Should Secular People Pray?

Julian Baggini test-drives prayer:

Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator. Many stoics did something similar and some forms of meditation serve the same kind of purpose. My version is simply a few minutes of quiet reflection on such matters each morning.

Eric MacDonald draws a distinction:

[T]he first thing one learns about prayer is that it is not primarily an asking for oneself — although there’s lots of that — but offering oneself. Anything else is really a declension from prayer.

I assume that the Muslim, bowing in humble submission, is not only asking but offering. It’s like that in most religious traditions. Nor is it out of duty to an absolute Sovereign, as Baggini puts it; prayer is much more a loving response than a duty. Augustine famously said that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in god, and it’s that kind of “letting go and letting god” as the phrase has it, that stands at the centre of what people mean by prayer. Not that people don’t ask and hope that their askings will be answered, but that’s not the heart of prayer as it is usually understood.