It is a question with which every religious person has at one time been confronted and been confounded. Even those of us who are not theologically inclined have struggled with this question: Why are my prayers not answered? After all, we do believe in the efficacy of prayer. Why, then, is it so often a frustrating experience?
I was very fortunate as a young boy, and in one particular way I knew it. Very few of my friends had living grandparents. Their families had recently arrived in America, and their grandparents remained behind in Eastern Europe and were consumed in the fires of the Holocaust.
"Religion is good for you." "A religious person is a mentally healthy person." Statements such as these could not have been made when I was a graduate student in psychology back in the 1960s. Quite the contrary. The prevalent belief in the mental health profession then was that religion was a neurosis, and that religious people needed to abandon their irrational beliefs.