The worst thing about free speech, is that people can bullshit at the expense of the truth. And when they do it on the Internet, there is almost no accountability at all. What a shame that simply banning somebody like grey_the_angel would be so much easier than convincing other people to shun his poor reasoning, and yet would accomplish so comparatively little. In this battle for hearts and minds—not merely at the Compendium, mind you, but throughout our lives—sometimes it seems as though people we are battling against are also the people on whose behalf we are battling in the first place.
You’ve made it evident how thoroughly you believe yourself, Grey. You’re not trying to fool anybody…you’re honestly just trying to get your point out there, and win some hearts and minds—no different than me, here.
Except, you know…there’s that one little detail about you being hopelessly wrong.
its basically instinctual to have a faith. people have to believe into something. its be that way since before recorded history when we had sun gods and stuff.
Actually, most early religions seem to come about from people trying to explain things that occured in nature - notice how sun gods always have the duty of taking the sun across the sky, making sure it rose, making sure it set. Maybe they felt afterwards that they should be thankful for that, or even afraid of the sun disappearing or failing to rise or fall or shine (I imagine eclipses helped spread that idea a bit), which most likely led to the worship aspect, rather than any supposed "instinct."
...Just randomly posting my two cents.
actually, the earliest religions believed in the mother goddess that created the rest of the god. The most well know being mother gaia & chaos (darkness if you an idiot.)
but hell, I only took mythology in collage and had to study this. what would I know?
Rat is more or less correct: Religion as we know it evolved from mysticism. It was the quest of our ancestors to satisfy their innate curiosity about the basic nature of their world, and of themselves—a journey they pursued without the benefit of the advanced language to phrase ideas, and without the benefit of a scientific methodology with which to pursue empirical knowledge. Who can blame them for pursuing such deep philosophical understanding using the only primitive means that existed in those days: association, precedent, wishful thinking, and a hearty dose of imagination?
As people realized that mysticism could be used as a means of power and control, it did not take long for religion to appear in the world. And while a lot has chanced since the days of the early religious mystics, one thing that has not is people’s willingness to submit themselves and subject others to an ethereal authority who provides order and purpose against danger and uncertainty.
You may have taken a college class on mythology, Grey, but you did not learn anything beyond what you were told. Questioning someone as coherent as Rat with nothing but a few meaningless pieces of trivia and the presumption that your meager offering represents a significant intelligence…this goes beyond mere audacity. You don’t even realize your audaciousness; you’re a classic example of everything that is wrong with faith-based thinking, and religion itself.
It almost always occur. At some point, [atheists] curse/denounce a religous figure randomly.
Never mind that your own argument is entirely a random denunciation of “atheists.” Even ignoring your hypocrisy, it is worth reiterating that the practitioners of a religion
are that religion. Influential religious figures are focal points for the vitality and proliferation of their religion, and of a faith-based worldview in general. Denouncing them is an important part of someday destroying religion’s tyrannical hold on the human race. But you weren’t really thinking about any of that, were you? I imagine you were only trying to link the act of denouncing a religious person to your stereotype of atheists as spiteful, petty, and hate-filled.
also, Those without faith have, in study, been shown to have a worse luck then those who do.
Assuming that “study” even exists, either it is scientifically bogus or you are grossly misrepresenting it. “Luck” is a popular concept in the social sphere, but has no scientific legitimacy. We speak of statistical probabilities, not luck. Such a term has no testable definition, and the variables in such an experiment could not be isolated until “faith” were also to be quantifiably defined.
You’re making up facts to suit your agenda. It reminds me of the old wisdom that, when faced with a challenge, the ordinary person will spend far greater energy defending his or her social standing, while the extraordinary person will actually engage the challenge. In your case, it means you are too busy defending what you already believe to actually consider the issue at hand. As Chibi pointed out earlier, you’ve already convinced yourself, and your actions here are meant solely to go on convincing yourself and anybody else who will listen. That’s why I’m here at all—not to argue with you, but to expose you as somebody not to be believed.
infact, a recent study (look what I can magically pull out of my absurbness!) shows that people wanting to get pregant had 50% higher sucess rate with prayer then those without. Those who recieved pray while ill had a higher recovery rate, as well.
To support your claim, you cite at the end of your post this website:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/cardiac.htmlHowever, that very website includes this interesting tidbit:
It doesn’t take long to undercover the truth: Other Christians, just like you, are also more than happy to make up whatever facts they need in order to further their agenda.
