Faith: worship or psychology? Can it help us out in any tangible ways, like world economics?
 
Over the ages, there have always been those who...for diverse personal reasons...mock the idea that life is not just a random cosmic accident, our laws of science in fact ruling out the possibility of any nature of so-called supernatural existence. Some today mock on grounds they're in the USA and want to test limits of free speech; others for diverse personal, financial, or political reasons.
 
A big current stratagem, worldwide, seems to be: "knock out the long-ago founders, knock out the religions and let brute human will be done without resistance". Resistance? Those who see peaceful devotions as some sort of Hogan's Heroes or A-Team surely don't understand basic faith in God.
 
For starters, when I say "God", I admit I'm a Christian; but "God" is my way of describing that Absolute which is capable of creating the first matter in a void, if not the void itself...and obviously capable of not being bound by our sciences, explanatory reductions, logic, and reason, yet intending lifeforms evolve where they have amid circumstances of their universe. Thus, God is the author of all that ever was, is, or ever could be. Why would it be bizarre for anyone to simply give thanks for the awe of the universe, natural earthly wonders, or existence?
 
Some concede as much, then protest: "but we're talking monkeys who grew a neocortex and God must want us to outwit each other in survival of the fittest". Okay, I'll not allude to Plato's "Phaedo" ( a discussion on the existence of the soul) or Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica" (insofar as defining a soul), as such talks are opinions of the writers; I'll focus on but one set of scientific people shoring up that a soul exists and does better when seeking the Absolute's presence and universal order.
 
Back in the 1990's, a doctor by the name of Larry Dossey used to make the New York Times bestseller list with writing and independent scientific studies into the healing benefits of prayer. Dr. Dossey had been a chief of staff at Humana Medical in Dallas, an executive editor of 'Alternative Therapies", and a co-chair of the Panel on Mind/Body interventions, Office of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health. But a few of myriad clinical studies he cited were "Healing Research" in Munich, "The Faith Factor: An Annotated Bibliography Of Systematic Reviews and Clinical Research on Spiritual Subjects" by the National Institute for Healthcare Research, and Nobel physicist Brian Josephson of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, who suggested, as noted in "Biological Utilization of Quantum Nonlocality" as part of "Foundations of Physics 21", that prayer even from afar can have positive results. Sorry to ramble, but the public has a right to know where even THIS windbag gets his ideas from.
 
In his book "Prayer Is Good Medicine", Dr. Dossey said prayer shows no changes if engaged in by one over another religion, or sometimes even if one has no religion, the success rate improving merely by attempting to communicate with the Absolute. He also indicated that those who found a religion, which for them best attuned with the Absolute, had the highest degree of successful prayer outcomes...casually praying people giving chance results, those with religious regimens and focused sincerity gave fewer than four chances out of ten thousand that positive results could be chance...did I mention that's PEACEFUL religious participation? Lastly, Dossey's book lays out that prayer is as successful at global distances as it is at a bedside, you don't even need to know who you pray for personally, and no specific form of energy has ever been identified. If that isn't circumstantial support for the existence of spiritual souls asking their Creator for help as God may will it, what is? The neocortex isn't sending energy, and for nonlocal quantum physics to explain it would mean that two people would have had to at least once touched each other physically...which strangers haven't.
 
And some will still say: "so there's a Creator, there are souls, and only those souls in harmony with some God requiring goodwill between people seem to be attractive to the Absolute, but even if they help, religions can be abused so it's the right thing to regulate or eradicate them, especially since nobody can prove Christ or whoever in any faith existed or was Divinely inspired".
 
Well, again, even if taken as but traditions, obviously peaceful religious prayer has best empowerment through ANY such faith...traditional, new, or small...which for followers stands up to the tests of time for worship. God doesn't throw ANY sincere prayer away, just because you used this or that identifier or language; God obviously intends we do pray; and if He abided negative prayers He would not isolate terrorists and dangerous or misanthropic people FOR psychiatric recognition by making them do their horrible deeds of their own volition and acts...how can such people thus be deemed "agents of their God" if God doesn't hear them? We wouldn't prohibit alcohol because a gangster drank, or cut  hands off all people because some heinous act involved use of hands, so why act invidiously toward any peaceful religion because someone angry at God or mercenary against peace or His Absoluteness popped their own cork?
 
Lastly, some will devolve to saying: "well, the New Testament, at least, outlaws women as spreaders of the Gospel, and says civil union parties are cursed from God, so at least we've got a reason to be rid of Christians". 
 
Well, I myself interpret 1 Romans:18-32 to not mean anything against certain people BORN a certain away; the context you get depends on whether you read a choppy passage line by line, or as an idea through its whole. To my reading, a group of subject people first turned to idols with specific intent to mock God, then undertook gossip, murder, debauchery, all sorts of incredibly objectivist things, including with hope that turning to their own genders would further enhance their own rebellion to the Absolute...sort of "how can we make EVERYTHING imaginable run counter-clockwise and prove man is at least as mighty as God?". To me it seems God simply chose to not even be available to them anymore and in such fashion they eventually fell apart. I do not push others to agree, especially since some would have the State begin a slippery slope of legislating for religious conduct due to non aggressive interpretation of a Bible ambiguity.
 
Likewise, my own opinion of the Samaritan woman in John 4:39-42 is that she is presented as a missionary, described in literally the same way as the Disciples, so no absolute bar to women as ministers seems to be in the faith tradition; at the same time, at 16 Romans:1-2, Phoebe is directly said to be a "diaknos", a minister of uncertain function in the early Church; again, I don't require others to accept my view of this ambiguity of a New Testament tradition. 
 
To sum up, to be in God's corner the only "resistance" one puts up is to doing inconsiderate things; a universal Creator exists; bona fide ambiguity is not a reason to have the State legislate religiosity; a few bad apples aren't cause to dissolve religions or anything else apples roll to; we have souls which flourish in God, fellowship, and prayer; and as long as that's a faith's point, no psychology for or against anything or anyone of this world is required.