“Prayer cannot change things” Discuss.

Prayer is a difficult subject to try to understand for many reasons. Firstly, it completely depends on what kind of person you are, your beliefs and the circumstances of the prayer. People pray in times of need and hope. People pray for themselves and others, to god, to ask for things, be it forgiveness, material matter, or for god to fix things. In Christianity, prayer is a huge part of worship. Christians believe that prayer forms a personal relationship with god. In times of need and trouble, people look to god and put their faith in god, to fix things. This is one of the examples which proves the point that prayer can just cause more harm than good; If people put all their hope in god to make things better, and then nothing changes yet perhaps things become even worse, these people may lose all faith in not only god and religion, but also life itself. Some truly devoted Christians believe that even when god doesn’t answer their prayers, there’s a perfectly good reason for it; for example if someone prays for a close family member or friend to recover from sickness, but they don’t, although they may be pretty angry at everything, especially god. However, they may believe that god decided it would make them a stronger person, and it was time for that person to go anyway. To a true believer, the theory of prayer can make a huge difference to life. The question of whether prayer can change things or not is a question of which there will probably never be a way to find an answer to, unless someone meets god. Sometimes however, just the idea of someone talking to someone, in this case god, in their time of need helps more than they may imagine. That said, even tiny differences in life and situations, which may have probably just occurred by chance, could be amplified to seem like the work of god, enforcing a dramatic increase of faith. In my opinion, the opinion of someone who doesn’t believe in religion, but kind of believes in god, prayer can be beneficial, even if it doesn’t change things. The point is, you can’t always expect things to get better just by saying please, in this case through prayer. Some people believe that life is already planned out; in which case prayer cannot change things, however to atheists, prayer is pretty pointless because there’s no one up there listening to your prayers. Whatever happens, whether you’re asking for forgiveness, for someone to recover from sickness, or whether you’re asking for a Ferrari, prayer brings hope, therefore even if prayer doesn’t change things, there is still a point in praying.