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?
I’m curious about Part 4.
Off topic: Is there a link to your home page when you’re in a post? I might be a techno-idiot, but I can’t find one and it’s irritating to have to go back to address bar to get back to the home page.
I found it. I’m officially a techno-idiot! (In my defence, I’d clicked there before, but for some reason it didn’t work.)
You’ll hopefully keep checking back for part 4 then! I might even have to string it along a while to keep you coming back for more.
Ah, I missed you.
As you know well by now, I’m not good with blogs. That you’re posting links on FaceBook helps, though!
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