Our thoughts and prayers

In the aftermath of anything tragic, it is inevitable that someone will say "our thoughts and prayers are with them." Now that many people do not believe in a god or practice any religion, it can - and often is in a lily-livered quaking in fear of offence kind of way - be abbreviated to "our thoughts are with them".

What the hell does that mean?

A thought, considered from the biological viewpoint, is a series of electrical impulses and neuron firings. No great amount of voltage involved, very little current, not enough to illuminate an actual lightbulb - let alone make one manifest in the air above your head. And not the kind of energy that one can transfer to a person in need - even if I did have jumper leads attached to my ears. My thoughts are not with them in this sense.

Perhaps my thoughts are with them in that they share my mental imagery? I sure hope not, for their sake. In particular, when tragedy strikes some people, if my thoughts were shared with them, their self-esteem might take a hit because they would start to believe that it couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Even if I do like them, my thoughts at any given time are unlikely to be uncomplicated as regards them - or indeed as regards anything. If our thoughts were with other people,  I don't know that it would do them much good in their time of need - or indeed by conducive to ongoing friendships.

Taking the less literal and more empathetic view, it seems to mean that we care and are concerned. If this is the case, then why "our thoughts and prayers are with them"? Someone making sympathetic noises at you is, on the whole, fairly useless and, beyond a momentary feeling of mild human warmth, doesn't do much to solve the actual problem. Much less so if the person isn't making the sympathetic noises at you but are informing others that they would, if you happened to be present, be making sympathetic noises at you. Or, perhaps, that they've thought hard about the kind of sympathetic noise that they might make, were you to be present. And they've done so with a sincere expression on their face.

Someone hoping I get better soon is at least directing their ineffective, childlike wishes in my direction. Saying "our thoughts are with them" is like saying "I hoped he gets well".

Even if we add "and prayers" back into the original phrase, it doesn't get much better. What that amounts to is "I have asked a possibly mythical being who, apparently, has the power to intervene and do - what I'm not sure but something vaguely interventiony, to conduct such an intervention despite the fact that she didn't, or couldn't, or wasn't motivated by sufficient toadying to intervene in the first place to prevent the catastrophe from happening". Given the inherent changeability of such a deity, one might equally fear that drawing attention to the crisis might just as readily bring down further catastrophe on the heads of the victims as solve the problem.

On the whole, "our thoughts and prayers are with them" is just another one of those things we say to prove to our fellow human beings that we are not psychopathic; that we share some basic level of empathy for other people. It's not doing the victims any good.