Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3

2 – Know your deities

This is part 3 in a series of posts on prayer. Please use the links at the top and bottom of each post to navigate through the parts.

but everyone knows prayer works!

Everyone prays when your time comes or when you get into trouble, even atheists — or so the aphorists would have you believe. Belief in the power of prayer is seemingly omnipresent, with daily reinforcement of the concept from other people that believe likewise. You see the reports on the news of the one little boy that walked away from a horrific plane crash (who was saved by God — never mind that everyone else on the plane was *not*). You know the story of the hurricane that tore through a small town and left only the church standing. You’ve heard about the “light at the end of the tunnel” when a dying person’s neurons start misfiring and they gasp out their last coherent words immediately prior to oblivion. The media, populated in equal measure to the society at large with theists, use phrases like “miraculous” or “divine providence” or “act of God” in describing rare events.

In the presence of such widespread and self-reinforcing memes, it’s difficult to imagine how to shake the general populace’s belief that prayer does anything. The only way I can see, as with pretty much every other problem humankind faces, is through judicious use of science. Sound logic will, of course, only get you so far.
Continue reading “Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3”

Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3
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Why prayer is nonsense – part 0

By no means is this intended to be an exhaustive list of every theological discussion, every argument and counterargument, with regard to prayer’s efficacy. My aim with this series is to show why prayer is an ultimately useless endeavor, either devoid of any merit when defined narrowly, or if defined vaguely, indistinguishable from other mental disciplines like meditation; and how people entrenching prayer in the public consciousness and including it in their individual philosophies in such large numbers as exists today, tangibly harms society.

This is the master post, the first in a series that will be updated as time allows. I’ll be editing links into this post as I create the subsequent parts. There are a lot of interconnected points that need to be woven together to form my final argument, so please bear with me as I get this thing built. If you’d like to start pulling on threads early, that may help to shape future parts, but otherwise, bear in mind I may well cover it by the time this series is done. Some posts will be longer than others (especially part 2), but I’ll be making an effort to keep the parts relatively digestible, which is of course why I’m chunking this up to begin with.

Part 1: First, define prayer
Part 2: Know your deities
Part 3: But everyone knows prayer works!
Part 4: Even if it IS useless, what’s the harm?
Part 5: So why pray?

Why prayer is nonsense – part 0

Fatwa Envy

The main story thrust of the recent two-part South Park episode that sent Muslims into a hate-frenzy and induced Comedy Central’s genitalia to wither and die, was an attempt by celebrities — chief among them Tom Cruise — to kidnap Muhammed and somehow use his powers of avoiding mockery for themselves. To duplicate the mystical “censorship field” power (called “goo” in the episode) that Muhammed has apparently spontaneously developed over the past few decades. Suddenly, and very recently, nobody can make fun of him — or even merely depict him as a human being — on pain of death after religious fatwas are handed down from the Islamic clergy demanding retribution.

Don’t worry though, Islam doesn’t have a monopoly on religious zealots that are beyond-the-pale crazy. Their kissing cousin faith, the Christians, have a particularly hideous little toad of their own who apparently wants Muhammed’s goo as well: Bill Donahue. He has an obvious and very unbecoming case of fatwa envy over Comedy Central’s considering making a cartoon series about Jesus Christ, as a regular guy who “moves to New York to escape his father’s enormous shadow”.

“It’s not certain what is more despicable: the nonstop Christian bashing featured on the network, or Comedy Central’s decision to censor all depictions of Muhammad,” said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, on Thursday.

It’s not certain to me, Bill, when you first started thinking your particular flavor of delusion trumps free speech, but it’s fairly obvious that you’re learning the wrong lesson from zealots threatening death over a perfectly harmless cartoon. The lesson should be “free speech is fundamental to free society”, not “they get to do it, so we should be able to cow people into doing our bidding out of fear of death too!”

Hat tip to Greg Laden.

Fatwa Envy

Should sexiness sell skepticism?

