Introspection

Why prayer is nonsense – part 2

Jason Thibeault, , , , 3 Comments

1 – First, define prayer

This is part 2 in a series of posts on prayer. Please use the links at the top and bottom of each post to navigate through the parts.

know your deities

In the monotheistic religions that make up the bulk of religions in the Western world, the variety of qualities ascribed to deities are so diverse as to populate the complete spectrum from the deist’s “the entire universe is God” (replacing nature with deity), to “God created everything exactly as suggested by my holy book and all the accounts therein of his intervention in history are absolutely true”. As there are as many postulated gods as there are people who believe in gods, one cannot argue against so many deities without letting a few slip through the cracks. Therefore, instead of breaking things down by deity, it will be far more useful to break things down by the properties postulated for the specific gods people happen to believe in.

In concert, some of these properties are mutually exclusive. Unsurprisingly, those couplings also cause the most grief when it comes to figuring out whether praying to your particular deity is worthwhile. Many of the properties that are suggested by humans for their particular flavor of deity are impossible in the scope of the universe we understand today. Many are redundant and require you to believe some very narrow views of the universe to accept their possibility. Many outright refute the body of evidence we humans have collected so far. For the purpose of this series, I will by and large ignore these problems, taking the special pleading arguments necessary to resolve such issues for granted, with one caveat — I will absolutely use the fact of the problems to argue against prayer in the matrix planned for part 5: “So why pray?”.
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Why prayer is nonsense – part 2
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Why I do what I do, and where I get my moral code

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , 28 Comments

James Carey, whom I know from university out there in meatspace, asked a few questions that were well off topic on the prayer post, and questions about prayer itself that will be, I hope, adequately answered in the course of the series proper. I decided to post my response as a full blog post of its own because I don’t really want to derail the point of the prayer threads.

James:

I had a bit of an ephinay the other day.

Every once in a while I find two silverfish in my bathtub. Silverfish are very inoffensive little critters so I just usually let them stay for a bit. Finally I go to take a shower and I look at them and think to myself, you guys aren’t going anywhere, you aren’t going to do anything productive. Gave you time to get going, now it’s too late. Turned the water on and sent them down the drain all the while thinking “I bet the apocalypse will be something like this…”

I have read several of your articles and I feel that there is an underlying venom that you try to camouflage with all of your facts, links, and introspectives. I am not particularily religious but even I realize that “prayer” is synonomous with “hope”. You say prayer is usless, it might be, but in my experience thinking good thoughts is never a waste. It goes further beyond trying to appeal to some diety, it is searching for some personal comfort to ease pain, fear, anxiety, etc. When you crap on prayer, you are crapping on hope.

“My father is dying of cancer, rather than praying to ease his suffering, I’ll go shop for hats.”

“My little girl has been kidnapped by a pedophilr, instead of everyone out of reach to offer any help praying for her safe return, you may as well squeeze in an extra game of solitaire”

“My husband is a firefighter, instead of praying for him to come home safely, I cry myself to sleep everynight thinking that tonight will be the night he doesn’t come home”

So I have a few questions for you. Why are you doing all of “This”? And more importantly, what is your moral compass? The Bible, the book of mormon have all been provided to you to tear apart and criticize but have you provided us with any sort of literature of what has helped form your own morals and core beliefs for us to inspect and criticize? If so, send me the link and I will be happy to read it and give it the same consideration you would on my beliefs.

And for anyone who wants to know what my moral compass is:

http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#37

Response below the fold.
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Why I do what I do, and where I get my moral code

Why prayer is nonsense – part 1

Jason Thibeault, , , 15 Comments

0 – Master post

This is part 1 in a series of posts on prayer. Please use the links at the top and bottom of each post to navigate through the parts.

first, define prayer

It’s always important to define your terms. Especially in debate with someone that believes in a particular religion — it’s horrible to get knee deep into a theological argument only to have them suddenly say “But I’m a Southern Baptist Episcopalian Wesleyan, I don’t believe THAT!” It makes the whole theism-vs-atheism debate ultimately futile, because while on the one hand you have the blanket position “there is insufficient evidence for any deities”, on the other you have a unique flavor of belief with such subtle nuances as to be shared by absolutely nobody else in the history of mankind. There are as many versions of God as there are people who believe in God. So figure out what your goalposts are before you start trying to make the punt.

