The 3rd of May
April 16th, 2007 by 
drunkentune
We want to make a public statement about how nonreligious people can observe the so-called National Day of Prayer, which we have renamed Gift of Life Day… So on that day, we atheists will be engaging in action that we can prove scientifically has real-life impact on our fellow citizens. (Brian Sapient of The Rational Response Squad)
I’d love to see both atheists and Christians (Matthew 26:28“This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”) get behind this: Donate blood on May 3rd!
There are four options you can take on this day: (1) Participate in The National Day of Prayer, which is scientifically provenThe Templeton Foundation spent ten years and $2.4 million, only to grasp the obvious: “prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery.” (The New York Times 3/31/2006) to be ineffective“Even in the best studies, the evidence of an association between religion, spirituality, and health is weak and inconsistent. … [I]t is premature to promote faith and religion as adjunctive medical treatments.” (Lancet, 2/20/1999), something I personally think is a waste of time; (2) Give blood, which saves lives; (3) Spend the morning in prayer or quiet meditation, then go out and give some blood; (4) Do nothing, go to work, come home, watch TV, then go to sleep, all this time living in apathy.
I suggest taking option #2.
Posted in current issues | 
April 16th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll be on a plane that day, so might have to take a rain check (though a NPR interview this week made me think about banning air travel [here]). I haven’t given blood in some time after traveling to a developing country disqualified me. You’re encouragment has made me think about checking to see if I can give again.
April 17th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I am excluded from giving blood on the grounds that I am a vampire. (Ok, that was a downright fib.)
It is a great idea.
April 17th, 2007 at 1:49 am
#3 - Praying and then giving blood is what I choose. #2 - giving blood for saving meaningless lives makes no sense!
April 17th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Jim,
I usually look for the most favorable reading of a comment, but yours confuses me a great deal. Each possible reading is worse than the last: ‘giving blood for saving meaningless lives makes no sense‘?
There is: (1) Prayer is necessary, a requirement to being a good citizen,(2) Without religious ritual, life is meaningless, (3) Without professing belief in a god, there is no meaning to life. Is there a reading I am missing? I have tried to understand what you are saying.
I give blood as often as I can. I am bloodtype O-, so I am a universal doner. If a child living in the inner city is struck by a stray bullet, she deserves the best care possible — and this includes transfusions of blood; if a woman is struck by a car and is bleeding internally, she deserves treatment; if a convicted felon is stabbed in the chest, he too deserves treatment. These are not meaningless lives, and giving a part of ourselves to someone in need is not meaningless.
April 17th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Your citation from Lancet in 1999 could be brought into question by a more recent article: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/524578_4
It seems the little evidence that we have seems to indicate that prayer by remote, uninvolved strangers does NOT influence health or recovery from sickness. But, there seems to be a positive effect on those who actually practice religion and prayer upon their health and well-being. I think these National Day of Whatever’s are kind of silly, though, they are more political creampuffs than anything substantial, and there are so many, it is hard to keep track. My view is that if you want to ignore the National Day of Honoring the Merchant Marine, that’s OK, but hardly a reason to give blood or do anything else noble. We ought to do what we can for one another regardless of the publicity.
April 17th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Ed,
I.
I think (perhaps wrongly) that this is a far more subtle form of equivocation than ‘You atheists practice a form of faith too.’ Yes, plenty of studies published in peer-reviewed journals seem to support the notion that personal prayer (i.e. a form of meditation and a positive outlook) is beneficial. But that isn’t what interests me. We’ve moved from an absurd, inane notion that many people believe is true (that of intercessory prayer) to a far more downgraded form. We’ve gone from, in essence, testing for the existence of miracles to a far more banal subject, namely emotional states, meditation, calmness, &c.
If by accepting the lesser premise, it looks like this supports the larger premise while in fact they have nothing to do with each other. We have to be very clear that there are two different stories being told. One is supernatural; the other is not. Let’s not conflate the two.
Yet, even then, I don’t trust these studies that support the positive effects of prayer.
II.
Richard P. Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine gives an informative lecture on the poor methodologies used in pro-prayer studies here.
III.
