So, because a lot of people had unusual experiences and felt that “magical answers” made sense, all of a sudden, the supernatural is a valid and legitimate idea ?
It goes without saying that that is a non-sequitur.
But more importantly, most people are not very intelligent. Most people can’t think critically. They make invalid inferences all the time. They make cognitive errors, they are victims of cognitive biases and so forth. You know this. Why pretend otherwise ? Just because you want to believe in fairy tales ?
We were not talking about the supernatural. I was referring to the gods, which are the oldest souls, and they are based in conscious elements and many types of tachyons. They are a real energy. However, only a few of them can hear prayers, and even fewer will respond or care, while hearing it.
Experience is the foundation of empiricism and from your last comment, you seem to be saying “people aren’t very smart, therefor their experiences of paranormal forces are either not real or not valid.” Therefor empiricism doesn’t matter, because even if over a million people had paranormal experiences, they were all just making it up. Meanwhile, our common reality is true, because why? Because it is so common? Because it is enforced the most?
I do agree. But what you expect to get out of prayer doesn’t have to be what you literally asked for in your prayer. You’re assuming stupidity, so that’s what you’re seeing.
That’s because the way you’re defining prayer is necessarily delusional. But if you take away the delusion, what are you doing? Give it a name, and I’ll play along and use your own terms.
It does say something about the efficacy of prayer in calming nerves. Knowing how prayer is and isn’t efficacious is the whole point here.
The placebo effect is a poor explanation. The way prayer produces calm can be studied, and the technique can be utilized to produce calm in a consistent manner. This is very important actually, as there is such an emphasis these days on “solutions” that disempower, i.e. an overemphasis on pharmaceuticals.
I do. But to that list you should add something about the psychology of supplication. In prayer, you supplicate. As an atheist, you can pray to a construct of your imagination. This can help people – it’s basic psychology, and it’s fascinating to me that a student of psychology has not interest in this.
Hilarious. Anyway, sure, you can say it’s irrational and insane to talk to an imaginary friend. But if it helps to do so from time to time, and if you are fully aware that the friend you are talking to is imaginary (or, say, an aspect of your own mind), then I’d say you are being decidedly rational and sane. Consider this – is it rational and sane to temporarily believe in the reality of the movies you watch?
What anon seems to be displaying is a belief in belief, in which case his take on praying can probably be likened to repeating a mantra or self affirmation.
This sounds straight out a sci-fi book. Again, do you have any evidence to back those claims? Can you make a case for it ? And if gods existed, how could you possible know that they are the oldest souls ? How could you possibly know that only some of them hear prayers and only some of them care ? How are you privy to this information ?
No. People are stupid and people make cognitive errors and the supernatural /magic goes against everything we know, so we should be incredibly skeptical of those experiences.
Some are making it up, others are simply self-deceiving. Also, if history taught us anything is that numbers mean nothing.
Again, saying that millions of people had paranormal experiences therefor paranormal experiences are real is a nonsequitur. Can you see how weak your argumentation is ?
I’m gonna say it again, if you put your hands together, stare into nothing and ask for something, knowing that it won’t work then you’re being profoundly irrational. Insane even. No one prays to calm themselves out while at the same time completely disbelieving prayer.
Why are you wasting my time ? We agreed to a definition of prayer a few posts ago, did we not ?
No, it doesn’t. Shut your mouth, close your eyes, empty your mind, kneel down, place your hands on your knees, breathe slowly, do all of those things without asking for something or pretending to communicate with something and you’ll get the same result.
The way prayer calms you has nothing to do with the act of asking for something and all to do with auto-regulation of bodily processes like breathing and heart-rate.
No, you can’t. If you pray, you are not an atheist period. If you don’t believe in Santa Claus, you don’t write him letters.
You are not an atheist. Not even close.
It’s basic bullshit but feel free to provide evidence of positive consequences of supplication. Do you have any ? Any at all , because I’m starting to see a trend here.
I can’t imagine a more disempowering tool.
Yes I can say it. But it also happens to be true. Feel free to check the definitions of irrational and insane in the dictionary.
People are confined in mental intuitions because of that. This isn’t some cute linguistic game.
So who’s this “we”? Consensus? That’s a numbers game.
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If millions of people had paranormal experiences, paranormal experiences are by definition real. People have them. That doesn’t mean they’re paranormal.
Irrational, maybe. You’re a psychology student: how aligned are emotion and reason? In my experience, there’s a big difference between knowing something and feeling it. If you feel calmed by saying hail marys, without rationally believing that Mary is in heaven and will influence something for you, it’s rational to indulge your irrationality (assuming you want to calm down). It’s certainly not insane. I would bet that there are a lot of people who do this.
If you find it helps to do so, and accept that it’s probably a psychological trick that you don’t understand, but don’t get the same effect any other way… I don’t think that makes you insane. In fact, a quick google throws up lots of seemingly reasonable, intelligent atheists who do so: jdmoyer.com/2011/07/25/why-as-an-atheist-i-pray/ quora.com/Atheism/Do-atheists-pray
The fact that something is irrational is surely not in itself a reason not to do something, and certainly not to a consequentialist. If it benefits yourself and/or others, fill your boots. Or am I missing something?
Do you have any proof of this? It’s basically an empirical, easily-testable claim.
It might even be argued that a little disempowerment is a healthy thing.
No, they’re not. People are locked up when they don’t think their imaginary friends are imaginary.
