Prayer - how to contribute absolutely nothing and still imagine you are helping!
I find it fascinating enough in itself that so many people can create a 'god' in their minds - a supernatural superbeing who goes around creating entire universes. That is a concept which I reject as a product of a very fertile imagination.
However, to actually imagine that such a being literally passes her time by continuously eavesdropping on the thought processes of every single one of a species of seven billion puny apes, who evolved from fish on a single planet, is just too amazingly, mind-blowingly, stupendously, impossibly ridiculous to contemplate.
How is it possible for adult humans to believe such a thing?
Whatever their religion, their 'god' must have sat around for 13.7 billion years watching the slow evolution, in this Universe, of hydrogen and helium gas into stars, planets, plants and animals, until finally humans evolved maybe 150,000 years ago. At that stage god suddenly sets up a prayer monitoring process to evaluate the thoughts and prayers of every human on the planet. Why would she do that? Can you imagine anything more boring than listening in (non-stop) on everybody's thoughts, just waiting for the moment of prayer? At least it would give her something else to ignore.
More importantly, how is this astonishing process of reading minds supposed to work?