This is a tough one. As to "a mastery of", I so no, but to a simple understanding that we are 100% g-o-d,  I say yes. I don't know if this means anything of help or even an answer, but to say again, in other words, WTF can't be connected, as to be g-o-d ?

All and any god constructs of any separatism are simply dogmatic meaningless, wrong and  dangerous to the peace of mind of what we are, 100% g-o-d. Religion as it traditionally is, therefore sucks.  

I wish Todangst was more frequent here at RRS.  He could add something to this I'm sure. 

I've been wondering about this as well. What physical effects does prayer have on a person, and is it possible to reproduce the effects without reference to anything supernatural?

I have discovered that meditation does indeed have real effects that are useful for managing stress and moods. Prayer on the other hand, I can't quite figure out. I've never been a Christian so I can't really go by experience. I've asked other people who pray and they say it's basically asking a question or 'hoping' for some outcome. I get the idea that probably it has to do with 'putting it on the back burner'. In other words, you have a problem, but you use this mental trick to put it out of your immediate attention. You 'give it up to god' so to speak. Effectively this leaves the problem to your subconscious and allows you to direct your attention to more pleasant or productive things. Instead of spinning your wheels worrying about something, you let your subconscious work on it.

Another possibility is that prayer is like self-talk. The internal voice(s) we all use to analyze things, direct our attention, change our behaviour, etc. For instance, a lot of people when they make a mistake, a little voice in their head goes "Ah, you're so stupid! How could you have let that happen?" That's an example of self-talk. I'm guessing some forms of prayer might be a modification of self-talk. For example, your mind might instead say "It's okay. You've been forgiven. Let's try again."

As I said, I don't really 'get' prayer yet. I've never had that Ah ha moment regarding how it works. I do manage my inner self-talk, and I do put things on the back burner, but I'm not sure if that's what prayer is. I can't really see the connection. But from what people tell me about it, they talk about it as if it were the same thing.

In any case, it comes down to the subconscious and intuition. I think that's what you mean by 'mastering the facts'. There is definitely something to be said for understanding how intuition and the subconscious work, and practicing and training them. Before I started to explore my intuition I was still using it, but I wasn't acknowledging it. I was pretending I was eliminating my intuition, that I didn't need it. But intuition is really a basic function of the brain. It is the brain's natural ability to make pretty good guesses. It is how we figure out a new tool we've never used before. For example, the first time you drive, even if you intellectually know how to drive, you still need to go through a process of learning with your body and intuition. You try pressing on the accelerator. You know intellectually that it will make the car go faster, but you don't know how fast it will respond, how much pressure to put on it, etc. You just try without knowing; that's intuition. You make a pretty good guess, and when you press the accelerator too hard, you say "Whoah, too fast." and let off the accelerator a bit. You don't think intellectually, "Oh, I pressed the accelerator 1 inch too far, so I'll flex my muscle to make the adjustment." It just comes naturally.

Getting to the point where you can do something mostly by intuition is a key to optimal performance. The thing about intuition is that it is fast and fluid. It is a highly evolved ability of the brain. Thinking rationally and systematically about everything may give more accuracy, but that accuracy takes time and effort. Our brains are natural intuitors, but rational and systematic thinking requires learning first.

The thing about intuition is that it has built-in flaws. You might call them natural human intuitive fallacies. However, the other thing about intuition is that it can be trained to correct for those fallacies. For example, when you first learned basic arithmetic, it was a challenge to learn that 2+2=4, the multiplication tables, etc. Each skill had to be learned. But after a while, through much practice, many of those skills became intuitive. Your intuition has been trained to handle the new skill. Now, you can probably look at 5 + 7 + 3 and quickly, intuitively come up with the answer 15. What used to take a lot of effort can now be done quickly and without effort.

Understanding intuition will be a key to our battle against irrationalism. Not only understanding the fallacies, such as argument from authority, but understanding how to use intution more effectively than the irrational people. Prayer is an example. It is an intuitive tool. A tool for using intuition to handle stress. Another example is myth and metaphor. They are intuitive tools for communicating ideas. We would do well to study our intuition and put it to good use, for example to develop metaphors to combat the religious metaphors. The trick is to find ways to use intuition to teach rationality.

my intuitive problem with the self-talk analogy is that (at least when i was growing up) prayers were more massive repetition of memorized lines than something that i would classify as 'talking'... kinda like you see in the movies.

i'm sure on some level this repetition psychology helps someone but i'd think many more productive psychologically benefiting activities can be done in the hour or so that you're on your knees going through the rosary.

I'd agree that there's a component of intuition, and maybe that's the best explanation for my car analogy. The self-talk component is also interesting. I've read some self-help books about memory improvement, etc., and I would always get hung up on the awkwardness of the mnemonics and metaphors they used; but I wonder if there's an experience I'm unaware of in accepting loosely defined sets of impressionistic ideas as valid. Further, I wonder what it's like to elevate an idea to the point where one truly believes it has a weight and presence outside of oneself. That is, I recognize my ethical boundaries as a product of physical processes, and I accept their existence as self-justifying. They are OK simply because they are so, though they could have easily been some other way, and I would be none the wiser to the alternative. On the other side, you have caricatures like the guilty Catholic, antagonized by the figure of an obscure tangle of instincts and reactions known to him as his morality.

Something that changed my life radically was just allowing myself to be aware of what I was feeling at a given time, and letting it process, rather than fighting with it. But that distanced me from my emotions more than it involved me in them, and made me more like an observer rather than a participant. When I look at things like the placebo effect, for all its limitations, I have to wonder whether there is a potential in being able to sincerely devote one's faculties to abstract concepts. I wonder whether there's a harmful distraction in certain degrees of self-awareness. To return to the car analogy; you can pull a vehicle down to its constituent parts, and figure out how it works; but whatever car it is, you eventually have to put it back together and just drive the thing.

We are compelled to figure our lives out, but we should also be obliged to live them, and live them well.

Buddha      Yeah , most who religiously label themselves are idol worshipers, fools.

 Just one moment of intuition is better than all that is idol worships, as is religion ....