Hear Me, Lord!

We know that prayer doesn’t work. It has been proven time and again that the frequency of positive answers to prayers is no more than happens by chance. In other words, the effect would be the same if no prayers were offered.

However, let’s look at the subject from a Believer’s standpoint; that God hears prayer, and of course He/She/It answers. The responses, according to believers, are either yes, no or later. But I see a serious problem – there are 7.7 billion of us humans on planet Earth. Let’s make the conservative estimate that 1 billion of them pray between 5 and 10 minutes every day – Christians, Muslims and Jews. Then at any given moment, 5 million are praying. God supposedly hears every one of them, praying in dozens of different languages, and remembers what was prayed for. But of course he must hear what everyone else is thinking/saying, otherwise he wouldn’t know whether or not they were praying, and there are around 5 billion people awake at any given time. Sounds just a bit far-fetched to me, but then Gawd has superpowers, right?

But surely we’re not the only intelligent beings that Gawd has to look after. There are billions of galaxies in the universe, each containing billions of stars, most of which have a number of accompanying planets, which must number in the quintillions. Millions of these planets must be in the ‘goldilocks zone’, with conditions similar to the Earth, and many of these must, logically, develop life, some of it intelligent. If not, then, as a science fiction character once said “It’s an awful waste of real estate” So wouldn’t our omnipotent Super-being concern itself about the thoughts of all these other thinking creatures as well as ours? It must be one helluva busy little snoop.