Sunday, July 01, 2007

Prayer

As I discussed in my previous post, prayer is not for the benefit of the person being prayed for. Science has proven that prayer has no effect on the person being prayed for. Prayer is really for the benefit of the person doing the praying, and that’s why it persists. Prayer is a comfort, based on the illusion that in the face of this cold and pitiless universe, this vale of tears, one has some sort of recourse. One can plead for forgiveness, for redemption, for justice, would somebody give me a break here!

Interesting that the religious, who tend to argue that God is all-powerful and His motives are unknowable, should cultivate the belief that God can be swayed by fervent prayer, ideally by many people praying for the same outcome at the same time. Even more absurd, that God can be swayed by his Son tugging at his cape…

But to reiterate, one of my goals in this blog is to examine the human motivations for religious behaviours. I think we will find, as with prayer, that there’s a fairly sensible basis for every religious belief – although it’s rarely the one given by the religious themselves… And while religious beliefs appear to many to be quite irrational because they are driven by the emotions rather than the intellect, I think we’ll also find that emotion and instinct has its own rationale and its own intelligence.

I think we’ll also find that the power of religious myth is that it points to realities that science appears as yet to be only dimly aware of…

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