Occams_Razor

Lol you got me! Actually, I do have a retort. It's not "near 100% death rate." It is 100%. So, say over a given period, 50,000 children are born with tay-sachs, and 90% are Jewish and 10% Christian. Since those 5,000 had Christian parents, many of whom presumably prayed, and all died, prayer is shown to have the same effectiveness regardless of religion; i.e., none whatsoever.

What I find so incredible about magical thinking is the almost cunning way in which the brain apparently filters out all bad, inconsistent and illogical results that would have caused the magical thinker's death a thousand times over if that same thinking methodology was applied to navigation through the real world.
Exactly. A believer cuts herself badly; she prays not for the cut to close up right then and there, because she knows somewhere deep down that that won't work. She prays that the ambulance arrives soon, or that the healing process will be shorter than might be expected or that sepsis won't set in--all events that can come true in the absence of prayer. Then, when one of those things which prayer is not required for occurs, voila, proof of prayer's efficacy. And around and around we go.

Epictetus

What grinds me about the religious element in all of this is how it plays out when a natural disaster occurs, like a tsunami. Think of the thousands of people who died in this event. Yet, they interview some schmuck on TV and the person says something like, "God was watching out for me" or "I must have had a guardian angel." It never seems to occur to them that God evidently didn't give a rat's ass for the other 90,000 people who perished.

Epictetus

I actually think there is some element in prayer that is useful and beneficial. Now don't get me wrong. Praying to some deity (sky pixie, etc.) does not in any way, shape or form elicit some miraculous intervention on the deity's part in that person's behalf.

But prayer sometimes, when practiced by certain people, may somehow focus their mental energy so that their attitude is changed or their limitation of what they can do is altered. So when they finish praying, they get up and accomplish what it was that they were praying for. They think some god did it for them, when actually they merely changed their perspective. I also think that in certain medical situations, some people can actually harness their body's natural immune system, healing processes, etc. and make themselves better over time. Why is one terminal cancer victim able to live far past the normal life-expectancy and another, with the identical disease, dies within 2 months? No god involved. Just mental attitude and the body simply follows the suggestion.

I mentioned hypnosis in another thread which is a similar process. But there seems to be some validity to this ability. Some people are really good at it and others suck.

dshimel

And then there are people like President Bush. A wayward, drifter, spoiled, rich-boy that found God. Okay, it got him to quit drinking his life away. BUT, now he is president, and thinks he's on a mission from God to rid the world terrorists.

Advisors tell him, invading Iraq is probably a bad idea. No, I know in my gut it is the right thing to do. Translation="God exists and wants me to do this, so everything will work out the way I want because God will see to it."

Once in, the advisors said that firing all of the existing secruity and military officers was a bad idea. No, Bush knew better, not becuase of evidence, but because of his gut. Translation: God wants me to do this, so it will work.


You could substitute Bin Ladden or Adolf Hitler or Moses or Alexander the Great or Julias Ceasar or Atilla the Hun or any of the other leaders throughout history that have believed they were on a mission from God(s).

And to a lesser degree, this same thing happens to ANYONE that accepts the God Paradigm.

A fertalized egg is a human because it has a soul, therefore abortive birth control, like the pill or IUD is murder.

God hates Gays.

Witches should be killed.

Atheists aren't "real" Americans.

Premarital sex is "wrong".

The list could go on for days. The point is simple. Using God as a motivation tool is like using a crack addiction to overcome a gambling problem.

Occams_Razor

Oh Certainly. Also, the Placebo Effect is well-documented. However I don't think you can chalk up "one cancer patient living far past the normal life-expectancy and another, with the identical disease, dying within 2 months" just to the effect of mental attitude. You'll find, for instance, that the progression of cancer in two patients in comas with similar prognoses will vary wildly. More significantly, you'll find that as between two cancer victims with similar prognoses, the one with the cheerful optomistic atitude may die earlier than expected and the doom and gloom despairing sufferer may live far longer than expected. I wouldn't disagree that mental atitude has an effect; just that there are many other factors at play.

dshimel

No. That is called statistical scatter. Some cancer's spread quickly, others more slowly. Some hit a vital organ right away, others take years.

