本文作者，一位曾是基督徒但现已不再信仰的个体，从非超自然的视角探讨了祈祷的实际益处。作者指出，祈祷有助于整理思绪，明确个人目标和困扰；它能促使人们深入思考所祈祷的事项，从而可能带来意想不到的解决方案，例如在祈祷朋友的生意时，无意中想到潜在的合作机会。此外，祈祷，尤其是集体祈祷，能增进人与人之间的情感联结，体现出一种平等的关怀姿态。作者还提到，祈祷可以作为一种“昂贵的信号”，向他人表明关怀和投入，并探讨了祈祷在群体中传递价值观和规范的作用，以及可能存在的“群体思维”限制。同时，文章也提及了祈祷可能带来的“糟糕解释”，导致对世界产生扭曲的认知。作者分享了个人过去作为基督徒的祈祷实践，包括“箭祷”和早晨的例行祈祷，并反思了这些实践的潜在意义与对下一代的传承问题。

✨ 整理思绪与目标明确：祈祷的过程迫使个体审视内心，识别真正重要的目标、困扰和愧疚感，从而帮助人们更好地认识自己。这是一种主动思考和自我反省的机制，即使没有超自然力量的介入，也能带来清晰度和方向感。

🤝 促进人际联结与关怀：集体祈祷能够加深参与者之间的情感纽带，通过共同关注彼此的需求和困境，体现出一种平等的关怀和支持。这种共同的体验，即使在非信徒看来，也能有效地传递温暖和归属感。

💡 激发问题解决与创新思维：祈祷促使人们深入思考所祈祷的事项，这种专注和反思的过程可能无意中引发新的想法或解决方案。例如，在为他人的事业祈祷时，可能会联想到潜在的商业机会或人脉资源，从而实现“非超自然”的帮助。

💬 群体规范与价值传递：祈祷行为，尤其是集体祈祷，能够潜移默化地向群体成员传递关于“何为好”和“何为不好”的信号，帮助塑造和巩固社群的价值观和行为规范。然而，这也可能带来“群体思维”的局限性，限制了对某些议题的开放性讨论。

🌟 “昂贵的信号”与信任建立：提供祈祷是一种“昂贵的信号”，表明了祈祷者愿意投入时间和精力去关心他人。对于接收者而言，这是一种被重视和被关怀的体现，能够增强信任感，即使祈祷者本身并不相信超自然力量。

Published on November 5, 2025 9:51 AM GMT

I’m on holiday with some Christian friends; they asked if I wanted anything for prayer.

I said I found driving in a foreign country stressful and that I hoped my younger brother would have success in his photography business.

After that, they prayed for each other and for me.

I stopped being a Christian six years ago, but I think prayer has some interesting features even if one doesn’t believe in the supernatural.

Upsides of prayer

Getting thoughts in order

When I am required to pray, I have to think about what to pray about. What is important to me? What do I feel troubled by or guilty about?

I take time in my day to do this anyway, but I sense many people don’t. Do you know what your most important goals or questions are? Perhaps imagine someone asks you for praye—what would you say? Is it what you’d expect? Perhaps consider talking through those things with someone.

Natural fulfilment of the prayer

Prayers cause people to spend time thinking about the thing they are praying about^[1]. This is a solid problem solving method, even positing no deity. Perhaps while praying for my brother’s photography business one of the group might think of a friend who needs a wedding photographer. In this example, prayer would have worked^[2] (though not supernaturally).

I think this could be improved by praying with a notepad and leaving silence to think about the answers to prayer. When I was a Christian, often I would want to get prayers over with and perhaps these days I would try and sit in the moment and see what comes to mind.

Closeness

I guess that thinking about someone fondly increases my closeness to them. This is even more true of group prayer. How often do my other friends sit in a circle, rapidly listen to each of their issues in turn and then spend time thinking about them? Not often! Notably prayer is pretty egalitarian—prayer requests are offered by both high and lower status members of a group, by loud and quiet people.

My Christian friends will offer care not just for each other but for their extended circle. I recall someone’s cousin going for an operation, or talking about my friend having a mental health crisis. In each case, the group offered to pray.

Groupthink

It’s interesting to note what things people do and don’t pray about. I am pretty sure that if I’d said I really wanted to find some friends to get drunk with, the prayer that was later spoken might have been censored somewhat to “please let Nathan find some friends”.

For good and ill prayer serves to signal to community members what is good and not good. I recall being at a church service where a woman asked for vengeance for the people killed in Israel on October 7th. She used very Biblical language (it was slightly shocking). That the minister didn’t try and round that set of prayers off said something about the church (eg by saying “and we pray for mercy on Palestinian civilians”).

Generally I think groups of people are better at thinking than individuals, so for many person to person problems, I imagine group advice will be better. For new kinds of problems or policy discussions, I imagine a typical small group’s reflexive answers might be worse.