The much-hyped Columbia University prayer study was flawed and suspicious from the start but now has been fatally minted with fraud. The first-named author doesn't respond to inquiries. The "lead" author said he didn't learn of the study until months after it was completed. And now the mysterious third author, indicted by a federal grand jury, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud. All his previous studies must now be questioned.
Courtesy of:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_5_28/ai_n6194238
So there we have it. Some flimflam religious types cook up a phony study that “proves” prayer has these beneficial medical effects on people. The traditional media give it some coverage, and religious organizations pick up on it and repeat it as truth thereafter. Meanwhile, the study is soon discredited, but by then the only people who are interested in hearing the truth are the ones who saw through that study right from the start. The damage is done. Indeed, here you are, years later, quoting it as though it were some valid piece of the sum of human knowledge.
But hey, its only a medical journal, it's all gotta be boogus shit I'm making up, right?
In this case, it wasn’t you who made up the study. But you still share some fault in passing along false information as though it were true. If only you could conceive of science as a vehicle to further human understanding, rather than a tool to tell you what you want to hear! If only!
http://home.att.net/~stpaulparkucc/id47.htm
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/cardiac.html
http://www.mercola.com/article/prayer/dossey.htm
http://www.sptimes.com/News/040101/TampaBay/Prayer_makes_medical_.shtml
http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/ppv.php?id=cqresrre2005011400
http://www.spiritualdisciplines.org/medstudy.html
http://www.ishpssb.org/ocs/viewpaper.php?id=53&print=1
We’ve already debunked one of your links. Let’s talk about some of the others, since you were so kind to provide us with the means of your undoing.
Medical Studies on Prayer:Can You Pray Your Way to Health?http://home.att.net/~stpaulparkucc/id47.htmThis bright-red webpage is typical of religious fundamentalists who try to prove that their beliefs have scientific credibility by taking a tiny shard of real science that doesn’t actually prove their point, but, rather, fails to completely
disprove their point, and then heralding that dubious honor as a victory by subtly mixing tiny bits of scientifically relevant material in with a whole bunch of meaningless discussion. Here is the only scientifically relevant quote from the entire page:
Overall, even most science-and-faith researchers consider the effects of intercessory prayer to be weak, at best. … [Intercessory prayer] could be psychological in origin--having someone take the time to touch you and pray on your behalf makes you feel better about life, thus lessening pain. But psychological effects can be just as real as physical effects, and in this case prayer appears to lead to tangible benefits.
So, prayer might help some people—namely, those who already believe in the power of prayer—to achieve a more positive mindset, which could in turn affect their health in a beneficial way. Now
that is a testable hypothesis. But it doesn’t have anything to do with prayer itself. It only establishes the premise that, if people do believe that prayer can make a difference, then knowing that they are being prayed for might help them to heal themselves. It isn’t hard to see that the prayer itself is meaningless; it could be replaced with any neutral activity that people believe will have a beneficial effect on them.
And that’s it. That’s the whole scientific value of that entire, hard-to-read site. Indeed, read the rest of the site, and you will see that they themselves admit what I have just said, with the only difference being that they tacitly endorse prayer as being of holy value anyway:
Why could prayer help you when you pray for yourself but not help others when you pray for them? Intercessory prayer could only function via mystical power, but prayer for the self might have an effect similar to meditation, endorsed in both secular and spiritual theories of healing. The "answers" that come from prayer might be divinely provided, or reflect a person's own contemplative understanding of his or her condition. The nonsectarian form of prayer, which is akin to meditation and used for stress reduction, has long been recognized by clinicians to improve one's sense of well-being.
Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, has supposed that prayer helps recovery from illness and depression by focusing the mind on things to be grateful for in life. Studies by Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard University have shown that inducing a relaxed state of mind is good both for health and immune-system response. Prayer might work partly in this way. Says Koenig, "I view the benefits of prayer mainly as psychological or social, not as a supernatural effect, though of course the research can't rule that out. All the research can show is that prayer sometimes really does confer benefits."
Put another way: Lack of strong evidence for intercessory prayer seems to argue against standard ideas about the supernatural as a commanding force that intervenes to cure. Yet the presence of evidence for effects of prayer on the self seems to argue that we would be foolish to assume away faith.
