Religion IS crazy!

[pavilion103]

I will add a final thought to but those posts. They are worth a response.

Tech:
I partially agree with you. I am not arrogant enough to trust myself in determining what truth is. I do not trust a religion set up by man. I do not trust a book written by man (no one can prove the Bible is the Word of God). I do not trust in silly superstitions. I am very skeptical of all of this. I am a very skeptical person in this regard.
So I ask myself who do I trust? I trust the one who predicted his death and resurrection (and by applying a standard of historical evidence far stricter than the level of evidence accepted by historians for any other historical event from antiquity) rose from the dead.
That is worthy of my trust.
If anyone here did this, you can rest assured that I would listen to you very closely.
This is why I listen to Christ, not myself, not other philosophers or scholars, to tell me what is truth.

p.s. Christ offers an open invitation to everyone to trust in Him. Not an exclusive group!

GB:
So if I'm born into a Christian culture my Christian beliefs are invalid
And if I'm born into a non-Christian culture my Christian beliefs are invalid.
It doesn't really have anything to do with what we are born into does it?

 

[Gringotts Bank]

I will add a final thought to but those posts. They are worth a response.

GB:
So if I'm born into a Christian culture my Christian beliefs are invalid
And if I'm born into a non-Christian culture my Christian beliefs are invalid.
It doesn't really have anything to do with what we are born into does it?

My point was that we are influenced by our surrounds far more than we realize. I should have said: "we are influenced heavily be our parents, peer group or culture".

Your point about the Chinese looks valid on the surface. But the whole culture changed in China, and with it, people's attitudes. Buddhism became perverted just like Christianity and only very rare individuals became enlightened - most didn't. The ones that didn't lived off handouts and lead very bland uninteresting lives in monasteries. Who wants that? Hell, if I was a poverty-stricken Chinaman in the 1980's, there's no way an austere lifestyle is going to win my devotion. But then again Buddhism doesn't have a rule where you are punished by a Father Figure-style God for looking elsewhere. You won't see too many Muslims converting to Christianity. The fear is too great.

 

[bunyip]

God would obviously be outside of time and is all knowing and all powerful. If there was a God do you think he would sit there with the clock running with a call centre of people in heaven answering calls frantically and sending the most important ones through to him?
We take the words all knowing and all powerful so lightly! Think about that for a moment.

Here’s something for you to think about.
You don’t even know that God exists. You think he does, but in all your posts in which you profess a profound knowledge of the subject, you’ve never once presented any evidence, let alone irrefutable proof, of the existence of God.
Yet you make authoritative statements such as ‘God would obviously be outside of time and is all knowing and all powerful.’

If anyone cares to genuinely explore evidence for the power of prayer, look up:

1) Azusa street revival
2) Smith Wigglesworth

If anyone wants to be honest and realistic about the so-called ‘power of prayer’, they should ask themselves what response the Jews got when they asked God to save them from the Nazis. Then they should ask themselves what response the bushfire victims got when they asked God to spare their loved ones and their homes from the Black Saturday fires in Victoria a few years back, and numerous other fire disasters as well.
Try praying for rain in the middle of a raging drought, and see if God delivers. Need I go on?

You seize on some idiotic claim from some clown who claims to fix stomach cancer by punching people in the stomach, and you stupidly present it as evidence of the power of prayer. You’re completely out of touch with reality, just like so many other religious fanatics.

You and others say that you don't believe that there is a God (any form of god), but my question is what evidence supports a self-existing universe?

1) Where there is a beginning there has to be a cause. There are zero examples of something coming from nothing.
2) There are zero examples of life coming from non-life

That is just to start off the discussion.
Think for one moment. The universe is not eternal. How can it come from nothing? This should be the end of the debate. There is not a way around this.

Let’s see you come up with a plausible explanation of how God came into existence. And don’t insult your intelligence by saying that God ‘always was’.

Anyway, I thought you said (for about the twentieth time) that this thread wasn’t for you. So why do you keep coming back in here with more posts?

