In the lobby of the hospital where I did my medical training stands a 10½-foot marble statue of Jesus. Patients and visitors often pause before the imposing figure to gather their thoughts, pray, or just touch its smooth white foot. The hospital has always been secular, but the statue has brought comfort to thousands for over a hundred years. It also reminds doctors that, in medical matters, our patients do not necessarily see us as the final authority.
In Practice
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Of course there are atheists in foxholes, they used to just keep it to themselves from fear of their companions, and few atheists reportedly reconsider their beliefs when faced with medical problems. Many of us have learned meditative skills, often from other religious traditions. We may even be inspired by the human sentiment behind a religious work of art. But we hardly miss what can only be described as the clinically delusional character of beliefs in an an afterlife, much less the hideous threats of eternal torment in Christian theology which you politely ignore. It is not clear to me that a delusion with such a mixed message is necessarily a consolation to all believers, and I have certainly seen people terrified of divine retribution. Magical thinking is childish, and tends as often to provoke fear. There is no physics to faith, and the ultimate unpredictability means that it may be crippling to many in a number of ways, even while it may provide true consolation to those few of perfect faith.
Clearly you have never been in a hot combat zone. There is a lot of praying that takes place, and it has nothing to do with peer pressure, your snide remarks notwithstanding. Also, from your remarks, my best guess is that you have never been very sick, "nigh unto death."
Stephen Hawkings claims to have proved that there is no God, but I have yet to hear the stampede from the majority of eminent theoretical physicists backing him up.
You seem to feel that you have all the answers. You don't.
Sorry, didn't mean to be snide. I was trying to say that no one is about to have a discussion about theology in such a horrible situation, or interfere with ones comrade's consolations. I am indeed fortunate that I have never faced a combat situation, although I have certainly been ill. I personally find the magical ideas of religion really quite disturbing, rather than consoling, so I am simply unable to accept them, and am quite certain that I never will. Like Thomas Jefferson, I take much of my moral grounding from the words of the great religions, but I rely for my view of the universe on physics and biology.
I accept that prayer can make a person feel better as a form of positive thinking and moral support, but so can secular positive thinking and morale support. There are atheists everywhere, and it is time for the religious majority to wake up and smell reality. God is a primitive fantasy that makes no sense and has no evidence, whateve.
Well over 90% of the members of the American Academy of Sciences are atheists, an even higher proportion of science Nobel laureates are unbelievers. It is taken for granted in the scientific community that one is an atheist, it is the few eminent exceptions that people take note of. Few unbelieving physicists are interested in making public statements about this subject. The most important physicist often cited by believers, Einstein, famously claimed "God does not play dice with the universe", which was actually an argument against probabilistic causality like quantum mechanics, couched in Spinozan terms, and he went to great pains to deny any belief in a personal God, it seems to no avail.
Biologists are much more likely to make public statements about the non-existence of God, because they find themselves banging heads with fundamentalists opposed to evolutionary biology in public, and they end up telling the truth about religion out of frustration. Most scientists consider it an archaic anachronism, and don't even bother, out of politeness or disinterest. A kind young physician, attempting to console me over the sudden death of my father-in-law, talked to me about souls, and I just nodded, concealed my disagreement, and tried to be grateful for her concern.