I am convinced that they all work in varying degrees, but only to the extent that their followers believe.
I can see this with a wide range of belief systems that not only resides in religion but medicine. A drug may or may not work.
The follower must believe in the thing while heartedly for it to work.
However, I am forced to the conclusion that many people go through the lip-service act of saying their prayers without the slightest belief that those prayers will be answered.
Children are taught the power of belief but in an incorrect way. They are taught to repeat the words in an autopilot manner.
Even the adults will do this, as the children follow what the adults do. There are many churches that I’ve visited and observed this behavior.
Many prayers are just repeated with no thought given to the words, some people are saying the words while looking around. Some cannot explain the words. Some do not even remember the words to repeat it outside of them being in a specific order of remembrance.
Consequently, they are not answered.
So it is obvious that the prayers do not work for them. But they have the general idea so their “God” will be working in mysterious ways at other times.
the inner power
the "spirit"
Supreme Intelligence
Universal Mind
After reading the book The power of now by Eckhart Tolle, he used many of these terms to say the same thing. His one seems to be “Being”.
When you look past the words, they are all saying the same thing.
A sort of power beyond the body and the mind, a third component, that one can draw on when in need.
But we also know that this power can be suppressed through control of the conscious mind. This is happening now through social media, news, and people around us who are “unconscious”.
Others will utilize our subconscious if we do not know how to do it for ourselves.
When others use the term “think for yourself”, do they really understand what is involved?
Do they understand how one has it isolate themselves in nature, where one purpose is to remove themselves from the environment of unconscious thoughts that infects us. But also that nature seems to “drain” the thoughts from us.
A similar mechanism happens with journaling.
Maybe that’s why the Buddha, the Jesus, the Moses and others have been documented to isolate themselves in nature before being able to reach that subconscious power?