It might not have to do with religion, but stress-handling. Yet, even then, even if we disregard that using prayer is statistically negligible and bad science, this is not a critique of religion; it’s an effort to protect religion from trivialization. (See this excellent paper from Medscape.) Once religious ritual is reduced to a scientific answer, that of stress-management or what have you, then it’s a purely secular answer — with a secular solution: go take some yoga or pilates classes.
April 18th, 2007 at 12:27 am
I suppose that if I keep going to church, experience a miraculous healing event, and live 2 years longer than I otherwise would have, that would be nice. I also suppose that if I keep going to church, experience stress reduction, a sense of hope, good music, and so on, and live 2 years longer than I otherwise would have, that would be equally nice. I suppose if I decided to stop attending church because I’ve never experienced a direct, personal, unequivocal encounter with God, and lived my normal lifespan, that would not be as nice. Yoga and pilates is not a fair comparison, those entail physical exercise, which the meta-analysis I quoted showed had an even more positive effect on lifespan. Perhaps someone ought to study whether attending lectures by guys like Sloan or Dawkins every week increases lifespan by 2 years. If that happens, perhaps one would end up wishing that it didn’t after all, due to the boredom engendered!!!
April 18th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Ed,
The most obvious confounder is that as a member of a church’s health fails, they are able to attend church less. I suggest you read this as well.
Also, check out the conclusion: ‘Weekly attendance at religious services accounts for an additional 2 to 3 life-years compared with 3 to 5 life-years for physical exercise and 2.5 to 3.5 life-years for statin-type agents. (Bold added)’
Furthermore, I don’t trust anything that’s been financed by the John Templeton Foundation. Just like I don’t trust studies financed by Big Tobacco. And why on earth does the study focus on monetary savings?
April 18th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Boy, it almost sounds like your fellow Cavanaugh sees natural selection as favoring religious tendencies: “They outbreed the rest of us; they live longer; they’re better at nurturing the necessary survival mechanisms in their young; they’re so much more numerous it’s not even worth discussing—by any measure, the religious are the big winners in the natural selection lottery.” Being a Christian and accepting evolutionary theory, he sure makes me feel better. Note that the financing of the Hall study I referred to is likely irrelevent to its findings. It was a meta-analysis, so it did no new data collection, it merely brought together the existing studies in aggregate.
April 18th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Ed,
I think he’s being a bit tongue-in-cheek about that. It’s true, though, that secular countries have a birth rate somewhere around 2.1, plenty of religious folk continue to have many, many children.
But let’s stay on topic here. To recap: (1) we’ve moved from talking about the supernatural to the natural; (2) there are huge confounders in the studies that claim church attendance is beneficial; (3) these studies also routinely follow a poor methodology; (4) a meta-analysis of studies that are cicumspect gives a useless outcome.
Furthermore, doctors can’t recommend that people go to church. Think of this for a minute: married people live far longer and healthier lives than unmarried people. Should doctors recommend that people go out and get married?
I think it’s time we send a message on May 3rd: doing something genuinely productive about a problem is far more effective than willing it to be fixed.
April 18th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Oh, I’m all in favor of folks giving blood, but prayer is not as utterly futile as your commentary suggests. See http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/4525066.html . I especially like this part: “Beyond crime and delinquency, in a 1996 synopsis of faith factor research, Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation summarized studies suggesting that religion enhances family stability (the family that prays together is indeed more likely to stay together), improves health, reduces adolescent sexual activities and teenage pregnancies, cuts alcohol and drug abuse, and reinforces other measures of social stability.” Perhaps we ought suggest people get married, as well, rather than stay unmarried in more fickle commitment, but not as a demand or compulsion.
April 18th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
I.
Ah! The Heritage Foundation founded by Joseph Coors and Paul Weyrich? Weyrich has some nice connections to The Moral Majority, National Empowerment TV, and The Council for National Policy; Coors is also a member of the Council for National Policy (and The Heritage Foundation’s president, Edwin Fuelner Jr., is a member too), as well with helping to fund the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Their credibility to me (along with other right-wing theocrats) on any issue, along with anything they have any association with, is close to null.
