The Third Commandment

Pennsylvania Representative Brian Sims observes that: "On the list of things that actually stop shootings in this country, I'm going to put Prayer somewhere down around pencil shavings and Ovaltine."  He later apologized to Ovaltine.  I think he's still giving prayer too much credit.

A lot of people think that Prayer does no harm, and it might do good.  God, after all, might be listening.  Of course if he believed that gun violence was something worth doing something about and had the power to do something, why would he need the prayer?  Is He such a jerk that he'll let thousands of innocents die each year and won't do anything about it unless we pray even more?

But of course it does do harm.   The idea that God responds to your prayers is an example of a gambling fallacy known as the hot-hand fallacy.  If your prayer works once or twice, a lot of people think that "luck is on their side", when really, it was something else...possibly random chance.  But it really discredits the hard work you might have put in to develop your skill at shooting the basketball, and it especially discredits the hard work your opponent did.  Perhaps most dangerous is that it might suck you into believing that the one-armed bandit is on your side.  Nearly all gambling is designed so that whether you win or lose is completely unrelated to how it went last time, and outfits like the Nevada Gaming Commission work hard to make sure this is really the case.  (Billiards and horse racing are exceptions, and to some extent counting cards in blackjack, but such exceptions are rare).

Moses understood this.  He gave us the third commandment, about not taking the Lord's name in vain.  This has nothing to do with offensive language.  If you think God might actually damn someone because you asked, if you think the reason you scored the touchdown or won the roulette roll is that you been praying for it, then you've implicitly decided that God is playing favorites and that you've been picked.  You are taking the Lord's name--and your whole relationship with Him--in vain.  The next step is thinking that prayer gives you special privileges: that because you pray a lot, it's ok to shoot other people, for example, or it's ok to not put in your fair share of the payment at dinner.

Prayer gives a lot of people solace.  If you spend some time, at the end of the day for example, thinking about your goals and what you've done towards or against them that day, it's potentially productive.  It doesn't matter if the abstraction you're talking to in your mind is God or a dead ancestor or something else, what matters is that you're thinking about this stuff, and trying to make yourself better.  Belief in yourself is helpful.  Believing that God might step in against shootings or to help you win the game or that promotion is taking the Lord's name in vain.