Costly signalling

Let’s imagine someone offers to pray for me. Either they will do so, which suggests they do care for me. Or they lie, which, given my Christian friend’s beliefs on lying, is costly to them. Therefore I am more likely to believe that they care for me. This is an avenue of showing care that someone with integrity who doesn’t pray doesn’t have.

This might seem meaningless—I could tell you that I am going to make a donation in your name and then send it to you, or tell you that I was thinking of you. But each of those seems odd to me. Prayer is an existing social technology that performs this function. And it does affect me. I do appreciate when people offer prayer.

Deals

When my friends ask me for prayer suggestions, I give them. Partly for the above reasons, but partly because I like deals. They are behaving as if we are on the same team. I like that. I want to be on a team with my friends. I like forecasting, even though many don’t think it’s useful. If I suggested they give a prediction of a future outcome I hope they’d go with it for similar reasons.

Likewise, in some circumstances I am happy to pray for people if they ask. A friend’s child died and they asked for people to pray for them. If I were them, I would want prayers, even from people who didn’t believe it. I try and act as I would want someone else to do.

Downsides

If I am going to write the benefits I want to cover the downsides of prayer also:

Bad explanations

I have seen people thank the Christian god for finding parking spaces. Finding parking spaces is not a particularly rare thing to happen. If people nod to this, as humans often do, these people will be affirmed in believing that a deity is micromanaging their parking experience. I imagine this leads to quite warped perspectives on the world.

Many things have this feature, whether prayer, astrology, vaccine scepticism. Most of these aren’t too expensive… until they are.

How to pray

I think there is something quite alive-feeling in discussing how I actually used to pray. I have prayed 10,000s of times and it was once a deep part of my routine.

This was my personal practice, as a fairly conservative evangelical Christian, so other Christians probably do it differently.

Quick prayers

If I needed help or confidence I might pray a single line while feeling scared walking home at night.

“Please help me get home safe”

I prayed like this five or more times a day. Some Christians call them “arrow prayers” in that you fire them off quickly.

Morning prayer

I would read my Bible each morning and then pray. My general practice was as follows:

Lifting God upThankfulnessAsking for forgivenessAsking for help for myself and others

A prayer might go as follows:

“Dear God,

You are mighty and gracious, you have made the mountains and the sunsets.

Thank you that I am able to come on this holiday. Thank you for my friends and their kindness.

I am sorry for not helping tidying up the food as much as I could have.

Please could you help Tim with his low energy. Help Anne with her relationship with her sister.

Please help me to know what I want to work on next.

Please end the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and help people in poor nations to have more economic growth.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen”

Group prayer

A third common type of prayer is group prayer. People might go around the circle and say what is troubling or important to them. Then there might be a quiet time where anyone can pray into the silence:

“Dear God,

Please help Anne in her relationship with her sister.

Amen.”

A fun feature of group prayer is the second “amen”, which many Christians will recognise. After the group has prayed for a while and there has been a long silence since the last prayer, some leader will say a slow “amen” (often aaaaamen) to bring the session to a close.

Thoughts and reflections

I have tried here to give a fairly unvarnished account of prayer.

While I was a Christian, I saw this kind of prayer as natural, but looking again, I imagine it could seem bizarre, informal or contrived. Is this really the way to talk to the creator of the universe? There is a notion in evangelical churches of God as Father vs God as Dad. This highlights our fathers as authority figures vs someone we are relaxed around. Different people think that different tones are appropriate.

I still pray sometimes, though rarely. I find it can settle my mood when I’m extremely stressed.

I find this a little hard to talk about because I predict people will assume a lot based on what I say. I guess I wish people didn’t do that. Can’t agnostics have opinions on prayer too? Can’t an experience be raw without necessarily implying that there is some deep truth I’m hiding from myself? Honestly, I find it tiring.

I think we can take too binary an approach to truth sometimes. I am not surprised to find something that billions of people do has use even if the supernatural isn’t true. It’s easy for agnostics to throw this stuff out without thinking why people do it in the first place.

Will my children meditate? If I meditate on things as a non-religious replacement to prayer, will my children? I find we often don’t consider how we will propagate the ways we are to the next generation and as an ex-Christian, I think about this often. I see Christians passing on their habits, but it seems to be likely much more difficult for me.

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Thanks to Manifest (the Manifold conference) for being the forcing function for me to originally think about these ideas. 

Here is the Substack menu image^[3] I used.

1. ^{^}

   Note this isn’t solely restricted to Christian practice, meditation has some of these benefits too.

2. ^{^}

   Get in, loser, we’re fulfilling prayers. My brother’s wedding photography portfolio is here.

   

3. ^{^}
   

Discuss