Originally Posted by abaya

This is my position as well, for the most part. If not for prayer and being part of a faith community throughout my teenager years (when my parents were splitting up), I am fairly sure that I would have gotten myself into some self-destructive behavior and ended up screwing myself over pretty badly. Prayer and the church got me through that time--it was my life raft, and I believed in it all to the core.

These days, I wish I could pray and believe in it--but there's nothing left there, except the psychological knowledge of how it might help relieve my mind of some pressure. Without faith, there isn't a whole lot of use left for prayer.

Originally Posted by levite

Do I pray for unlikely better outcomes to inevitably unfortunate situations? Yes. Do I expect that this will change the outcome of those situations. Not really.

Although I suppose I would say I am a fairly spiritual person (since I am studying to be a rabbi, it would be pretty unfortunate if I weren't), and I certainly would say that God has the power to directly intervene in any situation, I don't think he generally works like that.

On occasion, I think God does intervene, but either indirectly, or in extremely subtle ways. But often, as much as I believe he might like to, I think God does not directly intervene, because we call to him out of our suffering, and our suffering is inevitably either the result of things other people are doing to us (which result from human free will, something I don't believe God will choose to contravene) or from the entropy and chaos inherent in the structure of the universe-- which I don't believe God will generally choose to contravene, because the universe is designed to function according to those rules. If God wanted to get past them, he would've designed a universe that functioned differently. And whatever his reasons, this was the universe that we got; meaning, ultimately, that I think breaking or flashy bending of the rules is not likely to occur more than a handful of times in human history.

This is all aside from the standard prayers for health, protection, prosperity, and so forth for all the Jewish people that are a regular part of the fixed liturgy. I say those not because I expect they will bring miracles, but because Jews have a responsibility to pray the fixed liturgy, and to some degree, it never hurts to remind God to keep up his end of the bargain from time to time. Of course, I also pray a lot that we can manage to keep up our end of the bargain, and I'm not sure that really happens much, either....