Prayer and Medical Sciencehttp://www.mercola.com/article/prayer/dossey.htmThis website is painful, not on the eye but on the brain. It isn’t so much an argument in favor of prayer so much as a bait-and-switch tactic by religious fundamentalists who want to legitimize prayer as a valuable medical tool by attacking other kinds of medicine as though there were some zero-some equivalence, packing the intellectual pond with red herrings that detract from the matter at hand, drowning out the scarcity of any real supporting science with a glut of extraneous and completely irrelevant discussion, and, in general, insulting the intelligence of anybody reading their article.
Just look at one little example of the drivel you made me read through, Grey:
Richard Smith,15 editor of the British Medical Journal, agrees, stating, "only about 15% of medical interventions are supported by solid scientific evidence. . . . This is partly because only 1% of the articles in medical journals are scientifically sound and partly because many treatments have not been assessed at all."
And David A. Grimes16 of the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine states, "much, if not most, of contemporary medical practice still lacks a scientific foundation."
These observations suggest that a double standard is perhaps being applied to prayer research, according to which levels of proof are demanded that may not be required of conventional therapies-the "rubber ruler," the raising of the bar, the ever-lengthening playing field.17
Do serious scientists really believe that the effects of intercessory prayer are fantasy, as several letter writers imply? No doubt some do.
But in a recent survey18 of the spiritual beliefs of American scientists, 39% of biologists, physicists, and mathematicians said they not only believed in God, but in a god who answers prayers.
The highest rate of belief was found in the field of mathematics, which is generally considered the most precise of all the sciences. Many distinguished scientists favor prayer. A long list of individuals, including Nobelists, who have been cordial to consciousness-related events, such as distant, intercessory prayer, has been assembled by philosopher David Griffin.
Not even
you could have made it through that entire article, and you actually believe in their premise! The whole article is bunk. I could not find a single statement of scientific relevance in the whole thing.
Prayer Makes Medical Advanceshttp://www.sptimes.com/News/040101/TampaBay/Prayer_makes_medical_.shtmlWhy do I get the feeling you just googled something like “prayer effects medicine,” and then simply copy-and-pasted the first seven links you found? Ugh! Let’s get on with it. The major support in this article for the power of prayer is that people believe prayer works:
A Time magazine poll found 82 percent of Americans believe in the healing power of prayer. In another study Larson cited, 79 percent of hospital patients said they believed faith and spirituality can help people, 56 percent believed it had helped them recover and 63 percent said doctors should talk to patients about this it.
Just 10 percent of doctors surveyed had done so, however.
So 82 percent of Americans believe in the healing power of prayer? Good for them. I’ve got another statistic for you: Only 24 percent of Americans can name two or more Supreme Court justices. Being in the majority doesn’t make you right. And even if we
were to assume that it did, look at that statistic for doctors: Only ten percent talked about prayer with their patients. You know…“doctors.” The people who actually know something about medicine.
The Rev. Mack Sigmon, senior minister at Peace Memorial Presbyterian Church in downtown Clearwater, was not surprised.
He frequently finds that parishioners, especially the elderly and seriously ill, want their doctors to understand the importance of their faith, but doctors do not. Patients such as Faith McKiernan say they don't understand how anyone could divorce the two. She credits her faith in God, as well as regular prayer, for helping her battle breast cancer. She was diagnosed around Thanksgiving, had surgery and gets weekly chemotherapy from Goldenfarb. Right now, her prognosis appears good.
I’d like to see how well Ms. McKiernan would fare if she were to renounce her surgery and chemotherapy, and focus all her energy on prayer and being prayed to.
There’s a reason, Grey, why religion has lost so much ground in modern times:
It doesn’t work! People prayed and chanted spells and poured holy oils for thousands of years, and to no avail! But scientific medicine has yielded palpable treasures of human health beyond the wildest dreams of any shaman or pastor.
You are dishonorably stealing the credit from real medicine and attributing it to your cockamamie religious values.
Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayerhttp://www.spiritualdisciplines.org/medstudy.htmlI see you saved the best for last. You obviously did not bother to read this article, either. All this time we have entertained the notion that religious fundamentalists want science to back up their claims. Many of them do…but many of them don’t. They’ve been discredited and castigated so many times by scientific discovery that they have developed an aversion to it, which fits well into the Christian contempt for knowledge and education. This website which you offered as proof of the power of prayer actually consists of people who believe that science has no authority whatsoever to make that judgment:
As they tried to press prayer into a scientifically measurable form, the researchers turned it into something other than biblical prayer. For instance, the intercessors were told that while they might otherwise pray as they wanted for each anonymous patient, a particular phrase had to be prayed in every prayer, exactly as given by the scientists. Also, the prayers were to be offered only for a two-week period. Specific medical results had to be recognized, and within a thirty-day window. Moreover, only medical results were considered. That prayer might be answered dramatically, but in ways other than the researchers were tabulating, was meaningless and irrelevant in this study.
