Christians Say Interesting Things Part Two: "Pray For Me"

I've been thinking about this prayer thing for years now. I've even written two essays (linked below) using reason and logic to explore the irrationality and ineffectiveness of prayer.

Over the last few months as natural disasters have ripped through the south and the midwest and as I have personally dealt with the death of one of my best friends, I've seen, more than ever it seems, appeals for people to pray for them. During a calamity all of my social networking sites are clogged with people petitioning for prayer.

I simply don't understand it. Even when I was an evangelical Christian devoted to the teaching of the Bible I found it ineffective and slightly embarrassing to ask people to pray for me. As a progressive believer (meaning a believer more or less in touch with observable reality) I had relegated prayer to some abstract form of faith exercising. In my dialogues on the below essay's I've even heard some of you say this very thing. You pray because it changes you in an abstract sense, not because it actually changes reality.

And that brings us to my point. Here are some logical questions I have in response to people using social media to ask for prayers in the wake of an approaching thunder storm:

1. Is your god capricious enough to reserve help simply because not enough people prayed for it?

2. Don't you believe that god is in control of everything? Doesn't this include the very storm on it's way to potentially destroy your life? What is the goal of prayer here? To honor your god's will or to thwart it?

3. How do you explain the fact that there are people in this world who probably pray harder and better than you and who are still susceptible to the same natural disasters as yourself?

One Christian, who is fairly well known as a musician in a successful Christian band, had this to say in response to making it through a storm that others were destroyed by:

"We were *blessed* this line arrived after sunset. Avoided a tornadic outbreak. Feels good to get a reminder of Who is in charge."

I pointed out that this was incredibly offensive to those who were devastated by the storms and, according to this logic, "unblessed" by the Big Man in charge. He responded by saying he didn't consider it offensive to be thankful not to get hit by a tornado.

Do you see the cognitive dualism here, folks? It's like missing a flight that ends up crashing and thanking god for his goodness and his blessings while hundreds of lives were lost and thousands destroyed.

This is nonsense. If you want to pray to gods or to Elvis or to your dead loved ones then by all means, I want you to have the freedom to do that. But when you start publicly petitioning for prayer and thanking your god for sparing you while thousands of others are picking up the pieces then you deserve some social criticism.

Prayer quite obviously is a complete denial of reality. It is the ostrich burying it's head in the sand. It is childish and it is time to grow up, folks. What we need in a time of crisis is human solidarity and tangible resources. We don't need to waste our time praying to an invisible being who, whether that being exists or not, isn't going to do a damn thing for us. We don't need to proliferate wish thinking as a viable method of coping with tragedy.

We must use the tools of reality to face reality. Together.

In reason,

Clint Wells

Praying for Oil to Touchdown Jesus: Counting the Hits and Ignoring the Misses

Prayer, Science and Haiti

Christians Say Interesting Things Part One: Epistemology and Reality

Praying For Oil to Touchdown Jesus: Counting The Hits and Ignoring the Misses

According to a recent article at CNN.com, Louisiana lawmakers are proposing a day of prayer to stop the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. State Senator Robert Adley had this to say:

"Thus far efforts made by mortals to try to solve the crisis have been to no avail. It is clearly time for a miracle for us."

It is a testament to our great infancy as an intelligent species that in the era of modern science, the age of reason and enlightenment, state senators and even President Obama (for crying out loud) actually consider speaking to an invisible deity a reasonable solution for this horrendous calamity. Perhaps these politicians are simply appealing to the American majority of evangelical Christians and do not, in fact, consider prayer a reasonable course of action. No matter. The fact that they have to appeal to such nonsense to secure their offices by a majority democratic vote is enough reason to be alarmed.

In my essay Prayer, Science and Haiti I made a strong case, using observed evidence, for the ineffectiveness of prayer. I won't elaborate any further on that as it is scientifically uncontested.

This is what bothers me about praying for the oil spill: While the pious are kneeling before an unverifiable god wishing for a miracle, someone is working around the clock to actually solve the problem. When they do solve the problem it will be because of the ingenuity of that person (or team of people) and it will be implemented using tools and methods derived solely from science. But what will the religious community say? They will shout to the heavens about how GOD answered their prayers! They'll talk about the futile efforts of man and how good GOD is to have heard their fledgling petitions. They will completely ignore the fact that GOD could have easily prevented the oil spill in the first place or plugged the hole with a divine horde of angels, thereby saving the lives of countless animals and protecting America from another devastating economic blow.

And here is the truly remarkable thing. What will the religious community say if the day of prayer does not have any effect on the oil spill whatsoever (as observable reality suggests)? Well, of course they will say that GOD's will is mysterious and that it is probably for the good of our national character, even though our minds are too puny to comprehend it. They might say it's the work of the devil in the eternal battle for good and evil. More likely, they will blame it on the gays, abortionists, democrats or really any demographic they do not belong to. One thing it seems they will certainly not do is reflect on whether or not it was a complete waste of time. They certainly will not wonder if GOD really exists or not.

