What is God for, exactly?

The world is a beautiful, bountiful place, but it is full of dangers. Many of the dangers are things we have no control over, although in the modern world we have achieved limited control over some things that were uncontrollable in past eras.

Humans have often been at the mercy of random events: earthquakes, storms, accidents, disease, attacks by wild animals, long droughts and famine. Humans are able to look for causes of these events, and to try to take control over them when they can. Modern medicine, for example, has spared most parents from having to suffer the early deaths of their children.

Another result of human questioning and striving for control has been the idea that there is some intelligence in the universe that causes these things to happen. This being is responsible for the bounty and the beauty (Praise God from whom all blessings flow...), but also, humans hope, can be called upon to keep us safe from disasters. Unfortunately, this being is highly unreliable and seems to be capricious. (Note that God's capricious nature echoes the conditions of the natural world. While nature cannot be petitioned, God, we hope, can.)

Prayer is the attempt to gain some kind of control over our fates. When we pray, however, our unreliable deity ignores us most of the time. That is, prayer is most often perceived to be ineffective in getting the desired results. Now and then, however, the believer prays for something, and it comes true. The positive result strengthens belief. What does the believer do in the majority of cases when prayer achieves no results at all? Unfortunately, the believer makes excuses for God, and often blames himself. My faith is not great enough. Perhaps I am being punished for a sin. Finally, when the believer runs out of reasons to blame himself, he is forced to utter the foremost sentence for letting God off the hook: Thy will be done.

The human looking for answers and control would do well to realize that prayers are ineffective because there is nothing to pray to. Those times when prayer seems to work out are really just the times when the thing wished for just happened naturally. Diseases, for example, sometimes go away by themselves, and nowadays are often cured by doctors.

When we don't waste our time trying to mollify our capricious God through self-blame and trying to change the sinful nature of ourselves and others, we have more time to do, under our own power, things to improve our chances for longer, happier lives.

A side benefit to discarding the belief that our sinful nature is the cause of our problems is that our leaders can no longer use disasters to control our behavior. When we know that hurricanes are not punishing us because some person or persons are sinning, we are free from the despot's manipulations.