Sex sells. It’s practically axiomatic now — if you want to sell anything, sex it up. How do you do that? Well, obviously, in the advertisement world, by adding half-naked women, right? You know, since men — and heterosexual men only — are the only consumers worth targeting.

Except, NO, they’re not — heterosexual males make up at absolute best about 45% of the world’s population, which isn’t even a majority. So why the tacit approval, even (and especially) by certain feminists, of the current social norm wherein any “sexiness” brought into a conversation must de facto imply women slutting it up as sex objects? Why is it never about men bringing the sexy to the table? Why the gigantic backlash against the Skepchicks owning their sexuality and being sex-positive, as though they’re the only skeptics that have ever displayed any modicum of sex-positivity? Why the gigantic backlash against Boobquake, despite the surprisingly good data it yielded in disproving the Muslim cleric’s hypothesis that immodesty causes earthquakes?

Continue reading “Should sexiness sell skepticism?”

Should sexiness sell skepticism?

Children of Fulton, Mississippi: GFY

I don’t know if you’ve been following this — if you hang around in the same circles that I do online, you probably have. If not, here’s a quick recap. A teen by the name of Constance McMillen asked permission of her school administrators to allow her to wear a tux and bring her girlfriend to the big prom. They said “no way, you’re not allowed to dress in a tux, and you’re not allowed to bring your girlfriend, because we’re bigoted assholes.” (Not in so many words.) Constance tried to sue to be allowed in, and the school shut down the prom for everyone. The judge upheld that she was being discriminated against, but didn’t force the school to reinstate the prom. Parents organized a non-official prom, to which she was invited. However, it was “cancelled” at the last minute, and the school reinstated the official prom at a country club. Only seven people showed up at the official prom — Constance and her date, and two learning-disability kids, along with three others.

Turns out that other, unofficial prom was never really cancelled. All but the seven outcasts went to the parent-organized one. So the “official” prom was a decoy to keep the troublemakers and unpopular kids out.

Stephanie Zvan wrote a missive to the children of Fulton, Mississippi, informing them of what a grave and consequential error they have made in participating in the prom head-fake, and how if they don’t do something to rectify the situation and stand in opposition to the parents and administrators that orchestrated this vile and hurtful trick, they’re destroying their brand and sealing their place in society.

What you did was wrong. It was cruel, and pointlessly cruel. It was stupidly easy and easily the stupidest thing I’ve seen in a long time. You gained nothing by it. Hell, you didn’t even have as much fun as you thought prom should be. And you lost everything.

Remember how you thought about getting out of there and doing something with your life? Forget it. You’re one of “those kids from Fulton” now, and everybody knows what you did. Sure, you can find a school to go to, even one away from home, but it’s going to be one of those schools that’s no good for anything but sending you back where you came from.

You can find a job, kid from Fulton, but it will be a job that requires someone just like you. Prepare to spend the next fifty-some years of your life taking the same kind of orders you’ve been taking from your parents and your teachers and your friends. You’ve just waved goodbye to your chance to grow up and determine how you want to live your own life.

Emphasis mine.

I wish I had something more substantial to add to this discussion, but the best I can manage is:

Kids from Fulton,

GFY.

– Jason

Children of Fulton, Mississippi: GFY

RCimT: Sunday Atheism Roundup (on Monday)

Oh how late I am with this post! The fact that I’ve taken so long in posting my traditional Sunday link roundup obviously must mean I’ve run out of things to blog about and the blog will shortly close down! Well, I won’t let that stop me from carrying on blogging like our evangelical blog-stalker’s prognostications are as much bunkum as his religion or his conspiracy-theories.

Continue reading “RCimT: Sunday Atheism Roundup (on Monday)”

RCimT: Sunday Atheism Roundup (on Monday)

Feminism, skepticism and boobies

What, being hawt whilst also brainy? Can't have that!

