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I’m an atheist and I pray on occasion.* I wouldn’t care if people told me they were going to pray for me, even if they had a condescending attitude. Since they can do it anyway with or without my consent I wouldn’t mind, and because I find value in prayer myself I would encourage them pray if it helped their state of mind in some way.
*Because this statement might be slightly confusing I thought I’d explain it further, but it deserves an asterisk since it has nothing to do with the conversation at hand. If someone were to ask me if I believed in god I would probably respond as follows: I do not believe God, the traditional omnipotent being in the sky, exist. However, if I were to refer to God, in all likelihood, I am talking about the immutable physical laws of nature. That to me is God. It has been my experience that through trying times prayer can be very therapeutic. But, praying to the universal law of gravitation or what have you seems inane. So when I pray, I do pray to the omnipotent being in the sky, which I don’t believe exists. The only way I reconcile this contradiction is by saying that you don’t have to believe to hope.
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