It’s a long conversation to bring an atheist to the point where a discussion on the relative power and promise of prayer can even begin to be discussed. Atheists seem to want to avoid this particular topic more than any other. Can Creator share any insights on why this appears to be the case?

This, too, is an interesting perception because it is very true. The reason for the discomfort is not that the atheists have any trouble proposing a counterargument, but that they have an inner knowing that prayer has importance and they are going against their own nature to cut themselves off from their lifeline. Here, too, is evidence that there is inner divinity because it is the origin of human as an extension of divine consciousness to begin with, that you are actually comprised of divine energy, so in a sense being an atheist is a denial of the existence of the self although this cannot be proven readily. The disquiet people have in realizing they are neglecting prayer is an inner guilt because there is a part of them that knows differently and puts them in conflict with themselves to some degree. The skeptic would dismiss this simply as growing up in a religious home or community where they are subjected to the propaganda of religion and are made to feel guilty and fearful about a reprisal from an angry God if they are neglectful in their worship, and so on. There are some who will feel this way, but that is more the case of actual believers who are less than scrupulous in their religious practice but do believe they need to follow the rules of their faith and know their conduct puts them at risk of divine judgment, and then will feel a disquiet and in some cases considerable fear, particularly as they may approach their eventual transition with death of the body and begin to become terrified of judgment. In most cases, the hardcore atheists have already worked through such concerns and are satisfied their rejection of all religious notions is fully warranted and is the high ground and will feel quite self-righteous about it. It is true that atheism is a form of religion because it has many of the same characteristics, strong adherents who will defend it avidly and with passion through a careful construct of dogma that is believed simply on its face in the absence of true evidence. The fact God is difficult to prove as a reality is a challenge for the spiritual, but by the same token the atheists can in no way disprove the existence of God, so they are mistaking an absence of evidence for being evidence of absence. The two are not the same. In fact, there is far more evidence of an intelligent, designed, origin of the universe and everything within it, than the opposite. But science has been constrained through mind control manipulation to reject reason and logic when it comes to evolution and to promote the theory of evolution as the be-all and end-all to explain the origin of everything in existence, when it cannot truly begin to encompass the simplest phenomena. The largest obstacle to a fair discussion between spiritual believers and atheists is the fact that the latter are heavily manipulated by mind control to discard any notion in support of spirituality. So, in a sense, it is an uneven and unfair contest because the participants are not on a level playing field as many will not have the full command of their faculties to work with. This is an unfortunate reality that is never considered in the discussion, but is quite real and explains a lot about the difficulty people have to come together and have a meeting of minds on almost any subject when there are strong opposing views. Such divisions are engineered and orchestrated to happen through subliminal programming of the deep subconscious mind and this results in many quite strong inner beliefs that have been corrupted and, in effect, implanted deep within the being. So people are not truly who they would be without this manipulation, they are in fact a creation of the interlopers, a kind of a hybrid human, who with respect to certain subjects, will espouse the party line, so to speak, and will give the dogma they have been programmed to promote and will believe it unerringly and intensely because they cannot even think otherwise in a way contrary to their inner programming. If you follow people in the public eye who espouse conspiracy theories, when these are roundly discredited they may go silent for a while but eventually will pop up somewhere espousing the same general ideas and that is because they continue holding the beliefs in the faulty notions—it is programming pure and simple. Under such conditions, not only is a friendly discourse likely to not be fruitful, a serious, methodical, systematic, and intensive discussion will likely not be productive either, because people who have been programmed cannot be persuaded. You may get them to go silent if they see their arguments are not being accepted but that is not the same as agreeing with the opposite view. They will simply tune you out and disengage because their mind cannot embrace the concepts you are promoting. It is simply not allowable to them because their beliefs tell them it is impossible to be so and that is enough for them. This is how people navigate in the world normally, they develop a knowledge base of what they believe to be true and it is very hard to change thinking without clear evidence, but even then there will be some who resist your evidence, because to them it is not strong enough to go against an inner belief. People vary in how rigid they become, but that is often a consequence of manipulation as well, because it serves the hidden hand to have people who not only can be programmed with the desired beliefs but who will defend them to the death and will have closed minds on the matter. This is the greatest of obstacles in what you are wanting to understand, and to facilitate in having a fruitful positive dialogue of believers and non-believers to advance the cause of the divine and help persuade people to get back on track and more in divine alignment for the overall benefit of the human enterprise.