The same is true with prayer. There are a number of different varieties of belief about prayer, which are usually coupled with specific properties ascribed to the deity to which you’re praying. Of course, in this list, I’m probably missing a bunch of important variations, but like I said, this isn’t meant to be exhaustive. The one major commonality is that praying involves actively directing one’s thoughts to a deity, usually also assuming a physical pose of piety (e.g. one one’s knees with hands clasped, bowed low so your forehead touches the ground, etc.) They may have other names in more seasoned theologians’ vernacular, but I break them down like this:

  • Interventionary prayer — prayer where you petition your deity to intervene in a particular event
  • Imprecatory prayer — asking your deity to do something evil to, or curse, another person. I’ve only separated this from interventionary prayer because of its diametrical opposition to omnibenevolence.
  • Prayer for guidance — wherein you ask for help or more information in making decisions (the “show me a sign” prayer)
  • Sycophantic prayer — wherein one proclaims how much they love or adore their deity, or giving thanks for events or prosperity that has been ascribed to divine provenance
  • Meditative prayer — prayer whose only purpose is to either calm oneself or convince oneself to accept a situation as God’s will
  • Redemptive prayer — praying for forgiveness for an act that one feels transgresses some law or another, looking for divine absolution (which sometimes comes in the form of not being smote — no smiting, no anger from God, right?)
  • Ouroboros prayer — when a person’s faith is flagging, praying to the deity for the sole purpose of reinforcing their faith in the deity’s existence (e.g., because you’re having a conversation with this deity, it must exist) — a self-feeding prayer

I’m sure someone will come along and offer other kinds of prayer that they believe to be totally worth doing, but any new addition would likely be nothing more than a slight variation of one of the above. Of these, the only one that at all resembles anything actually proven to work is the meditative prayer, because science has already proven meditation causing brain changes, it’s an old saw that blocking off a time for quiet introspection has net positive effects on your well-being and clarity of mind, and the effects of attempted mental self-discipline in the face of growing panic during desperate situations is self-evidently beneficial in the event you need to take some drastic action. So, because meditative prayer so resembles meditation itself, it says nothing about the deity involved (or not involved as the case may be), and so can be, by and large, ignored for the purposes of this series. Let’s just say “we know meditative prayer can help because it’s just meditation” and move along.

Please keep these definitions in mind through the rest of the series. Knowing these different kinds of prayer helps decide whether each is effective in the presence of certain types of deities.

2 – Know your deities

Why prayer is nonsense – part 1

Why prayer is nonsense – part 0

Jason Thibeault11 Comments

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

Reconstructing Criticism

Jason Thibeault1 Comment

Those of my loyal readers who are fond of criticizing me, my actions, or my tone, but don’t seem to know how to do it constructively, should read these posts by the indefatigable Stephanie Zvan.  This is an ongoing series — the master post is here.

Or, alternately, you can drop the pretense of constructive criticism and just accept that you’re REALLY hoping to cow yr. humble scrivener into submission. Don’t worry, that’s okay with me. Just understand that it’ll take a hell of a lot to manage that. I’m pretty damned pigheaded and I enjoy a good smashmouth thread now and then. Like the one that started off being about people dodging responsibility with regard to ecological disasters and rapidly turned into a “stop bashing religion” thread that’s still ongoing presently. (Well, that is, unless I’VE cowed everyone else into submission…)

Reconstructing Criticism

Should sexiness sell skepticism?

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , 3 Comments

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?

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Should sexiness sell skepticism?

The Fool

Jason Thibeault, , , 2 Comments

A few days ago, Jodi took Jen and Opal to see a counselor, whom we didn’t know was theist until he couldn’t keep his gob shut about how they’d have to seek aid from a higher power to make any kind of progress in their personal problems. My beloved wife kept her head about her, and asked if he knew of any more secular-oriented counselors, as she’s an atheist (yeah, she actually said it outright, go her!), and was pretty sure this wasn’t the type of counseling they needed. He apparently said something along the lines of “Oh, I’ve heard of atheists, the Bible talks about you.” I’m sure Jodi will correct me on this. But if this is accurate, you can bet money on what passage he’s referring to.

