Derek Thompson

So it turns out that prayer works even without faith.

You can still get a lot of the benefits.

And so that kind of opened my mind to explore this further, to see, well, what have I been missing out on?

It turns out I'm not alone, that the largest religious group in America today are the nuns, not the Catholic nuns, the N-O-N-E's, the people who have no religious connection in terms of any particular faith.

And it turns out that those people have problems associated with that lifestyle, that in fact, people who call themselves spiritual but not religious, which is millions and millions of Americans today, turns out that they suffer more from depression and anxiety disorder than people who do have a particular faith.

But for someone like me who didn't connect with any particular faith, I wanted to see, could I find those benefits?

And that's exactly the mission I went on.

From what the research shows us is that prayer gives us a sense of agency.

It's exactly what you said, that when I feel that I really want something to happen that is partially or completely out of my control, that's when I would turn to these rituals because it gives me that sense of agency over something that I may not have direct control over.

And that's very psychologically comforting.

Now, the part that I struggled with about this

was reconciling, is that true?

Is it a fact?

And this took me a long time to get over, that if I couldn't prove, if I didn't know definitively that someone was listening to my prayers, that it wouldn't be worth doing.

And so I completely disconnected from the practice.

And it turns out that that, I think in retrospect, was a foolish decision.

Because I was holding...

my beliefs to the standard of facts.

Facts are not beliefs.

A fact is an objective truth.