That is, unless there’s anything supporting their policies from Nature, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, or the BMJ…
II.
If religious commitment really ‘improves health, reduces adolescent sexual activities and teenage pregnancies, cuts alcohol and drug abuse, and reinforces other measures of social stability’ then doctors should be recommending this as a way to improve health. The government, NGO’s, the UN, the WHO — they should all obviously be behind this!
But isn’t it just like Pascal’s Wager? How can someone already not part of a religious community possibly turn religious for health benefits? I’ll stick with running, since the very study you linked to shows that exercise is better and cheaper in the long-run than going to church. If being an atheist meant you had a higher IQ (or, for that matter, a Jew), would you become an atheist or a Jew? Don’t you want to be smarter and successful? So why aren’t you an atheist or a Jew?
Don’t believe everything you think.
III.
Isn’t there a distinction between prayer and religious attendence we’re missing? Even I on occasion still go to synagogue! So prayer, trying to communicate with a supernatural power, to will the universe to act in such-and-such-a-way, is just silly to me. Some people don’t think it’s silly to pray. It might make them feel good, give them a warm feeling in their stomach, but they just don’t have any evidence that it helps others. Yet, why are people having a National Day of Prayer when it’s so silly? Why, when all the evidence says that prayer won’t solve our problems? There are only otiose explanations for this. A teenager giving blood for the first time does far more for humankind than every single prayer for world peace.
April 19th, 2007 at 12:01 am
This reference http://www.aafp.org/afp/20060415/editorials.html includes a statement that prior to 2000, about 1200 studies were done relating religious variables to health. Not exactly a field only dominated by theocrats, I’d say, that is a lot of research. I couldn’t hope to master its content without a couple of years of further study. Interestingly, the article continues to tell that religious attendance is associated with 7 years increased life expectency for whites in the US and 14 years for blacks. This is before removing confounds, which the earlier meta-analysis attempted to do and found the range more like 2-3 years. So, maybe it isn’t a completely silly idea that just maybe, a prominent religious activity that is non-sectarian like prayer could have a place of honor among the pantheon of other “National Day of ____”.
April 19th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Why would people pray to live longer if they believe they are going to god?
That never made sense to me. Why concern yourself with the supposed possibility that prayer increases your lifepsan by so many years, if the option is heaven with god?
It doesn’t make sense.
April 19th, 2007 at 10:02 am
Paul addressed this in one of his letters. His perspective was that, of course, he longed to be with the Lord in heaven. But, he felt a desire to remain with the people here on earth, to be part of the community. The faith strongly emphasizes the sense of community and that is a motivation to stay here on earth, rather than die young.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Obviously, my perspective isn’t the same as Paul’s.
April 19th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
beep, of course. And I hope you differ from Paul by having a long, full life that isn’t cut short by persecution or illness, or characterized by great suffering.
April 19th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
I.
I suggest looking at the link I provided in Comment#4. Here’s a short excerpt:
Theocrats? No. It’s called misrepresentation. Furthermore, I don’t want to conflate the two: think tanks that push an agenda are not highly-respected scientific journals; The Templeton Foundation’s stated goal is to reintegrate religious faith into modern life by promoting ‘clinical research into the relationship between spirituality and health and documenting the positive medical aspects of spiritual practice.’ I find it interesting, to say the least, that they are only interested in research that shows a positive link between religion and health.
The research projects of Koenig, Benson, Larson, Cohen, George, and McCullough have all been beneficiaries of Templeton Foundation grants. Koenig and Benson are also on the faculty of Templeton’s Spirituality and Healing in Medicine course, and on Templeton’s Board of Advisors. David Larson is not only on Templeton’s faculty, but is the president of the National Institute for Healthcare Research (NIHR), which is funded by Templeton at approximately $3 to 4 million per year. And Michael McCullough is the research director at NIHR. I don’t trust them to be impartial on the subject. If JAMA, or the BMJ published studies in favor of religious attendance or prayer, I’d be interested.
Yet, as George Lundberg MD, former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (why, I seem to have found something from JAMA!), said, ‘Evidence of religious faith producing healing is anecdotal only… In the past 15 years, not one of the articles submitted to the journal describing the direct effects of spirituality, prayer or church attendance on staying well or getting well has survived the journal’s peer review process.’
