So, I was dropping off meals for my parents;
Mom was in the phone relating a story from when I I was a kid. The short version is we had gone into a ditch while traveling cross country. It was icy. We were going slow enough for the average conditions but for whatever reason, they weren’t salting ~1000ft of highway- we saw the city plows getting on at the same exit the county plows were getting off, leaving a gap.
In any case, my mom related the story as if the tow truck that came out was some kind of miracle, and just happened to be going by, etc.
No. We had a cell phone and AAA roadside. Dad called for service.
You know, AAA stands for Angels Angels Angels.
That’s a titty bar somewhere
I feel bad for your dad… 😩
Heh. He’s into it, too.
Now I feel worse for your dad.
Personally I don’t find big issue with praying but kids should not be exposed to this sort of mentality. It’s frankly insane that we allow religious indoctrination for children.
Prayer as a form of meditation is fine, but when it actively takes the place of working towards solutions and/or improving situations…. At best it’s a lazy response to feel better.
For example, praying for the homeless or starving. Praying about it changes very little. Granted unless one happens to be Jeff Bezos, there’s not a lot we can do, but even that much doesn’t happen when people see prayer as a viable alternative to doing it.
If you look at the theories behind modern spell work (I find magic systems interesting, whether “real” or from a game) you begin to realize that prayer is just a form of spell work.
The problem is, it’s really fucking bad at it.
Also, the church then becomes hypocritical (what, again?) for banning spell craft.
Transubstantiation? More like transmutation.
It kind of depends on the purpose behind the prayer.
Ritual prayer (like blessing a meal, or similar invocations,) are more symbolic or ritual.
Prayer for certain things… healing the sick, more money. Trump winning the election. Winning the lottery….
Yeah, those basically are spells. Yup.
If you stopped the indoctrination of children, religions would die within a generation. You’d just be left with fringe cults here and there that we’d laugh at.
Sounds like something that happened in ex-republics. For example during 2023 cristmas 1% of citizens visited christian churches in my country. And considering source(police) this number is probably inflated.
Relative to countries where many people visit church every week we have pretty secular society. Meanwhile fe(de)ral propaganda will continue to sell bullshit of “staples”.
Yep. And yet the same people who squawk about the “LGBT religion indoctrinating kids” have no issues indoctrinating kids in actual religions.
To be fair cancel religion is a thing. Or Twitter religion. Many names, same stuff.
Trust me, when they suggest using your superior intellect to get back at the angry oversized bully, they don’t really mean it.
I think prayer is practice deferring to authority and resignation to one’s fate as an obedient peon.
i’m not religious and i’m not doing it, but i think praying also has a psychological aspect that should not be underestimated. you take some dedicated time to reflect on your current problems, what you want in life and the people around you, possibly just before going to sleep so your subconscious can digest everything over night and might give you a different angle.
typing all of that, i realise i should start doing my own form of non-religious praying o_O
meditation and journaling?
Meditation IS certain religions. Such as Buddhism and Hinduism. They know that their stories are fables to teach morality to the youth. In fact most tribal religions know this as well. Only in Christianity do these fables take on a literal interpretation.
The existence of a diety is different than the tales surrounding a religion. Many religions are very aware of how far fetched most tales are.
Just to be crystal clear, the major branches of Buddhism and Hinduism do believe in supernatural entities and many if not most believe metaphysical nonsense. The idea that “Buddhists don’t actually believe this” is mistaken. Many or most absolutely believe it.
As a former pastor, I you’re pretty close to understanding prayer.
God isn’t Santa and doesn’t grant wishes. Prayer is more about contemplation. It’s seeking courage, strength, and acceptance.
Praying for healing isn’t about literal miracles. It’s about accepting that something is out of your hands.
i realise i should start doing my own form of non-religious praying o_O
It’s called sysadmin’s tambourine.
I was first thinking meditation as a form of non-religious praying, but that is more clear your mind or be in the moment. It’s not really reflecting which I think is an important part of praying. At least it was for me when I was religious.
Why do you think meditation is not this ? Just like prayer, there isn’t one “proper” way of meditating, you are free to do it just the way you want it.
Well then, I stand corrected.
To me praying looks like a way to pretend that you did something while actually you didn’t do anything. Very convinient but it won’t do anything.
Or you could just say “prayers flowing” and never even pretend to do it.
