I recognize so much of this from my Christian school and church experience as a child and teenager.

Sometimes, our pastor would even give sermons about Jesus's advice to pray quietly and privately. People would appear to appreciate the message, saying amen and complimenting him on "another great sermon, Brother."

Then they (and he) would go right back to their boastful, gossipy, judgemental, or whatever other kind of loud public prayer they preferred.

I remember thinking as a teenager that much of the congregation had to be really stupid. How could they hear a sermon like that and just continue on behaving as they were behaving? How could the pastor preach a sermon like that and just keep on behaving as he was behaving?

That's not why I left the church and Christianity, but it's just another example of th typical Christian (stupidity? ignorance? hypocrisy? bad values?) that pushed me out the door.

All kinds of things about typical prayers that I encountered bothered me, but one thing that got my goat the most who is when we prayed in school that our sports teams would win. I mean, we only played other Christian schools!

Presumably the other school was praying as hard as we were! Did these people really suppose that God was going to take an interest in which Christian team won a soccer game or a basketball game?

Even at 12 and 13 years old I recognized how incredibly stupid/bizarre this prayer practice was. The fact that our adult teachers and religious leaders at schools participated in this made me feel a tremendous amount of contempt for them — besides forcing me to doubt their intelligence and judgment about anything Christian.

I wasn't the only student who thought the practice was stupid, but not one Christian adult in our school ever took issue with it.

That just helped reinforce for me that Christian adults were usually not very bright, not very consistent, and not truly interested in following the teachings and practices of Jesus.

And that was BEFORE conservative Christians became so caught up in politics, embracing the intentional ignorance, selfishness, and cruelty of right-wing ideology — taking another giant step toward ditching the actual teachings and practices of Jesus.