If these studies were instead opinion pieces, pet theories, that I could be behind. It would be interesting. It would spark some debate. But with a history of fraud, I’m turned off to their notions; of course thinking good thoughts as opposed to bad thoughts is good, and it’s easy to see that it would be beneficial to someone’s health; of course studies show a correlation between church attendance and longevity, but that doesn’t mean there’s a causal factor, or that the studies aren’t flawed, statistically insignificant, with lack of controls, file-drawer problems, and outcome differences.
I can only suggest reading the following:
Richard Sloan, E. Bagiella, and T. Powell. 1999. “Religion, Spirituality, and Medicine,†The Lancet. Feb. 20, Vol. 353: 664–667
John T. Chibnall, Joseph M. Jeral, Michael Cerullo. 2001. “Experiments on Distant Intercessory Prayer.†Archives of Internal Medicine, Nov. 26, Vol. 161: 2529–2536.
II.
Yet, even if prayer genuinely helped longevity, just as marriage has been empirically demonstrated to do, let’s not just have a National Day of Prayer, but bring in the ‘Rev.’ Sun Myong Moon and perform mass marriages. Let’s have a National Day of Marriage!
If the government genuinely cares about having an intelligent and informed public, why doesn’t everyone become an atheist (or marry a Jew, so their kids will be wicked bright) and have a National Day of Getting Smart!
It’s obvious that doctors should have no business interfering with my private thoughts, nor your private actions.
III.
Still, I’m thinking that in the end this doesn’t benefit believers in the least. I think it’s a red herring. They’re left with a natural explanation that any doctor can prescribe: You’re suffering from depression? I suggest checking out this Hare Krishna pamphlet. Might I also suggest checking out Scientology or the Latter Day Saints? Their prayers are highly effective. In fact, it looks like after careful study Buddhists have the best mental and physical health improvements after prayer than all other world religions!
I’m wondering, if this thought experiment panned out, what you’d think. Do we want prayer reduced to a health fad?
What if careful study gave demonstrable evidence that practicing Buddhist meditation was far more effective than any other form of prayer?
Should we all become Buddhists, then?
April 20th, 2007 at 2:37 am
ed:
I would hope that for everyone, but hope isn’t going to a lot of good in reality, is it.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
drunkentune, it is interesting to see your reaction to the meta-analysis on religious practice and health. I just had a similar situation occur with my wife. Her parents were big vitamin supplement fans even back in the old days before it became big business. She was raised that way, and has been very fixed upon her belief that vitamin supplements are good for her and the kids. She has always been saddened when she found I did not share her enthusiasm, probably expecting to be a young widow. So, when I shared the recent meta-analysis that showed vitamin supplementation may not only be useless, but likely mildly harmful, she absolutely did not accept it. She’s still taking those vitamins and giving them to the kids.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
I think a more appropriate analogy would be people who think eating rocks help you live longer conducting either flawed or fraudulent studies on how eating rocks help you live longer. Did you read what George Lundberg (Comment#18) said?
My reaction to the meta-analysis is to call it useless. These studies on religious attendance do not take into account the problem that the more sick a person is, the less they are able to attend church. It’s a ‘chicken or the egg’ problem; nothing more. George Comstock of Johns Hopkins made this same mistake. To quote from Richard Sloan’s speech again:
I take a certain track: I focus on the premise (in this case, attending religious services or prayer are beneficial), on the results (recommending prayer or attending church), and see if they are true and desirable. I don’t think they are true, and even if they were true, are desirable for Christians. So, as I have been arguing, even if the premise was somehow true, we would stay away from it on both theological and secular ethical grounds. What will convince me is that both the premise is true and the results are positive for both theology (so that believers support this) and ethics (so that both non-believers and believers support this). I’m still wondering what your response to points (ii) and (iii) are.
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:18 pm
I gave my own opinion about this here.
April 22nd, 2007 at 9:51 pm
I don’t understand why someone needs a “prayer day” in the first place. It seems to suggest that not enough navel gazing is going on so let’s make a day exclusively for navel gazing.