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While I don’t believe in any religion, there is a relevant story in the christian bible. I’ll be writing from memory, because I cannot be bothered to search for it:
There where two coachman travelling on an old bumpy road. Both of them broke their axle an could not continue to the next market. One of them was a firm believer, so he sunk to his knees and started to pray to god to fix his axle so he could reach the market in time. The other coachman jumped of his cart while cursing like a sailor. He copped down a small tree from the nearby woods and made an improvised axle, all while shouting and yelling indiscriminately about his bad luck. Who do you think received more help from god?
“The moral is that god helps those who help themselves!”
“Or that he takes credit for other people’s work. Basically, he’s middle management.”
The mysterious thing about God is that he can do anything humans can’t (create worlds, stars, animals), but he can’t do anything humans can (create ships, fixing axles)…
Leaving it to us to regrow limbs, I guess.
But I’m not sure we’ve given up on tokamak reactors (that is creating a very small star).
Does that mean the more humans learn to do the less God can do? Like God used to be able to make fire until we figured out how to start one. Since humans figured out flight and communicating great distances, God can’t fly around or hear and send messages anymore?
As our knowledge increases in God shrinks.
Haha I definitely like the middle management comparison here!
I don’t remember the context of the story. But I think it was supposed to be “god helps those who help themselves” - basically discouraging people from being the ones described in the picture above.
That first man is a fool!
Prayer only works if there are two or more people doing it!
Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.
Matthew 18:19
This implies that there has never been two christians gathered together and praying for world peace or to end world hunger
This implies that there has never been two christians gathered together and praying for world peace or to end world hunger
Or that there are two christians that want wars and starve people.
Looks more likely.
Okay, I’ll bite. Which one received more help? I’m guessing the one who got off his knees and did something about his situation?
But then what help was actually provided if the guy did it himself?
I don’t really want to argue for religion here. The way I comprehended the story was basically telling people to not be the ones described by OP.
But if you really want to go into the interpretation stuff: I guess if you wanted to argue for a god, god made sure the cart broke down next to a wood with a tree roughly the right dimensions? Here we are with the part where religion can’t really be proven or disproven. Was it luck, was the whole road just forest…?
You’re not arguing for religion, don’t worry. I don’t believe in gods but I was raised by religious people and the whole point of most faiths, the way I was thought, was to pray for help, for strength, inspiration, etc. not for the problem to magically go away.
Fun fact: You can actually tell if someone is religious by an mri.
The part of the brain that deals with critical thinking shrinks due to lack of use.
Is this real? Anywhere I can read more about this?
This is easier to digest: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/religious-experiences-shrink-part-of-brain/
If I’m reading this correctly, the findings of this particular paper are more directed towards a relationship between stress/anxiety (such as life-challenging events or religious-related existiential stress) and religious beliefs rather than critical thinking via hippocampal volume (the neural section associated with emotional responses).
It’s interesting that there was a pattern of hippocampal atrophy however they do not definitively claim the direction of a causal relationship or if even is one (such as correlational).
Interesting read that sheds into how religiosity may induce additional stressors from having a specific belief system.
The cause for the atrophy is hard to prove exactly for obvious reasons but it seems to be in the part of the brain used for critical reasoning. Could be stress too. Either way yes, you can spot the religious because their brains are a bit shrunken
Emphasis mine.
The authors offer the hypothesis that the greater hippocampal atrophy in selected religious groups might be related to stress. They argue that some individuals in the religious minority, or those who struggle with their beliefs, experience higher levels of stress. This causes a release of stress hormones that are known to depress the volume of the hippocampus over time. This might also explain the fact that both non-religious as well as some religious individuals have smaller hippocampal volumes.
You can’t look at a person’s brain to determine if they’re religious or not.
Eh that just means it’s not an exact science and there are exceptions like anything. You’ll find qualified statements like that in any good scientific study.
We found correlation
It’s not science
???
Just in case correlation != causation.
‘Greater hippocampal atrophy over time was predicted by baseline identification as born-again Protestants, Catholics, or no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants who were not born-again. Greater hippocampal atrophy was also predicted by reports at baseline of having had life-changing religious experiences’
So what about Orthodox?
LOL it’d be an interesting study…which religion causes the most regardation 😂
Maybe it is the opposite? The more degraded person is - the more likely it to be religious.
Any day now, magical sky man will solve all my problems!
Give up control so others can take it.
Ramen!
If prayers don’t work, then where are all the school shootings? Oh…
Maybe they’s why they don’t want to do anything about school shootings. It’s to keep prayer in public school.
Nice ChatGPT meme
I asked it before when this got posted on lemmy.ml and I’ll ask it again now that it’s here: how is this a meme?
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