Uncertainty is a form of fear. No matter how confident we seem to the outside world, can we ever be certain of our convictions? Perhaps, playing it safe, is one way of covering all the bets.

Human prayer is a truly fascinating human activity, and one that I have wondered about ever since I can remember. It comes in a great variety of formats, and all seem to be legitimate forms of appeal or expressions of appreciation. Prayer may be silent, vocal, grovelling, pleading, reprimanding, demanding, questioning, extremely long, only seconds long and in any worldly language.

For a sensible prayer at least two elements are required. One is the guy that does the praying. On the other end you need a god, perceived or real, preferable with good hearing and a lot of patience. Unfortunately, the listening partner in the above interaction is not at all a certainty and one can do no more than hope that it is not a one-sided affair. This was brought home to me in a strange inverse manner. This is the case of a confident atheist ? or so I thought.

A good twenty years ago I had a friend, call him Mountaineer. Mountaineer started his career by studying to become a church minister at a seminar of the Seventh-Day Adventists. Somewhere along the way, he realized that the god he wanted to announce to the world, did not really exist and that it would be useless to proselytize about it to the world, and thus the atheist in him was born. He began studying law and became an advocate, and ultimately a professor of law at a university. His speciality: the art of writing laws. The mind-set is of course, not so very different. A man of the frock's main purpose is to keep his flock on the righteous path by controlling their beliefs and actions, based on the Lord's Laws. Having given up god, Mountaineer found an ingenious  way of doing the same, sans the Lord: telling the wide world what they must and must not do by writing a country's laws. The benefit is obvious: immediate retribution if the laws are transgressed upon ? no longer do we have to wait until we reach the afterlife.

It was thus, that this musician and his family was invited to dine at prof Mountaineer's home. It must be stressed again that Mountaineer was a confirmed atheist, and was not ashamed to verbally make his position known. Sitting down at the table, the food looked good and the aroma made our mouths water.

Suddenly Mountaineer said with in a solemn, sotto voce ( a musical term meaning"sweetly"): "please close your eyes." Just before I closed my eyes in wonder, I glanced at my youngest daughter who had a rather bewildering expression on her face ? she new what was coming. I had always taught my girls that one expresses gratitude for one's food by participating in the meal and enjoying it; no god should expect one to grovel for receiving the nutrition for a need it has supposedly installed in living beings when he created them. I always imagined the creator god's conversation with itself as being in the nature of: "I shall now create you, but you shall repeatedly be hungry at regular intervals. Every time you will have to plead with me for nourishment, and then thank me profusely before you participate in its consumption. Now, go out into the world, procreate profusely, and consume other living things which suffer from a similar fate ? repeated periodic hunger."

Mountaineers' prayer went "bloomy wompy zinla zong", and lasted no more than five seconds. In fact, before I had looked down from the glance of my daughter, there was an "amen" ? the only word I understood. The little prayer that went so quick and was so unintelligible, was probably no problem for Mountaineer's god, so it did not matter if any of us actually understood the string of mumblings. However, it was of no consequence to me, and I suspect it meant little to my daughters.

Rather bemused, but not at all in a belligerent or critical tone of voice ? it was a well-meant question, I commented to Mountaineer that I always had been under the impression that he was an atheist.

His confident, calm answer was: "you never know, Mario, you never know." The meal was delicious.