I would however, be conducive to a “BBQ at the Beach Day” where some of the most enjoyable and beneficial navel gazing could occur.
April 22nd, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Frank,
While I disagree with you on almost everything under the sun, I’m glad we can agree on some things: ‘… I hope their blood drive is a success! Giving blood is important no matter what your religious background and I hope they do good.’
I give blood as often as I can; I wish more people would too.
That reminds me: you said, ‘[P]rayer doesn’t entail that God will always answer your prayers in the affirmative. He may say “no” to your request.’
Why is it that I often hear from Christians that God gives three answers to prayer: ‘Yes’, ‘no’, and ‘wait’? (Such examples can be seen at [1], [2], [3], 4], [5], [6], [7]…) Isn’t that implying that God doesn’t answer any prayers that don’t follow God’s plan? Isn’t prayer then a vapid act?
April 24th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Good point, drunkentune. There are several theological problems with an absolutized God and prayer. Probably the most problematic is the idea that if God has already planning every action of the universe, then isn’t prayer meaningless? Also, if God is omniscient, why would prayer be necessary?
There is currently a theological view called “open theism” [wiki] that sees God as experiencing time with humanity. In such a view, the future does not yet exist, even for God. His statements towards the future are statements of intent, which can be changed, but when unchanged are certain due to his power. This view is in contrast with the orthodox view posed by Augustine that God is outside of time, but may still offer promise to solve such situations.
Another view would relate to Jesus statement, “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” [Matthew 6:7-8 NIV]. This would seem to indicate that praying is not primarily about making requests and getting God to act by magical or ernest efforts. Instead, it seems to offer a parent-child view of prayer that could be best viewed as cooperative. What is commonly called the Lord’s Prayer is offered a few verses later and seems, in the way it is written, to be more of an act of alignment than a laundry list of requests.
I disagree with any interpretation that this means God knows our needs absolutely and plans our future inescapably or in such a way that our prayers are ineffective in changing his action, or why would Christ pray three times in the Garden for a different ending to his life? Was it just for meaningless show? Likewise, there is an important theological theme in the Bible of God changing his mind in response to prayer.
Again, here I see this all in context of relationship. God is powerful enough and yet sensitive enough for prayer to matter, but prayer is about relationship and not about magic. I do not think any data is given beyond the context of relationship, so all the absolutes that create the theological problems with prayer are created by speculation concerning definitions of God and his actions, mostly following the Hellenistic philosophical influence on theology.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
soulster,
That’s an interesting point. Rarely have I heard of theology that puts God in our timeframe, removing his omniscience. It gets around the contradiction inherent in characteristics of both a more orthodox view of omniscience and omnipotence (and omni-benevolence as well). It brings the concept of God back from the Greek philosophical concepts of an ‘unmoved mover’ or a ‘first cause’ to a being that is transcendent to human perception.
Of course, it’s pretty obvious that I think that’s false. I explained why I think that belief in such a being is unjustified while a tentative rejection is justified in Naturalism, pt. II. It belongs in metaphysics, but it’s still very novel and unconventional — something I am always open to hear from believers. Thanks for the info.
May 6th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
drunkentune asked me to continue our discussion at here (or by email). Since this topic seems the most appropriate one to bring that discussion to, I reply to his previous points below:
1. dt asks me to explain how prayer ‘feeds people’. I didn’t claim it did; this was his response to an anology I offered for how prayer indirectly contributes to saving lives. I will explain again: For some people prayer is part of a lifestyle that encourages productive behavior. Praying doesn’t directly save lives in the same way that fabbing screws and small tractor parts doesn’t directly feed people, but it is part of the social process that results in the fulfillment of that end.
2. dt says that giving blood works and prayer doesn’t. The ignored question here is, works for what? Prayer doesn’t spontaneously generate blood in people who need it. But lots of worthwhile activities don’t do that. Even if prayer isn’t part of the life-saving process, that doesn’t mean it’s useless (humans do lots of things that don’t save lives). Furthermore, praying does not render one unable to ever give blood ever again, even on the same day.
