I want to be quite reasonable about this, but it's an odd gift that is meant for the giver. Perhaps it shouldn't, yet it does get slightly under my skin. When I divulge a spot of trouble to some, the response may take religious shape. They'll be making petitions to a higher power for my sake.

This strikes me as a kind of self-love mixed into the well-wishing, the aim of which you’d figure to be at him who needs the getting well. How petty I must be to gripe then. And right there is your reward for protest, so you keep quiet mostly, out of a sense of politeness.

I wouldn't gift you with a book I knew you intended not to read; a book that is close to my own heart. In particular, I wouldn't do this if I thought you'd find the content disagreeable. Briefly, I think prayer is neither an apparently functional effort, nor a logically sound one in the sense religions tend to render it.

You're pleading with an indisputable force to improve (according to you) upon the set organization of the universe. Or else you're knowingly asking something you grant won't happen because it isn't in the cards.

Some secular people don't mind this. But if you're doing it for me, I would suggest you save yourself the trouble of reporting the plan. I might even argue that it isn't for me at all. If your intent is to comfort me or to buttress my confidence, you must know you really haven't.

If indeed my consolation is the point of mentioning the prayers, the gift couldn't possibly be for my real use, and so in what sense is it really for me? I can at least rest on the count of your caring enough about me to kneel for my sake, but then you could have implied as much to me without the religious addition, which is itself a negation by way of making me wonder about your empathy:

Why are they telling me this when they know how I feel about prayer?

Divert your attention and chuckle at, or perfunctorily disregard, this study on the therapeutic efficacy of prayer. To a nonbeliever, par for the course. (Not to mention the higher incidence of complications in the prayed-for/aware condition.) And the believer won't be dispirited by a mere human study of God’s miraculous fiddling if I had to guess. So what's the use? I can say that if I were a believer, I'd be ill at ease with a god who suspends his intervening efforts to thwart an upstart research team. That'll teach ‘em!

In the worst case, I lament my receipt of prayer as a gift of passive hostility: we don't see eye to eye, but allow me to flop my contrary position onto the table in your time of need. I haven't yet been asked to thank a praying benefactor, but I have been reminded in the event of success that petitions were made on my behalf, they say with a smile and a wink.

I may then be an ingrate, or I may bolster my alleged beneficiary’s sense of accomplishment with an affirmation of ritualism. What a gift!

In her drawn-out putty stretch of a primordially good premise, Mary Doria Russell’s science fiction novel The Sparrow finds a loyal Jesuit missionary gravely managing his suppressed love for a beautiful comrade. It's rather decked out, this alien rendition of the man resigned to his own roof during a flood evacuation. (You know the old joke: at the pearly gates he would like to know why, Lord, did you not reward my faith? God is indignant - what of the raft, the boat, the helicopter? Were you expecting teleportation?) The priest never considers that this woman might have been a handsome celestial reward for his celibate loyalty.

In other words, if you would but get off your knees and open your eyes, you might find all the action in front of you.

Still, I look on in a head-cocking stupor when the faithful express gratitude to something invisible after putting in the work. And I do have to prefer this kind of motivated practicality over a reliance on miraculous interference alone.

It is my hope that this article does not foster a froideur between myself and beloved family or friends who base their lives upon a religion that encourages prayer. But I would enjoin readers at least to omit from their expectations any hope that I will psychologically profit from an assurance of prayers proffered.

The most I can send in return is a helpless, unentertained lip pursing and a slight eyebrow raise. Confidence in my ability to obliterate some obstacle, on the other hand, is quite welcome.