Now, being happy does stimulate body functions, including the immune system. When you're happy, everything works better.

However, when it comes to cancer, I don't think it is a significant large effect to overcome statistical scatter.

You hear about the person that did "laugh theorapy" and lived. You don't hear about the hundreds that used "laugh theorapy" and died.

Lola

Mental energy is powerful. You know.... I always wondered, if a Christian believes that his/her all-knowing, all-loving god cares about them and knows everything that will happen to him/her in the future, then why even bother praying in the first place?
-Lola

Stacey Melissa

Well, no luck for me. I prayed, "This is a prayer to the god that jonesg prays to. Could you, pretty please, with a cherry on top, help me get over myself? Thanks ahead."

Five minutes later, I'm still under myself.

Stacey Melissa

:rolling: I like that. I may have to come up with a thread for the humor section based around a gambling addict who overcomes his addiction by replacing it with crack, and proceeds to proselytize to everyone about the Good Crystals. :rolling:

boundlesslife

Also, make sure that there's nothing they can do, themselves, to influence what might happen. Thus isolated from cause and effect, the results can thus only be attributed to the entity that was prayed to... or, to the entity that did the praying.

Because the entity that did the praying was unavoidably engaging in a process of affirming or "wishing for" the result sought. Is it possible that this process of affirmation might have contributed? Or not?

"Religious behavior" in pigeons illustrates the practice of ritual with the apparent intent to produce a result, that has nothing to do with the result obtained.

A pellet of corn (which the pigeons eat) is dropped at regular intervals. At first, the pigeons behave in a random fashion, but eventually, through sheer chance, they will have repeated a certain kind of footwork or other behavior just before the pellet is dropped. Then, it will be as if they had "figured out" how to get the pellets.

Because of reinforcement of behavior, the behavior is strengthened. Soon, the pidgeons do it this all the time, and the reinforcement grows stronger. The hungrier the pigeon, the more frequent and rapid the behavior.

The behavior will actually not have anything to do with the result obtained, of course, (they got fed a pellet), but if we used our imaginations, we might believe that they (the pigeons) "believed" it worked.

People who "believe in prayer" can be even more creative than pigeons. When they get a reinforcement (they prayed for rain, and it rained) they tell all their friends, over and over, as evidence for the validity of their faith, thus compounding the reinforcement.

When they pray for rain and it doesn't rain, they shrug their shoulders, tell themselves they must have done something else that displeased the God, and ignore the results, telling no one. In this way, they may develop "religious behavior" as regards prayer even more rapidly than pigeons on a fixed feeding schedule.

All of this, of course, ignores the cases where what the person praying does has some connection with the result obtained. Two heart attack victims are advised by their physicians to cut down on fat. One, who does not pray, quickly falls off the wagon and has a second heart attack. The other, who prays to God six times a day to help him eat less fat, eats less fat, and is far less likely to have a recurrent heart attack. Do we give the credit to God? Or, do we recognize that in the case of the prayer, the intention to cut down on fat and the feeling of being accountable to a God was instrumental?

Prayer works! It may not work in the ways envisioned (intervention of God) and it may not work in all circumstances (praying that an asteroid will not strike one's house, as if the prayer could make any difference in that), but on the whole, prayer works. It may work best for those who "fear God", since they may virtually be in terror that they will antagonize Him. It may work less effectively for those who regard it as an affirmation, because they may more easily ignore the prayer, and feel less accountable to an authority that might be watching them.

So what are we secular Humanists to do about this?

Simply let those who pray, pray, and ask ourselves if we have an equivalent mental strategy to do at least as well as those who believe that God will answer their prayers!

Are we at a disadvantage in this? Not really! At least, we do not wander forward in a state of confusion as to whether or not "prayer works". From our point of view, we know what's going on, and how to make use of it, if we have the will and the focus.

What more could we ask, than that?