3. dt asks me to explain how RRS’s thinking is lazy. I already did, but to recap: It poses a false dilemma and fails to grasp key concepts of human action like marginal utility and division of labor.
4. Most of the people praying probably are stupid and intellectually lazy. But it would be improper to infer this just from the fact of their praying. Religionists may take any number of views of prayer, some of them fairly reasonable. Not all of them treat it as a magical quarter for a Cosmic Gumball Machine ala the blab-it-and-grab-it televangelists.
5. I’m sure a lot of Christians do pray on National Prayer Day just to appear more pious. I don’t really have a problem with that, just like I don’t have a problem with RRS making a PR stunt out of their blood drive.
6. I don’t care what RRS does.
May 6th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Ugh, I didn’t close the tag.
May 6th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
JOR,
Fixed! No need to worry. I’m glad you’ve stopped by for a bit. Reading over your comment I see that we agree on most of the subtle issues you raised (notably points 4, 5 & 6). I’m very interested in believers that take ‘fairly reasonable’ positions on prayer. They seem to be few and far between. Try as I might, perhaps it’s a problem of geography, but I keep running into the ‘blab-it-and-grab-it’ type (I love this phrase!). I’m always interested in hearing more reasoned and intelligent people; I hope it’s obvious why I invited you to continue our conversation here. I’ll respond to the other points when I get the chance.
As a brief (hah!) prelude to my response, I’d like to explain how someone like me, an atheist (although I’m loathe to use the word) sees prayer. Let’s begin by imagining that someone is in need of assistance. Their house could be on fire, they could be suffering from an illness or an injury, &c. What matters is that there is a real problem they face.
I.
Now, I see prayer as non-action; wishing something to be so. It is intense thought on a subject; perhaps it is a good thought, perhaps a bad thought. This doesn’t make prayer good or bad, since even if we assume that most prayers are positive, it’s still non-action. People’s prayers in churches and Las Vegas are both heartfelt and meaningful, but let’s disregard Vegas and prayers for material goods. Prayer can benefit or hinder social progress, but it’s not prayer itself that is social (I mean, wishing for the universe to be different, wanting it to be so, for long periods of time does little for dialogue). That’s not what interests me with prayer. It is clear that attending church is different from praying. Even I, a loudmouth atheist, go to synagogue at times; prayer can take place outside of a social setting; church can be without prayer. Prayer is just thinking, wishing, hoping it to be so.
I’ve worked with religious groups for a long time, and I don’t mind that they pray. But what matters is that they help others. They do what is right. I don’t mind if they spend their free time wishing or thinking really, really hard about making the world a better place (most people do this), but when a dog is on fire, prayer means nothing. I want to see them running as fast as they can to save the dog. Prayer doesn’t do that. When someone needs your help on a life-threatening matter, prayer doesn’t help. I want to see dedication to advancements in medicine and technology, along with quick and helpful applications of real-world solutions, not non-action. When someone is in danger, dangling from a cliff, prayer — non-action — is worthless. In fact, in these situations, prayer is impeding good moral actions.
But what difference is there in the immediacy of helping someone dangling from a cliff and someone in need of blood? Yes, there is the time to sit back, rest for a bit, contemplate, drink lemonade, wish for things to be different, but that’s just idle time to dick around before we do what is morally right: help someone in dire need.
Help? But prayer claims to do far more than wishing, hoping, thinking it to be so. Prayer isn’t some sort of pipe dream. So many people believe prayer helps! There is a greater belief that our thoughts can change reality by just thinking, by non-action.
Sadly, they don’t. I wish it were true, but it’s false advertising; it’s magical thinking; it’s selfish, boorish, but also highly praised by millions as an effective tool. I find that highly immoral. And it’s just flat-out untrue. Philosophy looks for truth (among other things); science look for answers to our problems; great works of art can inspire us. But that’s not prayer. Prayer is not philosphy, science or art. Prayer is willing the universe to change by thought alone. I’m not interested in bashing Christianity, there’s The Secret and other New Age systems of magical thinking as well. I am concerned with both what is good and what is true, and magical thinking is neither good nor true.