 

[Gringotts Bank]

I could understand some poor villager in deepest, darkest Africa believing this cr@p...



The next bit is a beauty...it's not that I'm a charlatan it's that the poor sod with cancer doesn't believe.



Reminds me of when Uri Geller couldn't bend the spoon because it had been swapped without his knowing; "I don't feel strong tonight" was his reason.

If this witch doctor is an example of the "power of prayer", then religion is indeed crazy.

I wonder if the good doctor ever prescribed eye of newt, or toe of frog.

McLovin, belief is extremely powerful. One can create "miracles" with or without a religious context.

One example of this is placebo, which everyone knows about. Modern Western medicine would not readily admit to it, but the majority of the effect of any scientifically proven drug is due to the patient believing it will work. Only a small percentage of the observed effect is due to the active molecule. There's many such examples. I can dig them up if anyone is interested.

Harvard Medical School have at last developed some interest in finding out why belief is many times more powerful than even the most 'powerful' drugs. http://programinplacebostudies.org/tag/harvard-placebo-studies/

Even more powerful than belief is Presence or Awareness. Few on the planet have it, but it is extremely powerful. It leaves medicine for dead (both conventional and alternative).

 

[DB008]

I could understand some poor villager in deepest, darkest Africa believing this cr@p...



The next bit is a beauty...it's not that I'm a charlatan it's that the poor sod with cancer doesn't believe.



Reminds me of when Uri Geller couldn't bend the spoon because it had been swapped without his knowing; "I don't feel strong tonight" was his reason.

If this witch doctor is an example of the "power of prayer", then religion is indeed crazy.

I wonder if the good doctor ever prescribed eye of newt, or toe of frog.

Thanks Mclovin.

 

[Judd]

...The theories behind quantum physics can be as hard to understand and more importantly to beleive as what is written in the bibble.

Yeah, it's mind blowing trying to get one's head around quantum mechanics which discovered the virtual particle, (a virtual particle is something which is formed out of nothing and it's existence was discovered using quantum mechanics before experiments actually determined its existence. Ergo, quantum mechanics is god - or a form of one?)

 

[McLovin]

Thanks Mclovin.

That's the one. I remember watching that doco about 15 years ago. There's a pretty good bit in it where he gives a bunch of students a personalised horoscope (or something similar) and they are all saying how accurate it is. Then he asks them to swap with the person next to them. They were all the same.

If anyone wants to be honest and realistic about the so-called ‘power of prayer’, they should ask themselves what response the Jews got when they asked God to save them from the Nazis.

The "power of prayer" is a case study in confirmation bias. Anything positive is attributed to God, anything else is just glossed over.

 

[bunyip]

The "power of prayer" is a case study in confirmation bias. Anything positive is attributed to God, anything else is just glossed over.

Exactly.

Steady soaking rain makes the countryside green and picturesque – praise be to God.
An earthquake or tsunami kills tens of thousands of people – you won’t hear anyone saying it was God who caused it.

A severe drought is currently devastating western Queensland, killing tens of thousands of animals and trees, causing valuable topsoil to blow away, and devastating family businesses to the extent that suicide rates have climbed dramatically in rural communities. Nobody is blaming God, or pointing out that he’s ignored prayers for rain. But when the rain comes, even if the coming wet season produces only ten or 20% of normal rainfall as happened last wet season in Queensland, causing the current drought, effusive praise will be heaped on God for answering the prayers for rain.

I remember being in a small country church about thirty years ago where the congregation was made up entirely of farmers and graziers. During a prayer session the minister asked the congregation if there was anything in particular they’d like him to pray for.
One man asked for prayers for his sister who was dying of cancer. A woman stood up and asked for prayers for rain to break the drought that was devastating the region. The minister responded with a heartfelt prayer to ‘Our lord in heaven, maker of all things’ etc etc.

