Amardeep Kaleka is praying (see picture below). His father, Satwant Kaleka, the president of a Sikh temple near Milwaukee was shot by a man whose motives are not yet clear. Amardeep’s father, we now know, did not make it.
Prayer is one of the most universal human gestures. You can even be a deist like Albert Einstein, who believed in God but not in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (a God who joins himself to a particular people), and still imagine that there is a dimension of the mind, a noosphere, which connects us all immaterially and in which change for the good or the bad is possible.
Even if Einstein did not so imagine, but believed more modestly that sympathy is the first and most important foundation of ethical behavior, he might well have understood that prayer is an expression of sympathy, to be greatly prized even by those who cannot bring themselves to pray.
The question worth pondering: is Spinoza's God in whom Einstein so ardently believed like a brain as Einstein was wont to think of a brain, a muscle with no personality, or is Spinoza’s God a brain as we now know it to be, a place in which beliefs, data, and emotions are processed and combined?
Since intelligence is a place like the latter, and interactive by nature, the conclusion is inescapable: prayer is a supremely logical gesture.
Background reading from Scripture: Jonah 1 (God answers the prayers of "pagans"); Matthew 7:7-10 (the sympathy of a fatherly God). Background reading in Einstein:
I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 325). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]
To [the sphere of religion] belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 334). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]
A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those super-personal objects and goals that neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (pp. 334-335). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.] Einstein, it is fair to say, was frum in the sense he defines.
A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education, and social relationships. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 328). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. [Einstein as quoted in Jerry Mayer's Bite-Size Einstein (p. 25). The quote is unsourced. It is consistent with other things Einstein said, but that does not mean the quote is his. I cite it with reservations. Regardless, we now know that the brain is far more than an elaborate computer. Belief and emotion, not to mention the powers of which Paul speaks – faith, hope, and love – are the fuel on which the brain runs.]
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