Example of human factors in mass market religion.

I was thinking about the way many of the congregations I have attended pray and why I often find it unrewarding. The congregants get really used to saying the same prayers and singing the same songs over and over until it becomes aggregated into a single composite automatic schema. It becomes possible to say the prayer or sing the song with no attention to the words. After a while, you can ask the "expert" what the words MEAN, and they would have to think about it. They might not ever even have learned that part. The schema have strong links to the sensory, and perhaps the emotional areas of the brain, but they lose the links to the semantic.

Maybe I am different, but I would rather concentrate on the semantics.