The dilemma is real and it matters. It’s not about giving blood vs. prayer, but doing what is right vs. doing nothing at all.
May 7th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
I picked up the ‘blab-it-and-grab-it’ phrase from other Christians. I thought it was funny too.
Prayer may be a non-action, depending on what you mean. I’m used to thinking of action as the conscious use of means to pursue ends. A non-action would be your heartbeat, or some motion you go through entirely by reflex. In that sense prayer is action; whether it is ill-considered action depends, I suppose, on what ends one is using it to pursue. But whatever prayer is, your examples of people praying during an immediate crisis in which other action is more useful seem to be strawmen. Either that or you are saying that every minute of every day one spends doing anything other than giving blood or dousing burning puppies is a waste. I don’t think this is true. People make decisions on the margins. Nobody has to make a decision whether to spend the rest of their life unceasingly pumping their veins out into a blood bank or on their knees talking to Whoever. They make decisions between discreet qualities and quantities at particular times and places.
“Prayer is just thinking, wishing, hoping…â€
Even so, one is going to act for the sake of the way one wishes things to be, not contrarywise. Better that people reflect on what they really want - even if imperfectly, through the medium of talking to a God that probably isn’t there.
May 7th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
JOR,
I can see how my examples of prayer vs. action look like straw men (or, as I like to call them, scarecrows), but they are intended as totally extreme, examples of how prayer doesn’t solve our problems. For instance, I can pray that my car won’t get stolen, but what’s going to really matter is that I locked my car. I can hope that I will win the lottery and live in luxury, but if I want to live a good life, I’m going to have to work at my job and save up a little. In these more banal examples, asking for a handout from the cosmos won’t solve our problems — or the problems of our loved ones. This request isn’t idealism. I’m all for striving for a better world. It’s asking for a supernatural being to solve our problems, take my cancer away, save my neighbor’s soul, make sure my car is locked when it’s not, help me win the lottery.
I hate to throw back the ’straw man’ blast so quickly, but I’m not talking about a dichotomy of saving lives vs. whatever, but of good, moral deeds vs. armchair requests for welfare from the universe, wishing wistfully that things were a bit different. The RRS (I know, neither of us care that much for them) makes a good point that ‘…atheists will be engaging in action that we can prove scientifically has real-life impact on our fellow citizens, (Brian Sapient of The Rational Response Squad)’ and by implication that prayer has no measurable impact on others.
There’s the common question among Christians: what gets you into heaven? Works or belief. Now, I consider someone to be morally good if they do good things and hold true beliefs or false beliefs. Thus, even though I may be wrong about believing in a god, I do what is good; even though some believers may be wrong about god, they still do good. That’s why many believers and I don’t bother each other about religious subjects (unless it’s about politics), because I don’t really mind. But one of us is right and the other is wrong, and truth matters a great deal to me.
I consider someone to be morally bad if they do bad things and hold true beliefs or false beliefs. I care little for people who do bad things, even if they agree with me. To an atheist such as myself (and possibly many believers), I am interested in both the works a person does in their life and what they think is true. Both, I see, is better than doing good things and holding false beliefs. While you most certainly dissagree with me that prayer is non-action, and thus immoral (I’ve never been very good with moral arguments), perhaps a different tact would shed light. I see prayer, imploring a god, asking, believing, wishing, hoping, as accepting of one’s place and waiting for a handout from a more powerful being, as false.
I prefer truth.
May 8th, 2007 at 4:33 am
When you take into account marginal utility, the only way RRS’s blood drive could work as a criticism of prayer or Christianity is if Christians (or others who believe in the efficacy of prayer toward any ends) always elected to pray instead of giving blood, at every opportunity to choose between the two. This is clearly not the case; while you can’t always give blood, you can always pray, and Christians et al. often give blood, therefore it follows that Christians et al. often elect to give blood instead of praying. If you think prayer is a waste of time, prayer is silly, whatever good prayer achieves is better wrought by other means, etc. that’s fine. I agree. But that’s quite a bit different from the dichotomy RRS seemed to present. If we’re faced with a choice between everyone in the world praying for an hour a day and never giving blood or putting out puppyfires, or doing the latter at every opportunity and never praying - of course, any sane person would pick the second option. If any sane person were faced with a choice between all the water in the world and all the pillows in the world, he’d choose the water. Happily we are not faced with these choices in the real world.
dt: “I can see how my examples of prayer vs. action look like straw men (or, as I like to call them, scarecrows), but they are intended as totally extreme, examples of how prayer doesn’t solve our problems.”