Scientific investigations of prayer always fail to recognize that prayer is based upon a relationship, a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And relationships cannot properly be evaluated by scientific methods.
Imagine scientists attempting to quantify a father's love for a child based upon the percentage of the child's requests that the father granted. If the child received what if asked for 51% of the time, would that prove that making requests of the father "worked"? How about 49%? Who determines the minimum percentage necessary for successful asking? And what if the child made unwise requests, causing the percentage to fall precipitously? Would that be evidence disproving the effectiveness of asking? What if the child was asking for something while in disobedience to the father? What if the child was asking of someone who was not even his father?
The scientists apparently presumed that if prayer indeed "works," then the prayers of everyone in the three groups who were asked to pray would be answered because they were members of churches or religious communities. Such presumption, however, divorces prayer from the Gospel of Christ which establishes the relationship between any individual and a prayer—hearing God. These scientists—and, for that matter, most other folks—do not realize that prayers are not heard because of people's religious activities or church membership, but because of what Jesus has done through His life, death, and resurrection (John 14:6; Hebrews 10:19-22). And the Bible makes plain that only those who come to God in prayer through Jesus can expect to have their prayers heard. Not even "the most scientifically rigorous investigation" can isolate and evaluate prayer apart from the dynamics of this spiritual relationship upon which prayer is predicated.
Jesus Himself gives us another reason to be skeptical of efforts to subject the supernatural to the researcher's computer or the scientist's microscope. In His temptation experience, Jesus quoted from the Old Testament to Satan and said, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test" (Matthew 4:7). This means it is wrong for the creature to ever say "Prove it!" to his Creator. God has provided ample evidence of His existence, character, and power for us to believe Him and love Him. In light of His abundant self-revelation to us through creation, Christ, and the Bible, we should not challenge God or imply that we need more proof before we can trust and obey Him. And while Jesus was not referring to scientific evaluations of prayer, such studies push very close to putting God to the test.
Finally, it really doesn't matter what studies like these conclude. Whether science seems to support the effectiveness of prayer or to contradict it (and studies have supported, and will continue to support, both sides), Christians do not govern their prayer lives according to the latest scientific experiments. We pray because we have come to know God through Jesus Christ. His Spirit gives us the desire to pray ("Abba! Father!", Gal. 4:6), creating in us a new heavenward orientation that's expressed in frequent communication with our Father. Moreover, we pray because God commands us to pray, and we do not submit the will of God for scientific approval. True Christians will "pray without ceasing" (1 Thess. 5:17), whether secular research thinks it beneficial or not.
You’re beaten, Grey. You fell victim to the most basic trick in the book: You laid your cards on the table for all to see, but in so doing you revealed how weak your hand truly is. By providing these links you have given yourself the opportunity to be debunked not only from the scientific perspective but from the hard-line fundamentalist perspective too. You’ve been outflanked!
Ah…but you’d rather fight to the bitter end, I think:
Athiest also have higher death rates, by the way.
Go ahead…give us some more links. By all means! Or I can save you the trouble and provide one of my own:
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/healthier.htmlThere also more likely to do drugs, develop alcoholism, and get arrested.
No, they are not. In fact, just the opposite. Whoever told you this was lying, either deliberately or by virtue of ignorance. In addition to having fewer substance abuse issues, fewer psychological problems, and fewer run-ins with the law, nonreligious people—atheists included—are much more likely than their religious counterparts to be responsible in their recreational consumption of drugs and alcohol, more likely to be of sound mental health, more likely to be knowledgeable of the law and law-abiding, more likely to be artistically gifted or scientifically talented, more likely to be successful professionally, more likely to have a higher education, much more likely to be satisfied with their lives, more likely to have a happy marriage, more likely to stay married, much more likely to have a much higher intelligence, more likely to contribute to their society in positive and charitable ways, more likely to be left-handed, more likely to win the Nobel Prize, more likely to win swimsuit contests than their religious counterparts, and so on and so forth. And nonreligious people achieve all of this despite being oppressed by religious tyrants everywhere in the world.
That’s the benefit of controlling one’s own mind instead of being religious.