Well the rain came a few days later, about 8 ml of it, or 32 points in the old scale. Now, anyone with farming or grazing experience will know that 8 ml of rain during a drought is worse than useless. It muddies the soil, making it harder for weak cattle and sheep to move around, and draining their limited energy. It puts a green shoot on the grass for a week or two, making the stock scour badly as the sudden burst of green feed hits their drought-affected digestive systems. This sudden onset of diahorreah causes them to dehydrate and lose even more weight and get even weaker. It takes a couple of weeks until their digestive systems have adjusted to the new rich feed, and by that time the small amount of moisture in the soil is gone, and the green pick on the grass has gone with it.
Another disadvantage of a tiny amount of rain during a drought is that it germinates a new crop of weeks on the cultivation, many of which have deep tap roots and are therefore able to survive and thrive on limited soil moisture. So the cash strapped farmers have to spend money dealing with the weeds either by cultivating or spraying, otherwise they go to seed and create problems for next years crop.
Anyway, suffice to say that 8 ml of rain during a drought is all disadvantage and no advantage, except maybe to put a bit of water in rainwater tanks.

Next week in church, the woman who had requested prayers for drought-breaking rain stood up during the service and thanked God for answering her prayer and sending us ‘that lovely rain’.
That same woman lost her 34 year old husband a couple of months later when he dropped dead from a heart attack. She was a very religious woman and I had on a number of occasions heard her thank God for our families, and keeping them all safe.

 

[Gringotts Bank]

Exactly.

Steady soaking rain makes the countryside green and picturesque – praise be to God.
An earthquake or tsunami kills tens of thousands of people – you won’t hear anyone saying it was God who caused it.

A severe drought is currently devastating western Queensland, killing tens of thousands of animals and trees, causing valuable topsoil to blow away, and devastating family businesses to the extent that suicide rates have climbed dramatically in rural communities. Nobody is blaming God, or pointing out that he’s ignored prayers for rain. But when the rain comes, even if the coming wet season produces only ten or 20% of normal rainfall as happened last wet season in Queensland, causing the current drought, effusive praise will be heaped on God for answering the prayers for rain.

I remember being in a small country church about thirty years ago where the congregation was made up entirely of farmers and graziers. During a prayer session the minister asked the congregation if there was anything in particular they’d like him to pray for.
One man asked for prayers for his sister who was dying of cancer. A woman stood up and asked for prayers for rain to break the drought that was devastating the region. The minister responded with a heartfelt prayer to ‘Our lord in heaven, maker of all things’ etc etc.

Well the rain came a few days later, about 8 ml of it, or 32 points in the old scale. Now, anyone with farming or grazing experience will know that 8 ml of rain during a drought is worse than useless. It muddies the soil, making it harder for weak cattle and sheep to move around, and draining their limited energy. It puts a green shoot on the grass for a week or two, making the stock scour badly as the sudden burst of green feed hits their drought-affected digestive systems. This sudden onset of diahorreah causes them to dehydrate and lose even more weight and get even weaker. It takes a couple of weeks until their digestive systems have adjusted to the new rich feed, and by that time the small amount of moisture in the soil is gone, and the green pick on the grass has gone with it.
Another disadvantage of a tiny amount of rain during a drought is that it germinates a new crop of weeks on the cultivation, many of which have deep tap roots and are therefore able to survive and thrive on limited soil moisture. So the cash strapped farmers have to spend money dealing with the weeds either by cultivating or spraying, otherwise they go to seed and create problems for next years crop.
Anyway, suffice to say that 8 ml of rain during a drought is all disadvantage and no advantage, except maybe to put a bit of water in rainwater tanks.

Next week in church, the woman who had requested prayers for drought-breaking rain stood up during the service and thanked God for answering her prayer and sending us ‘that lovely rain’.
That same woman lost her 34 year old husband a couple of months later when he dropped dead from a heart attack. She was a very religious woman and I had on a number of occasions heard her thank God for our families, and keeping them all safe.

