When you pray, it's usually because you have a belief that when you speak words out of your mouth, this will alter the physical world to your advantage. My question to you is this: how do your prayers change physical properties. What is the exact process of change?
When you pray, you believe that this 'prayer' will change the world we live in. And by many accounts of peoples' belief in this magical process, this speaking of breath somehow alters the physical world.
So let's test this process. Let's see if it really is what you think it is.
1. Get a glass of water. Pour water into the glass until it is half full. Now get a magic marker, and write a letter P on the glass. Now for 1 week, pray for that glass of water to go to a third world country where they do not have enough clean water to drink. What happens to the glass of water?
2. For the next experiment, buy a steak from a grocery store, sams has some decent meat. Take that meat home and let it sit out for 1 month in a garbage bin (this is to avoid the smell). Now, with you sitting on your knees over the meat, pray to your god that the meat will become edible. Now eat the meat. What happens?
Make sure to carefully record the words that you breathed from your lungs and the corresponding physical alterations to the glass of water and the rotten meat. What changed? Did anything change at all?
If prayer is not used for this type of thing, why not? Why is prayer limited to things that cannot be measured? If someone tells you to do something, and then says the the something you do is good, but cannot be measured in any physical way, does that raise some alarms in your head as to the veracity of this process?
Here is a thought experiment:
1. Imagine a town of 1000 people. In that town, there is 1 homeless person that is starving. The 1000 people in the town decide to do something. They decide to pray that the man be full and have nourishment. There are no other people in this town but the 1001. No one else is there. If those 1000 people continue to pray for 30 days, but take no action whatsoever (because this is the point of prayer, to get one's god to act on their behalf). What will happen to that 1 homeless man?
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Well OF COURSE God wouldn't answer those prayers. Then what on earth would FAITH be for if his existence and intervention could be measured and observed logically.
ReplyDeleteBesides, God is too busy helping people find their missing keys to help that one homeless man in your third example. :)
That is the question then, isn't it. If god does not help that man, then how does he get helped? He does not. So what are we to conclude? That the prayer does not 'work'. And that God does not exist.
ReplyDeleteThis very same circumstance gets played out in our reality over and over and over. A man in another country in a distant land is starving to death. We can breath words from our lips all day, but if no one acts, then that man will die.
That is reality.
The problem with FAITH is that it only works if you suspend the need for evidence. Any you only suspend the need for evidence if you do not need to think for yourself. If you're not thinking for yourself, who is thinking for you?
It places an unreasonable burden on people. And it also sets up a very real problem - without evidence, all beliefs are possible. This is bad because it does not allow for any common ground between people. Without common ground, we usually end up settling our differences with force.
Also, without evidence, unreasonable beliefs turn people into fanatics. Fanatics are disconnected to this reality, and they live in a reality entirely devoid of evidence, which makes them extreme.
Extreme is bad, mmmkay.
"We can breath words from our lips all day, but if no one acts, then that man will die. "
ReplyDeleteVery true.