Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Does anyone get anything out of rote recitation of a prayer?

Apparently they say the Lord's Prayer in the Ontario Legislature? and they're only just now thinking "Hey, maybe this isn't the time or place"?

I've already written what I think about saying it in public school and that applies here too, but now I'm wondering something else.

If you are in fact religious, and you're in a situation like this where you have to recite a specifically-worded prayer in a secular context, do you at all feel it emotionally or religiously or faithfully or however it is you normally experience prayer?

I was once religious so I do grok that prayer is something to be experienced, not simply something to be recited. You think and feel something and then pray it, and then something happens, something that's more than just thinking and feeling it. (I don't know what happens, I never had the experience myself which is why I'm an atheist, but it's supposed to happen.) And I do see how saying a specific prayer could be an experience when done in a church or some other religious context - in Catholicism, all the words and actions of the mass had a specific purpose which served a greater goal of forgiving all our sins so we wouldn't go to hell if we died between the end of mass and our next sin or something (there are big words for all this but they escape me at the moment).

But if you're in the legislature - a completely secular context of no theological significance - and you recite from a given script, are you experiencing it religiously at all? Reciting in a religious context I can see, praying whatever your happen to be thinking and feeling in any context I can see, but does reciting in an irrelevant context actually do anything for you?

Any religious people out there? Or have I already alienated them all?

ETA: Theme of the day seems to be blogging things that other people have already said better. Here's Eddie's take.

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