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And God ignores your prayers, and the prayers of the billions of other Christians who have also prayed for this obviously good thing for centuries. Can you see how, to an outside observer, this might make it seem like you're not actually asking as if someone is listening? God looks down on, say, the mass murder of Christians by ISIS as part of his benevolent plan and doesn't intervene. But apparently he does intervene to help you meet your wife?
Would I be right to think that the latter came before the former? Because from my experience and reading, people turn to religion for emotional reasons, and then the apologetics come after to see off the logical doubts.
My model of it leans less on people going along with what they were raised in (although the statistics show that conversions are basically a rounding error, religions grow through the cradle), and more through motivated reasoning. That's what I mean by compartmentalisation. Applying wildly different standards to God that to the ones you apply to everyday life. I don't think any religious person believes in God in the same way that they believe that things fall down when you drop them or that the sun rises in the morning. But motivated reasoning, applying different standards to religious beliefs than normal beliefs, and positive mood affiliation leads to 'belief in belief'.
Not at all. Certainly, I can understand if you say "this makes it seem like there's no God". You wouldn't be the first, nor the last. But I can't see any good argument to be made that unanswered prayers (or at the very least not answered in the way we might want) somehow reflect on my own sincerity.
You would in fact be incorrect. The former preceded the latter by something like half a decade.
Again, your model is gravely mistaken. You would do well to abandon it and start fresh.
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