So you used to go to church and then when you tried to pray for stuff it didn't work?

 

[bunyip]

The Philippines is a strongly Christian country, with around 86% of the population being Roman Catholic.

Many millions of Philippinos prayed to their God to keep their homes and families safe as typhoon Hyan bore down on the Philippines last week.
Nevertheless, the typhoon destroyed millions of homes and business and farms, wiped out food crops, devestated the economy, and killed an estimated 100 thousand people.

I’ll let the Philippinos decide if the power of prayer worked for them.

 

[MrBurns]

I think religion is losing its grip in the west
Been to a few funerals lately and the sermons just seem antiquated.

 

[bunyip]

So you used to go to church and then when you tried to pray for stuff it didn't work?

I was born and raised in a Christian family, and I believed everything my parents, church ministers and Sunday school teachers told me about God and Jesus and prayer. But then as I started growing up and observing and thinking for myself, I saw no evidence to support what they’d taught me, and plenty of evidence that discredited their beliefs.

And GB – don’t even bother wasting your time giving me your views on all of this, regardless of how much you might feel you want to help me. I don’t even read those big long posts of yours, and I’m not looking for help. I’m a happy bloke with a fulfilling life, and I’m not searching for answers.

My view is simply that there may or may not be a supreme being – personally I don’t think there is – but it doesn’t really matter anyway. What’s important is that we’re in this life and we’re in this world, and for all its shortcomings it’s still a pretty good world that we can enjoy to the full if we look after ourselves and our health, look after each other, and take pleasure in simple things.
And that’s exactly what I do.

 

[MrBurns]

The meaning of life -

You don't live forever so what's the point of it all ? money ? plenty of miserable wealthy people around.

No, you're here to look after others, help those less fortunate, if you can do that it's it's own reward and is a life well spent.

God or the "spirit" is present in those who do this, churches are increasingly irrelevant we should be worshiping the practice of helping others.

 

[Gringotts Bank]

I was born and raised in a Christian family, and I believed everything my parents, church ministers and Sunday school teachers told me about God and Jesus and prayer. But then as I started growing up and observing and thinking for myself, I saw no evidence to support what they’d taught me, and plenty of evidence that discredited their beliefs.

And GB – don’t even bother wasting your time giving me your views on all of this, regardless of how much you might feel you want to help me. I don’t even read those big long posts of yours, and I’m not looking for help. I’m a happy bloke with a fulfilling life, and I’m not searching for answers.

My view is simply that there may or may not be a supreme being – personally I don’t think there is – but it doesn’t really matter anyway. What’s important is that we’re in this life and we’re in this world, and for all its shortcomings it’s still a pretty good world that we can enjoy to the full if we look after ourselves and our health, look after each other, and take pleasure in simple things.
And that’s exactly what I do.

I offered my views because I thought you were grappling with understanding it all. Since I've looked into it all in great depth I thought I'd throw up what I'd learnt. I misinterpreted your position on all this and don't want to be a 'helper' as such.

Since you don't read my long posts, I'll just say that briefly that I did agree with the general sentiment that praying to God is not really going to help most people most of the time. But if someone did want to do it (not you, someone else), there have been people who have rigorously investigated the hows/whys and wherefores of prayer, including through the use of scientific experiments. And such material is worth reading.

 

[Gringotts Bank]

Taken from https://www.scimednet.org/effects-of-prayer

I see this as the power of the consciousness + intent, rather than the power of God, but this might just be semantics in the end. My personal and considered view is that God is pure consciousness (ie. consciousness stripped of mind). If that's the case, God is 'no-mind' as the Zennists say, and that's where the power lies.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scores of controlled studies have demonstrated the correlation of positive mental intent with physiological effects in distant human beings. This material has been the subject of several reviews (Benor, 1990, 1993; Dossey, 1993; Solfvin, 1984). Among the studies:

In a double-blind experiment involving 393 persons admitted to a coronary care unit, intercessory prayer was offered from a distance to roughly half the subjects. Significantly fewer patients in the prayer group required intubation/mechanical ventilation (p<<0.002) or antibiotics (p<<0.005), had cardiopulmonary arrests (p<<0.02), developed pneumonia (p<<0.03), or required diuretics (p<<0.005). Subjects in the prayer group had a significantly lower "severity score" based on their hospital course following admission (p<<0.01) (Byrd, 1988).