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
–Psalms 14:1

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The Fool

Honesty and emotions and pain and joy

Jason Thibeault, 1 Comment

I have some very honest friends, it seems. Both Jenny Wadley and Tim Iwan have written some evidently very difficult-to-write posts very recently. I’m still chewing on whether I can contribute anything to this dialog on honesty and emotions, but in the meantime, you’d do well to read their posts yourself.

From Jenny’s Truth Hurts:

I learned that my life isn’t always easy, but it’s always an interesting adventure. I learned that the real me didn’t need any embellishment. I learned that if you let people see you as you truly are, and they still like you, it is much more rewarding and amazing and humbling than if they like you for some false self. And, most importantly, I learned that there is freedom in being honest.

I struggled for a long time to fully embrace honesty. That’s why I say my honesty was hard-won, and why I’m not willing to give it up.

Over the last year, I’ve brought honesty to a whole new level within myself. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I truly don’t believe in a god. That I put my faith in people, and in love, but not in god. I’ve come to accept that I really want everyone to get along and for there to be no conflict, but that isn’t realistic. I’ve realized that the pseudo-science I grew up accepting is false and often dangerous, and that I’ve made mistakes in accepting the heartfelt convictions of others over the evidence of science. I’ve embraced that the fairy tales I grew up believing aren’t quite true, and that love isn’t as easy as one rescuer knight on a white horse taking me away from all of my problems.

And from Tim’s Strip Away the Labels and See Me As Me:

Flash forward to now, I am more confident and more assertive of myself, seeing the world with my own eyes and allowing it to overwhelm me with it’s seemingly-endless ideas and beauty. And yet I am still strangely feeling like a shell. To some, it feels as though I am nothing more than “The Sweet Skeptic Guy”, full of sincerity and genuine love. Which is entirely true, I never say anything I don’t mean. But it also can make me feel as though I am taken as, just like the title to that Douglas Adams book, “Mostly Harmless”. I am much more than just a sweet word or two that tells you that I hope your day is the best it can be, I am more than a word or two that tells you that you are beautiful, and I am more than a word or two that will do everything in his power to make sure that you are cheered up when your day is shitty or stressful. That is just a part of me, and not all of me.

I generally only put my favorite posts in the Introspection category. I like introspection, as much as I might curse it now and then. This may not be my own introspection, but it’s notable and laudable that my friends have such experiences on the intertubes as well. And I’m proud to be able to call both of them friends.

Honesty and emotions and pain and joy

Feminism, skepticism and boobies

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 26 Comments
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.

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Feminism, skepticism and boobies

More Formspring philosophy

Jason Thibeault2 Comments

More Formspring questions and answers. Enjoy!

Are you happy to be a skeptic?

I’m very happy with my worldview, and I think being skeptical provides me with an appropriate filter with which to examine claims about how this world works. It has freed me from all manner of superstition, ignorance, fear and undue hatred, and provided a clarity of understanding of the universe’s true mechanics unparalleled by unscientific hypotheses, and of the duplicity of humans who claim to understand *everything* about it and who provide pat answers.

Would I be happier if I believed I had more control over the universe than I do, via magical thinking or delusions of a connection with some higher power? Perhaps. But it would be a false sort of happiness, an unfulfilled and mistaken sense of peace.

why r u an atheist?

Straight question. Here’s a straight answer: I’ve never seen any reason to believe in any specific god or gods.

Once I got away from the reinforcement of being told there is definitely a god (named “God”), I figured out that I believed what others were telling me with absolutely no evidence and that I might as well believe in fairies or unicorns for all the proof I have. Or for all the proof anyone offered. When all you have to base your belief is one book and a whole lot of people that believe wholeheartedly that it’s true, you might as well worship Harry Potter for all the evidence you’ve been presented.

More Formspring philosophy