Why should they? After all everyone has at least one story of baffling circumstantial coincidence. Maybe you were about to file bankruptcy and a relative died leaving you an inheritance. Maybe you struck out every time you were up to bat except for the one time the bases were loaded. Maybe you survived a car crash without a scratch. Maybe your relative's cancer went into remission. And so on and so forth. I've had moments like these. We all have.

But if we're really honest we've had A LOT more moments when these things did not pan out. We've prayed for LOTS of things that never happened. After all, every basketball game ends confirming the prayers of one side and ignoring the prayers of the other, right? The progressive believer may say that God does not care about sporting events. Fair enough. But what about when children die of cancer? What about when families are torn apart by substance abuse? No, the perceived answer to prayers are commonly things that would have happened naturally either way (thus compatible with laws of probability) or are results of scientific innovation (antibiotics, surgery, genetic engineering, etc.).

This is called confirmation bias or, counting the hits and ignoring the misses. Consider the incredibly ironic story of a recent lightning bolt destroying the Touchdown Jesus statue in Monroe, Ohio. Now if a lightning bolt had struck the Hustler adult store across the street from Touchdown Jesus these people would have no doubt considered that an act of GOD. A fiery judgment on fornication. But since the lighting hit Jesus square in the face they are appealing to science, blaming the sporadic nature of lightning and the metal frame that Touchdown Jesus housed under his buttery exterior. Interestingly none of them consider the lightning a judgment from Zeus, the once widely worshiped thunder god.

It may be clear to Senator Adley that we need a prayer miracle in the gulf. But it's clear to me and any reasonable person that sitting around and talking to yourself is exactly what we DO NOT need. We need real people devising real solutions to a real problem. People think I'm angry? Well, when it comes to this issue, if you're not angry then you're not paying attention.

In Reason,

Clint Wells

Prayer, Science and Haiti

When the devastating Haitian earthquake happened several months ago I, like many of you, was overwhelmed with the awfulness of that great tragedy. As the media began to flood in pictures and videos of mothers being torn from their children and houses falling on top of families I sat, with all of you, feeling immeasurably impotent to help my fellow human beings as their entire world sank into hell.

I was encouraged and humbled to see both secular and religious organizations pool their collective resources in order to send medical attention and funds to Haiti in order to rescue and rebuild. The arts community, which I am unendingly proud to be a part of and a community that ALWAYS gives during tragedy, did its part by playing countless shows and giving away tons of music with all proceeds going to Haiti.

World calamity has a way of putting a shot in the arm of human solidarity. People become kinder, gentler and astonishingly altruistic. There is a large debate about WHY human beings react to tragedy this way. One side gives supernatural reasons, as if human solidarity wouldn’t exist without laws, rewards, and punishments from gods. The other side posits natural explanations such as a hundred thousand years of group cooperation through which evolution has given us a collective shared value of pain avoidance and empathy. At any rate, I’m not writing this to hash out that debate. I think what I have to say applies to both camps and can be agreed upon in practice, if not in doctrine.

Alongside the many laudable efforts coordinated to bring tangible relief to Haiti, there also unsurprisingly arose a barrage of petitions to pray for those suffering from the tragic event. It seems that Twitter and Facebook status updates were bursting with pious accolades about prayer. At the time, being as passionate about my secular humanist worldview as I am, I wrote this on Twitter, followed by a link to an organization that made it very simple to donate to a secular Haitian relief fund through your mobile phone:

“Believing friends, please consider this more practical alternative to helping Haitians”

This phrase caused remarkable consternation amongst my friends and enemies alike. How dare I suggest that prayer is not just as practical as donating money? In fact, if God really is the all loving, all knowing, and all merciful being that most Christians believe Him to be, and further if this god is somehow moved to act by the sheer will of his people, then praying is THE MOST practical thing one can do in the face of such a harrowing event. I wanted to take a few moments and respond to you, friend and enemy, about my comment.

1. The wording of my petition was intentionally less intense than how I actually feel about prayer. I find it to be an absolutely childish waste of time and energy and an offense to the suffering people you claim to be helping. But notice that I said “please consider” a “more practical” alternative. I recognize that I will live and die as a minority in this day and age processing information about the world as a non-theist. I also recognize that the believing person is so insanely defensive and insulated from criticism about his/her beliefs that the only way to effectively plead for rational action is to tread lightly (on my grumpier days I refer to this as “babying”). I’m not overly concerned that you believe me, but as a matter of fact (hopefully facts matter to you) I wanted to word that phrase in such a way that was thoughtful about my believing friends who I know want to help the suffering as much as I do, and at the same time pointed to a fact that is subversively obvious to all of us, whether we believe in the efficacy of prayer or not (more on this in point 3). I’m fairly certain I accomplished this from my end.

2. It’s true that prayer does not work. At least insofar as we know that things are true. So, how do we know that things are true? Do we use our common sense? One writer humorously notes that our common sense is what tells us the earth is flat. Is it what we feel? How do we distinguish what we feel as truth when feelings can be so easily manipulated by chemical changes in the brain? Do we simply believe truth based on authority? How can we find the Holocaust repugnant? Is truth decided by consensus? Well then perhaps we should all consider Islam a reasonable belief system since there around 1.4 billion of its followers walking the Earth.