In a double-blind experiment involving 990 consecutive patients who were admitted to the coronary care unit (CCU), patients were randomized to receive remote, intercessory prayer or not. The first names of patients in the prayer group were given to a team of outside intercessors who prayed for them daily for 4 weeks. Patients were unaware they were being prayed for, and the intercessors did not know and never met the patients. The medical course from hospital admission to discharge was summarized in a CCU course score derived from blinded, retrospective chart review. The prayed-for group had about a 10 percent advantage compared to the usual-care group (P = .04) (Harris et al, 1999).

In a double-blind experiment involving 40 patients with advanced AIDS, subjects were randomly assigned to a "distant healing" (DH) group or to a control group. Both groups were treated with conventional medications, but the DH group received distant healing for 10 weeks from healers located throughout the United States. Subjects and healers never met. At 6 months, blind chart review found that DH subjects acquired significantly fewer new AIDS-defining illnesses (P= 0.04), had lower illness severity (P = 0.03), and required significantly fewer doctor visits (P = 0.01), fewer hospitalizations (P 0.04), and fewer days of hospitalization (P =0.04). DH subjects also showed significantly improved mood compared with controls (P = 0.02) (Sicher et al, 1998).

In thirteen experiments, the ability of sixty-two people to influence the physiology of 271 distant subjects was studied (Braud and Schlitz, 1983,1988,1989). These studies suggested that (1) the distant effects of mental imagery compare favorably with the magnitude of effects of one's individual thoughts, feelings, and emotions on one's own physiology; (2) the ability to use positive imagery to achieve distant effects is apparently widespread in the human population; (3) these effects can occur at distances up to twenty meters (greater distances were not tested); (4) subjects with a greater need to be influenced by positive mental intent - i.e., those for whom the influence would be beneficial -- seem more susceptible; (5) the distant effects of intentionality can occur without the recipient's knowledge; (6) those participating in the studies seemed unconcerned that the effect could be used for harm, and no such harmful effects were seen; and (7) the distant effects of mental intentionality are not invariable; subjects appear capable of preventing the effect if it is unwanted.

 

[bunyip]

I offered my views because I thought you were grappling with understanding it all. Since I've looked into it all in great depth I thought I'd throw up what I'd learnt. I misinterpreted your position on all this and don't want to be a 'helper' as such.

Since you don't read my long posts, I'll just say that briefly that I did agree with the general sentiment that praying to God is not really going to help most people most of the time.

Thank you GB for your willingness to help me and others.

I’ve made my position clear a number of times on here, including detailing my Christian upbringing and my gradual losing of faith in God and Christianity as I grew up and started thinking and observing for myself . I guess you just didn’t read all of my posts, just as I don’t read all of your’s.

Regardless of my disagreement with many Christian beliefs, Christianity taught me honesty and integrity, consideration for others, and generally how to be a decent person. And best of all, how to appreciate simple things.
I have many Christian friends and I’ve generally found Christians to be nice and decent people. And you can’t help but admire the charity work done by Christian churches.

Here’s a final thought.....’‘Nothing is more challenging than to become simple and nothing brings a greater reward.’
Once you understand this and put it into practice in day to day life, it becomes unimportant whether or not a supreme being exists and created the world as we know it, or whether it was created by something else.

 

[overhang]

I offered my views because I thought you were grappling with understanding it all. Since I've looked into it all in great depth I thought I'd throw up what I'd learnt. I misinterpreted your position on all this and don't want to be a 'helper' as such.

