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.
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”.
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.
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?
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…?
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?
‘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.
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.
Any day now, magical sky man will solve all my problems!
Give up control so others can take it.
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.
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Or you could just say “prayers flowing” and never even pretend to do it.
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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?
Ramen!
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