I was honestly expecting a big ol’ shitstorm over this post, wherein I defended the Boobie Wednesday Twitter campaign despite, I thought, the obvious feminist objections against showing breasts (whether male or female) to raise awareness about cancer. I believed people would crawl out of the woodwork to shout me down over considering acceptable the objectification of women, the “sexification” of breast cancer, and that I was going to be accused of merely wanting to save “my playthings” rather than people’s lives. You see, because I’m a guy — a heteronormative guy, at that — and boobies are therefore obviously far more important to me than the brains situated a foot and a half above them.

I was surprised that no such outrage happened. And I have to suspect that it’s because it merely wasn’t widely read enough, considering the sudden and strange attack on Skepchick over at Greg Laden’s blog.

Continue reading “Feminism, skepticism and boobies”

Feminism, skepticism and boobies

In defense of my “meaning of life”

A better question: what is the meaning of ice cube LEGO?

A while back, someone thought they would be smart and take on my Formspring challenge, wherein I said, “go ahead, try and stump me. I dare you.” They asked, “what is the meaning of life?”

I actually had an answer for them, one I thought was pretty good and pretty explicit in declaring the question itself as a category error — a question along the lines of asking “what does the sound of a train whistle smell like?” or “what shape is love?” Life is a state classified as a grouping of biochemical reactions acting in a self-perpetuating manner, and doesn’t have a “deeper meaning,” any more than “what’s the meaning of ice?” or “what’s the meaning of stars?”. It’s a mangled question, one that actually conflates a few similar questions into one seemingly sensible question, one for which most religions claim to have an answer. That theists generally have a better answer for an incorrectly formulated question is no big surprise, but I decided to take a stab at it anyway. Here’s what I answered.

What is the meaning of life?

THAT’S the kind of nigh-unanswerable question I was hoping for! Good for you!

It’s also a bit of a mangled question, which no matter how often it’s repeated I still can’t parse. It seems to be asking “why is there life”, but it’s actually not — it’s sort of presupposing an agency and a purpose to our existence specifically. At the same time, it’s asking what reason we have for living our individual lives the way we do. So let’s break the question down.

*rustle rustle*

Life itself has no meaning, any more than purple has a taste (unless you’re synaesthetic). Life on Earth is the culmination of a very long series of cause-and-effects starting when the quantum foam first fluctuated and kicked off the Big Bang. We don’t know how many universes or how many shots at this particular universe there has been, so we don’t know how likely or unlikely life is. We do know that we wouldn’t be around to think about it if it wasn’t possible (thus the anthropic principle), but there’s no specific agency to it that we can detect (despite people suspecting as much, since we’re evolved to detect agency in every rustling bush).

So, that covers “why is there life”. On to “what meaning can we impart onto our own lives, to give us reason to go on existing”, which is a smaller, and more personal, question. My life has meaning in finding comfort and happiness, and increasing the comfort and happiness of those around me. I also like rooting for human progress, and have a fascination with just how far we’ve come as a species in a mere ten-to-twenty-thousand years.

Of course, if this doesn’t answer your question, feel free to narrow it down some more.

Last week, this answer was used in a sermon by a Southern preacher by the name of Steve Davis. I’ve been following him on Twitter for some time — I had started following when we had a brief but civil exchange on theology, and he seemed like a fairly reasonable and sensible person whom I might want to converse with again in the future. In his sermon this past week, Steve referenced an abridged form of my answer to compare/contrast a theist’s “meaning of life” with an atheist’s.

Continue reading “In defense of my “meaning of life””

In defense of my “meaning of life”

Help DuWayne with his homework

You know you want to answer his question…

What do you think of, when someone mentions the word “culture?” How does “culture” differ from “society?” What is/are your culture/s?

[…]

I am asking these questions because I am hoping to use the responses as part of the foundation for one of my papers this semester. If you could help me out, I would really appreciate it. I would ask that those who have a background in anthropology or sociology refrain from responding in comments – I am not looking for professional definitions. What I am looking for is purely layperson responses.

It’s a great question. And he’s specifically looking for laypeople, so I am eminently qualified — and so are most of you! Answer him here. Or here. CLICK DAMMIT.

Help DuWayne with his homework