You and I both know how we know things are true. We look at the evidence. Almost every decision you make in your day to day life is predicated on the success of the scientific method and evidence. When you plan your vacation you consult weather experts who use meteorological instruments to make the best possible predictions about weather patterns. When you invest the money you work hard for you consult the hard data of stock trends or hire financial experts who consult the hard data of stock trends. When you’re trying to decide which toothpaste is going to help you get laid easier, you read reviews and are naturally swayed by the recommendation of your personal dentist. When your child is sick you rely on your family physician to make a decision based on the education he has received about medicine developed in labs that withstood the rigorous tests of falsification and failure. This is hardly disputable.

Now, all of these things (and many, many more) are verified by testing hypothesis through considering every variable and having the conclusions replicated in the same conditions and with immunity to falsification. This is the scientific method and it is likely the most important mechanism for discovery ever utilized by the human species. I say all of this because the effects of intercessory prayer have been tested many times. I will point you to the largest study done to date, the STEP Prayer Project and leave it to you to do your own research. The short of it is that NONE of them have yielded any results that suggest anything outside of normal laws of probability. This is important and this matters. Do not believe the lie your pastors tell you about the scientific community being biased towards the supernatural. If prayer was actually a practical way of dealing with suffering that would be one of the most impacting discoveries in human history. The STEP Prayer Project was even funded by the Templeton Foundation, a theistic organization that gives a SHITLOAD of money to people who are trying to prove the existence of god through science.

So as far as we know from the data, and again this is how you make nearly every decision of your day to day life, I was pretty much totally correct to consider the donation of money to a reputable relief fund more practical than donating thoughts to a god.

3. You KNOW this is true and you prove it every day. Just today I had a lovely lunch with my sweet, beautiful grandmother. As you may imagine she is a devout Christian and although she does not hedge any of her beliefs around me, she has been very accepting and gracious to me about spiritual language. I do not talk religion with anyone in my family unless they invite me to (they usually do) so we were having a conversation about a woman she works with who is going through a hard time. She remarked that this young girl always calls her in troubled times and asks for prayer. The last time she called, my grandmother, who was lovingly fed up with this young woman’s constant self-destructive relationships with dubious men, replied, “Honey, how about we stop praying for a bit and actually DO something to change your life.” I swear to the COSMOS my grandmother had no idea I was writing this piece today. If I didn’t know better I might mistakenly refer to this coincidence as a “god-thing.”

I digress.

The point is that even my deeply religious and sincerely believing grandmother recognizes the ineffectual nature of prayer. Her great care for this young woman pushed her to the point of suspending the mumbo jumbo, rolling her sleeves up and GETTING TO WORK.

Now other than being a less beautiful human being, you are no different from my grandmother. When you want to lose 15 pounds try praying about it while you eat Doritos and watch Seinfeld reruns and see how helpful that is. When you want a promotion try praying about it and watch your more ambitious, harder working peer get it instead. And more seriously, when your children are sick do you pray about it or do you take them to a qualified and reputable physician? What if your pharmacist gave you a prescription that could mean life and death to your child and instead of offering you the comfort of intense peer review as well as FDA certification he told you he had prayed about it? This is self-evident. So why keep up the pretenses?

Objections:

I pray because I know that it changes reality.

No it doesn’t. There has never been a documented miracle published in any peer reviewed science journal. Most cases are explained simply and easily by medicine (directly through treatment or indirectly through a placebo effect) or natural causes. I once asked a friend who claimed to believe in miracles to prove it. She told me that god healed her mother’s cancer. She actually played the cancer card! Through a mutual friend I learned that her mother had undergone extensive radiation therapy at one of the top hospitals in the country. And yet her remission was miraculous? There has never been a miraculous regeneration of a severed limb? Why is that? Does God hate the amputees as this insightful website asks? Or is there no god?

I pray because it makes me a better person.

Well, perhaps it does in which case it still stands to reason that offering prayer to suffering human beings is the least practical option for helping imaginable.

What if I pray AND offer practical help to the suffering?

Obviously this is preferable. But let’s see which one works, shall we? And this brings up another point. How is it that when people pray for something like a loved one battling cancer that when the outcome is positive (Uncle Albert survived cancer!) God gets the credit but when the outcome is negative (Uncle Albert died in excruciating pain as cancer ate away his internal organs) God is still great but He just has mysterious ways? This is perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment of insulation to criticism I’ve ever heard of.

You’re a Meany!

Perhaps it is cruel of me to use such strong language in a culture that highly values things like prayer. My intentions are not to be mean to you or steal anything away from you. My intentions are to passionately seek the truth. And in the wake of such calamity and devastation as our fellow human beings endured (and are still enduring) in Haiti I can’t imagine a more important time to believe in true things and reject false things.

I take no pleasure in conflict for conflicts sake. But I will gladly start a sticky dialogue, even to the consternation of my friends and enemies, in order to bear out truth. In light of all these things I still consider my original statement true and I stand by it. I hope you will thoughtfully consider more practical alternatives to prayer as you walk your many lovely roads that will, no doubt, lay punctuated with suffering.

Yours in reason,

Clint Wells