Should you pray or reason in times of tragedy?

Many people disagree on what really works when others need help or healing.

Virginia Tech sophomore Danny Raynes lost two close friends in Monday's mass killing on the Blacksburg campus, yet he sounded hopeful on the phone Wednesday as he explained that everything happens for a reason.

"My friends say I am a pretty upbeat person," said Raynes, 20, a Baptist from Montclair, Va.

For that he credits his Christian faith, which through prayer and Scripture has sustained him in the days since Cho Seung-Hui gunned down 32 people and took his own life.

"You have to turn to your faith," Raynes said. "We can't just turn to ourselves but to the creator who really loves us."

While the publicity surrounding massacre-related prayer vigils certainly backs that view, atheists and agnostics disagree.

Those who live without belief in a supreme being say it is other people - and human reason - that offer the best help in the wake of tragedy.

Prayer may provide comfort but not answers, said Heather Wellman, a Jacksonville resident and executive director of the Humanists of Florida Association.

"Sometimes a lot of people believe God will intercede and provide a solution, and that's not going to happen," Wellman said. "People are going to provide those solutions."

People volunteering as grief counselors, donating money or participating in rational debates on how to prevent more killings will make a true difference, Wellman said.

Praying about incidents like the Virginia Tech shootings has been proved not to work, said Wilhelmina Walton, a Jacksonville atheist and founding member of the First Coast Freethought Society.

Jacksonville's high homicide rate in 2006 is an example of that, she said.

About 6,000 people worshiped, prayed and sang hymns during the city-financed Day of Faith anti-violence rally in August. Yet the killings continued, Walton said.

Smarter public policies and gun laws - not prayer vigils - have the best chance of preventing future school shootings, she said.

"I don't see how anything that's going to solve these problems is going to come out of prayer," Walton said.

But human action without God's help is ultimately futile, said Katherine Kiernan Fries, a Jacksonville mom whose son, Dylan Kiernan, is a Virginia Tech sophomore not injured in the shootings.

Faith transforms merely surviving a tragedy to emerging victorious over it, she said.

Relying on God can remove the anger and confusion that otherwise could prolong the grieving process, said Kiernan Fries, author of The Red Words, a collection of Jesus' sayings from the New Testament.

"The important thing is for people to keep their faith in the face of adversity and turn to God," she said.

In fact, there's really no other choice, said the Rev. Tony Hansberry, pastor at Greater Grant Memorial AME Church on the Northside.

Shootings like the Virginia Tech massacre demonstrate that the nation's embrace of secularism - rejecting God and relying instead on human reason and actions - has failed.

"The truth of the matter is you've done everything else and still we find ourselves looking for help and assistance," Hansberry said.

That answer, in good times and bad, is God, he said.

"Who else you going to turn to?"