something is or maybe true, and you begin to believe it is or maybe true, can you still call it a superstition? I think not!

What is the right way to pray? As a newbie in praying, I am no expert here. But I can share with you a few things I learned myself. First of all, if you don't pray consistently, you are doing it wrong! As the Catholic Bishop Fr. Robert Baron said - the only wrong way to pray is you do not do it regularly.

Secondly, if you are not religious, you should still pray. People throughout the ages of all backgrounds - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, people who follow primitive religions and even those who were/are unreligious - prayed and continued to pray.

The question then is, if you are not religious, who do you pray to? Being nonreligious, it took me a while to figure this out. I can tell you that while it is easier to pray when you are a theist or at least an agnostic, you can be an atheist and still pray, but you cannot be a "convinced" atheist, ie, someone who believes that there is absolutely no spirituality in the universe.

Since you have to pray to someone or something other than yourself. It does not matter what you call this something or someone. You can call it God, spirit, energy or whatever. But what is important is that this something or someone has to be bigger, more powerful than you. If you think you have all the power in the world, or even you alone have all the power in the universe to control your own destiny, then there is no point of praying.

Lastly, do not have any preconceived notions of how your prayers will be answered. Some religious people may have a harder time with this. They think because of their faith, God will somehow favor them by answering their prayers. God, spirit or energy, being a Higher Power, does not think or act like us humans. Remember the Christian Bible says: "That ye be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew 5:45 KJV).

No, God or the spirit, or the Higher Power, does not play favoritism, or work in any way that can be predicted by us human beings. If you can figure out God and God's plan for you and for everything, you might as well call yourself your own God, and stop praying.

So, I have a few favorite prayers of my own, one of which is the Serenity Prayer, because it follows nicely the principles outlined above. It goes like this:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Thy will not mine be done! Amen."

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