Make sure that your standards of evidence are as high as you would expect your brain surgeon's standards of evidence to be if they had to diagnose a problem in your brain and operate on you. If they said that they have a book from a few thousand years ago that gives them all the answers and that you just have to have faith that it will work...find a different surgeon. That tends to be the dividing line between what people espouse to believe, and what people ACTUALLY believe in practice. When it actually becomes real and comes time to put your beliefs to the test, you tend to see a drastic change in how their reasoning changes.
Honestly, think about it. If somebody truly believes that prayers are answered and that god is in control and that there is no reason to be afraid, march them onto a busy interstate at rush hour. Tell them to pray for safe passage across the road. Have them close their eyes and start walking to the other side. Do this 1000 times, or 100,000 times. How many would do it? How many would actually make it to the other side alive? How many would be badly injured? How many would be killed? You see, people espouse that prayer works and that god has a plan for them, but when it comes time to put that to the test in a fashion that ACTUALLY affects them on a large scale, they drop those beliefs in a second. Why? Because now it just got real. You can no longer hide behind a philosophical approach and faulty ideas just because you're trying to win an argument. Now you are truly testing the effectiveness of your ideas, and you doubt them because even the person who espouses absolute confidence in the idea that prayer works knows deep down that they are probably wrong. Even take it to a less violent end with the experiment. Get a prayer group together, hell, get the entire world together to pray that an amputee's leg will grow back. Pray for as long as you need with as many people as you need. I guarantee you that the leg will never grow back. God only answers your prayers mysteriously when there is already a chance of a real world reason for the problem being solved. Praying for cancer to go away and it goes into natural remission, or cancer treatments actually working. Praying for the children to not starve to death in a village that has help already on the way. Praying that you can pass a test in chemistry class that you didn't study for and you happen to guess a lot of the right answers. This is the fringe where prayer operates.
Religion is the only area of our lives that we allow bad evidence to dominate the discourse. Primarily because whether it works or not is completely irrelevant to our lives. Imagine how much Fraulein Fritzl must have prayed. Imagine how she cried out to god the entire time she was being raped in her father's basement, day after day. When no other human agents knew about this happening, and god was the only entity that knew about it and had the power to stop it, he remained silent. He did nothing. He did not intervene, he did not stop the atrocious acts, he did not ease the suffering of this girl in any way. He didn't even offer her a divine way out. It came to an end from purely naturalistic means. God watched that happen for twenty four years with folded arms. While she put her faith to the test and prayed and prayed and prayed with no answer. This is the reason why prayer has the strongest following when it deals with matters of little or distant importance as listed in the previous paragraph. When it really matters, when the chips are down, when you really need prayers to be answered, they mysteriously are still only answered in the cold and calculated statistical probability of the system they affect.
Honestly, think about it. If somebody truly believes that prayers are answered and that god is in control and that there is no reason to be afraid, march them onto a busy interstate at rush hour. Tell them to pray for safe passage across the road. Have them close their eyes and start walking to the other side. Do this 1000 times, or 100,000 times. How many would do it? How many would actually make it to the other side alive? How many would be badly injured? How many would be killed? You see, people espouse that prayer works and that god has a plan for them, but when it comes time to put that to the test in a fashion that ACTUALLY affects them on a large scale, they drop those beliefs in a second. Why? Because now it just got real. You can no longer hide behind a philosophical approach and faulty ideas just because you're trying to win an argument. Now you are truly testing the effectiveness of your ideas, and you doubt them because even the person who espouses absolute confidence in the idea that prayer works knows deep down that they are probably wrong. Even take it to a less violent end with the experiment. Get a prayer group together, hell, get the entire world together to pray that an amputee's leg will grow back. Pray for as long as you need with as many people as you need. I guarantee you that the leg will never grow back. God only answers your prayers mysteriously when there is already a chance of a real world reason for the problem being solved. Praying for cancer to go away and it goes into natural remission, or cancer treatments actually working. Praying for the children to not starve to death in a village that has help already on the way. Praying that you can pass a test in chemistry class that you didn't study for and you happen to guess a lot of the right answers. This is the fringe where prayer operates.
Religion is the only area of our lives that we allow bad evidence to dominate the discourse. Primarily because whether it works or not is completely irrelevant to our lives. Imagine how much Fraulein Fritzl must have prayed. Imagine how she cried out to god the entire time she was being raped in her father's basement, day after day. When no other human agents knew about this happening, and god was the only entity that knew about it and had the power to stop it, he remained silent. He did nothing. He did not intervene, he did not stop the atrocious acts, he did not ease the suffering of this girl in any way. He didn't even offer her a divine way out. It came to an end from purely naturalistic means. God watched that happen for twenty four years with folded arms. While she put her faith to the test and prayed and prayed and prayed with no answer. This is the reason why prayer has the strongest following when it deals with matters of little or distant importance as listed in the previous paragraph. When it really matters, when the chips are down, when you really need prayers to be answered, they mysteriously are still only answered in the cold and calculated statistical probability of the system they affect.
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