You’re all about evidence, though, and I respect that. If you can find me one (recent, Western) example of an atheist who’s been institutionalised for praying, though, I’ll concede that point.
Are you really a psychology student?
Edit: I missed this earlier -
Give me an example of a religion that doesn’t. Even fucking Jainism does it.
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism. I don’t know much about Hinduism or esoteric Judaism.
Of course, not all Christianity, or even the majority of it, doesn’t do so. But treating a major religion with hundreds of millions of practicioners as a monolithic slab of fairytales and lowest-common-denominator platitudes is… not the sort of nuance one would expect on a philosophy forum. Alternatively, I could assume that you as an atheist find your views and reasoning to be adequately represented by the most stupid atheists I can find on the net.
It’s a lesson that anyone can learn when looking at history. Why are you being pedantic ?
Sure. That’s what I meant.
For starters, there is a big difference between simply repeating some words and intently and deliberately talking with someone. If a person is only repeating a few words, I’d argue that the person is not really praying and he or she knows it.
I can’t be bothered to read those links but as I said before, someone who prays is not an atheist. The same way people who don’t believe in Santa Claus don’t write him letters. If you find yourself praying, it’s time to re-think that “atheist label”.
That doesn’t make any sense. Can you conjure an hypothetical situation that demonstrates your point ?
Of what ?
Argument from incredulity ? LOL! You sure are being pedantic today. The idea that supplication can have positive results is extremely disempowering. Obviously, I was not being literal when I said that I couldn’t imagine something worse. But more importantly, I didn’t even make an argument against that idea, let alone an argument from incredulity. I simply asked if he had any evidence that supported his claim. Jesus, this isn’t a good day for you.
While I can appreciate your effort of actually linking things that are relevant to this discussion, I’m not really in the mood to read a study right now. Studies, as you know, need to picked apart. Reading an abstract and saying that the study demonstrates X, Y and Z isn’t prudent to say the least. I’m not saying that’s what you did. I’m saying that I just can’t be bothered to analyze a study right now. Having said that, I know that there are studies who show the opposite of what you’re trying to argue. Not to mention studies about the actual efficacy ( the main issue here) of prayer.
Indeed. And I didn’t say otherwise.
Atheists don’t pray and yes, religion is a mass delusion.
I must be missing something here. Are you saying that Christianity, Islam and Buddhism don’t make claims about psychology, biology and physics ? You can’t possibly be serious.
The difference lies in where a person places emphasis — behavior vs. experience (Skinner vs. Rodgers).
For theist prayer — God is other (or whatever a person likes to call it).
For atheist prayer — subconscious is other (or whatever a person likes to call it).
Or, for the atheist other is inside of oneself and for the theist other is outside of oneself.
A person could argue that using the same term results in confusion but as J.D. Moyer suggests it is essentially the same behavior but with a different belief system attached. What is important within the ‘definition of prayer’: the behavior or the belief? The answer to this question is clearly dependent upon the belief (a circular reference). Hence, I would classify insanity as a person who is stuck within a circular reference (emphasis is placed on stuck).
I think volckok makes many valid points and in particular.
As far as analogies are concerned, they are mostly very limited — but this one hits the nail on the head and is as close to perfection as analogies can get. Dawkins is anti-NOMA and so I would assume volchok’s view aligns with his view (correct me if I am wrong).
Interestingly,
I now assume Ludwik has more quality material for his ‘next’ paper with more of the “we are better than you” confrontations.
If writing a letter to Santa Claus helps you to enumerate and prioritise your wishes in life, while you imagine how you would describe that to a Santa-Claus-figure, what’s wrong with doing it? You don’t have to send it to anyone, because there’s no-one to send it to. It’s a mental exercise; a useful roleplay.
This is a pretty normal differentiation between prayer and meditation, which is why I’ve used the term prayer to refer to the act of supplication taking place within a meditative frame of mind. I think if prayer doesn’t occur within a meditative state of mind, it’s merely discursiveness. I characterized prayer without delusion as a form of meditation for this reason. Also though, there is plenty of precedent for directed conceptual thought to be considered a form of meditation. There are many kinds of meditation - I believe most Buddhist schools first differentiate between calm abiding meditation and insight meditation, and then there are various types of each. “Contemplative meditation” (it can go by other names) might involve thinking about some theme - say, the reality of death. The words are used as the object of meditation (say, “death is real - it comes without warning - this body will be a corpse”), but when a felt sense of the meaning arises, the meditator is instructed to make that the object of meditation. The practitioner simply rests in an open state, aware of the feeling that has been generated in the first stage of the meditation. So there is definitely a place for “verbal thought” in traditional meditation practices. Further, there is the traditional practice of praying to what is clearly taught to be a construct of the imagination. I don’t know if all Buddhist schools engage in this practice, but the ones that are most known for it are thought of as the schools of “means and methods”, meaning the philosophical view is no different from many other Buddhist schools, but they utilize whatever tools might work, with disregard for how this might look to outsiders who might not understand.
According to my mentor, all prayers are for oneself. They prepare one for positive action where help may happen and for positive thinking when help does not happen. Of interest to me is the evidence that prayer affects one’s immune system and health in general. There are many sites about this claim. Google “prayer and the immune system”.
But what if our prayer isn’t answered. Does that mean it’s just good enough to feel better? And do we really feel better when our prayer isn’t answered?
And if none of our prayers are answered – other than “I pray that I feel better by saying this prayer” – won’t we then doubt that whom we’re praying to?