Since you don't read my long posts, I'll just say that briefly that I did agree with the general sentiment that praying to God is not really going to help most people most of the time. But if someone did want to do it (not you, someone else), there have been people who have rigorously investigated the hows/whys and wherefores of prayer, including through the use of scientific experiments. And such material is worth reading.

You seemed to have missed the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer.
"1,802 subjects, all receiving the same surgery and who generally believed that prayer works, were divided into three groups:

1. Patients who would be receiving prayers, but didn't know it.
2. Patients who would be receiving prayers and were told about it ahead of time.
3. Patients who would not be receiving prayers (the control group).

Three groups of religious folk (two Catholic, one Protestant) from religious states (Kansas, Minnesota) provided prayers to the study subjects in groups 1 and 2 (whom they did not know) throughout the course of the study.

Results

The results found no differences in the complications of groups 1 and 3, which a rational scientist would expect. Unexpectedly, however, patients in group 2 actually had more complications during surgery...a psychosomatic result of knowing about the prayers, perhaps? "

Prayer is merely a placebo effect and one that can have negative consequences as this experiment showed. Many people have difficulty dealing with situations outside their control, particularly when it comes to life and death. People cope in different ways but some require the hope that there is a higher entity that would somehow take some time out giving children AIDS in Africa and cure their cancer.

 

[burglar]

... giving children AIDS in Africa and cure their cancer.

... ?

 

[overhang]

... ?

Satire. I'm implying how irrational prayer is, to think that their is some higher entity that can sit idle while atrocities occur by the second around the world but then assist someone that is in a Western hospital receiving the best possible care that is the result of years and years of research and science through trial and error.

 

[Gringotts Bank]

You seemed to have missed the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer.

The results found no differences in the complications of groups 1 and 3, which a rational scientist would expect. Unexpectedly, however, patients in group 2 actually had more complications during surgery...a psychosomatic result of knowing about the prayers, perhaps? "

Prayer is merely a placebo effect and one that can have negative consequences as this experiment showed. Many people have difficulty dealing with situations outside their control, particularly when it comes to life and death. People cope in different ways but some require the hope that there is a higher entity that would somehow take some time out giving children AIDS in Africa and cure their cancer.

I don't miss anything.

There are innumerable extraneous variables in such studies, the most powerful of which will be the experimenters' and participants' intentions; these always go unaccounted for. It is impossible to neutralize such a powerful influence anyway, but they should at least be acknowledged. In the studies I posted about, the net intention of all participants will have the most powerful effect on the outcome. So if the experimenter was a religious man, then his intention will be for the study to show a positive effect. He will be likely to choose participants who are also religious, and maybe even the patients are religious. Right now we have a huge intention swing to the positive. The other factor - the net degree of consciousness - will now determine how powerful the effect is.

The study you posted is just as valid as the ones I posted. I underlined a few sentences in the study to show the negative intention. The guy is bound up in scientism, and is not open to other possibilities as shown by the quote "which a rational scientist would expect". So we know that his expectation and intention were negative. He got what he expected, which is what prayer is. Expectation = faith + intention. He's actually showing us that if you're negative, you will get a negative result. Then he goes on to say that prayer "can have negative consequences", which is quite laughable isn't it?! I mean the guy is hell bent on saying there's no effect at all and no higher power but then comes out and says there's a negative effect and that people should be very careful about praying. That's quite stupid on his part. To finish off, he shows his full on negative bias and intention by saying "there is a higher entity that would somehow take some time out giving children AIDS in Africa and cure their cancer". Can you see that there is a very bitter and disappointed guy talking? He seems to believe in the Sunday School version of God (with a beard and robes up in heaven) and he wonders why his prayers don't work. He is assigning the power to something fantastical outside of himself.

As I have stated above prayer doesn't need a "God" to work; it's about consciousness + intent. If you want to throw in a God then that's fine by me. Intention is easy. Developing the necessary degree of consciousness is the hard part and that's why in most cases, and for most people, prayer is not going to work.