And hence they assume that the purpose of prayer is to ’solve problems’ or that if prayer doesn’t ’solve problems’ it is useless. What’s the point of solving crises if actions not directed at solving crises are somehow bad or meaningless? The point of solving crises is to be without them, so we can live.
As for morality, prayer could conceivably be immoral -sometimes. If some guy got on his knees and started praying while someone was dangling off a cliff, sure, that would be immoral. But this is not the reality we’re dealing with (usually).
May 8th, 2007 at 7:27 am
JOR,
Look over what we’re written, it’s hard to see if we actually disagree on anything substantial. We agree:
1. Prayer doesn’t work the way ‘blab-it-and-grab-it’ theo-nuts say it does.
2. The RRS is juvenile (although they’ll trounce Ray Comfort in the ABC ‘debate’, which isn’t hard to do; their blood drive was a great idea for publicity; I wanted that free DVD of The God Who Wasn’t There so much, but didn’t care enough to actually make a video.); the National Day of Prayer is the same, only more so.
3. Prayer — a resort to methodological supernaturalism — can be immoral (as well as moral), but it’s not necessarily immoral, other than in the way I argue that the truth is morally good and untruth morally bad (see Dawkins & O’Lielly).
I suggest a moment’s look at CHILD, Inc. as disturbing evidence of prayer’s potential for evil. What bothers me is that Christian Scientists and their ilk aren’t much different than we are; they have the same genes, many are just as smart as us ‘cultured’, reasonable folk. It has little to do with sanity or insanity, but accepting the existence of the supernatural as real and imminent in our world. Believing that prayer actually does what it says on the side of the box often leads to disaster.
4. I’m a very poor apologist for the RSS (see 2).
I guess the reason I’m so open to your ideas might stem from basic, simple ideas that Christopher Hitchens explains in his new book (an excerpt can be read at Slate): ‘We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.’
But I have a problem with arguing from marginal utility: a 2006 paper published in Nature, by Dr. Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, a neuroscientist in John Assad’s Harvard lab comes to mind. He spent several months watching monkeys choose what to drink, offering the primates different beverages, letting them select their favorite drink. The monkeys had a clear but complicated hierarchy of preferences.
Of course, figuring out what monkeys like to drink isn’t what got him published in Nature. Schioppa’s real insight was that he could get the monkeys to change their mind; they would choose the less preferable drink. If he was offering the monkey equal amounts of peppermint tea and apple juice, then the monkey would always choose the apple juice, because juice tastes better. (It had a higher utility.) But if he increased the amount of peppermint tea offered, then, at a certain point, the monkey would change its mind, and choose to drink tea instead. This is called ‘the indifference point,’ since the monkey seemed ‘indifferent’ between the two options. (all we have to do is substitute (i) having an enjoyable conversation with loved ones and (ii) prayer)
I think, perhaps wrongly, perhaps rightly, that many fall into a trap where prayer is offered far too much in comparison to family interaction: they have little family contact due to overwork, attend religious servies, hear the benefits of prayer and forgo things they would usually find more satisfying otherwise.
The paper is a fanstastic read.
But far more than that, it’s clear that this genuine prayer is an absolvement of responsibility, a selfish attitude to the universe at large. I will sit here and think really hard and… *poof* the universe will fix itself! I cannot accept the claims of faith healers that they have saved a child’s life by prayer (how surprising this usually occurs after a long stint with medical professionals!) while numerous children die all over the world without medicine, but with prayer. I think that even saying that a child’s life was saved through prayer while another was not is in itself highly immoral, the epitome of a selfish, high and mighty, me-me-me belief that the universe won’t just right itself by luck or fate, but that God is on your side. It raises a stink that — if He existed — would turn God’s nose all the way up in Heaven.