Spaz makes sense, but...watermelon? Is there something I don't know? Is that like fried chicken, or is the throwing the problem? Either way...I defend my right to make political math jokes without having people call me racist...
(1) you put it on a jumbo jet so you can fly to the battlefield and provide cover for your advance units, or to patrol over your allies. (2) you put it on a jumbojet so your bazillion dollar laser isn't limited to line-of-sight shots.
that's true! if it weren't for the heroic work of grammaticians, we never would have suppressed vulgar Latin and its barbaric northern offshoot "dialects"!
most of what i've seen directly haven't been walking-on-water miracles; more of people changing in unexpected ways and the like; things which carry a great deal of plausible deniability (it could have just been time, or friends, etc) but which comfort me when i doubt. more dramatic stories tend to come from missionaries i know, who have had very wacky things happen - from tribesmen who had come to kill them in the night being shooed off by people nobody had seen before or since, to a woman who walked right into an African warlord's camp and into his tent, where she opened up a bible and told him (he was not a Christian) that Jesus wanted him to stop slaughtering and raping everyone in the area -- then packed up and left, and lived to tell the tale. is there deniability? of course -- one could have been people from another tribe just passing through, or maybe a hallucination, the other could have just been a weird day where the guards didn't feel like shooting intruders on sight. in the same way, parting the red sea could have been caused by an earthquake or freak windstorm, healings by biochemical processes, and walking on water by illusion. so miracles in themselves are a lousy way to convince doubters -- and debunking miracles a lousy way to make doubters, as the interpretational rubric of the hearer will do far more to their conclusion than the impressiveness of the event. thus the constant tension in Jesus' teaching where people ask him for signs and he basically rolls his eyes and reminds them it's not going to help -- that those who it would help believe already believe, and those who it wouldn't, don't intend to believe in the first place.
and yes, the opposite is equally true: that people overattribute things to miracles, which can largely be attributed to the rules of how the world works. but even then, i'm not sure it's problematic to thank God for his mercy, even if that mercy was simply in the laws of physics not killing you today.
one should also remember, when talking with Christians, that they are living with a scriptural tension between a God who declares he will welcome all who come to him, and wants all to come to him, with a God who makes it clear that he is in charge, and that, while he is in himself loving, he is also just, and we will find some of his choices inexplicable. terribly, terribly frustrating to agnostics, who find it all to be a silly way of excusing God for the ways of the world, but also the logical outworking of any monotheistic system in which the god is an actual creating being, rather than the invented conglomeration of the desires of the religious folk -- which is to say, something inexplicably bigger and more intense than a human. and, of course, there's always the problem of sin, and the idea that this world is cursed -- not to say it isn't a nice place much of the time, and that we can't have a great time here, but that over all of it is the persistence of human evil (which i like to call "the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine") and suffering and death. to one who doesn't buy into the idea that this life is an in-between state built of our own desires (between perfect creation and a return to God's presence), the idea that God is perfectly willing to let human evil work itself out in temporal suffering is abhorrent. even things like car accidents -- they sure seem arbitrary, but remember it's we humans that think we really need to move fast -- if we really wanted to end car accidents tomorrow, we could -- we could just return to carless town living, and reserve speedy vehicles for emergencies. but we don't want that, so we choose speed instead -- and then blame God when someone gets run over.
drawing it all back down again...to me, conversions of nonbelievers to Christ is actually a more important/merciful miracle than walking on water or helping the blind to see and the paralyzed to walk -- since that change, in my worldview, is equally difficult (assuming everybody is as donkeyheaded as me) but effects a much greater change.
again: the study does not even address the question of whether praying is more likely to help you than not praying, as both groups, as the study noted and as i mentioned, had people praying for them (friends and family members not covered by the study). again: all the study showed was that adding the additional prayers of some people the scientists brought in on top of the unmeasured people who were already praying didn't affect the baseline statistics. which is to say: the study doesn't support your conclusion.
that said, if the study was valid, and confirmed or denied my opinions, i still wouldn't be impressed -- prayers for miracles are for miracles, and should be expected to be *statistically* significant.
now, to directly address your question:
the specific/relevant Judeo-Christian answer is that God does prefer to work through our prayers. if God chooses to help those who didn't pray, great. but my premise is the God is a sentient being, not a mindless force, and that he does like it when people do as he asks. supplicatory prayers are also requests, not incantations, which can be confirmed or denied, or answered in ways not requested. and, with a God primarily interested in our eternal selves rather than our current fleeting state, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if mortality rates among praying believers and nonpraying nonbelievers were equivalent, and that prayers for extended life were answered much less frequently than prayers for faith/comfort/charity, etc (or the latter substituted for the former).
but my most direct, simple answer: i pray for help because i believe that's the right thing to do. it's like screaming when drowning in a public pool instead of just splashing and sinking -- the lifeguard will pull you out either way, but the lifeguard prefers it if you make it very clear you want his or her help...and when you're drowning, there is wisdom in doing what the lifeguard prefers. odd analogy; but i'm not much an analogymaker, and it's all that came to me.
yes, you believe partly because the bible says so, in the same way you believe other historical things because of other historical texts. and yes, you analyze sources and make decisions on your own.
as for the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures, your "3" number is actually quite low -- I presume you're referring solely to the first several books, in which theories range from 1 to 5, with lots of questions about textual criticism; the rest was written by dozens of people, 1-3 per book. As for the New Testament, there's much controversy, but it is absolutely known that the entire thing was writting by the 2nd century, as that's when the first manuscripts start appearing, and it's widely theorized (judging by internal and external references) that the whole thing was written between 50 and 150 AD, which is within the lifetime of eyewitnesses and near-secondhand accounts (not generational rumor). and as for the "arbitrary exclusions" -- they're hardly arbitrary; if you read those texts (many of which survive) it's clear that they are describing the events in very different ways -- meaning one or both is wrong. which you believe determines whether you're "orthodox" or "unorthodox", but disagreement in historical texts doesn't mean you can't do history -- it just means there will by myriad opinions.
so why take this deity over the greek gods? well; for me, having done my research and read the texts and read other texts, i find the JudeoChristian accounts more credible than Egyptian/Greek/Roman/etc. and that's my interpretation, based on my research; yours is clearly different, and i don't have the slightest problem with that. of course, my beliefs cause me to want to convince you -- but that's very different from actually disrespecting your opinion, or thinking it's less well-informed and rational than mine.
it...doesn't really, in a specific way, but the Gospels are presented in a direct, evidentiary style -- saying what happened when where in Jesus' life, and why the reader should really believe that this guy he was reading about actually did claim he was God's son, said he would die as a propiatiatory sacrifice (like the sheep and bulls in the Old Testament, but on steroids), and then performed a whole bunch of miracles, died, and was resurrected. Thus the argument goes "things you can confirm > Jesus > God." And those sections are written assuming a rational doubter, who needs lots of historical evidence to believe that anything like that -- and is, in fact, liberally salted with people just like that, who say things like "i can't believe that!"
The Jewish scriptures are similar -- they don't say "believe in God," they say "remember what God has done" -- direct, event-correlated evidence, corresponding to things recorded in the past.
following the rational lines of argument (there are others -- prophecy/fulfillment foremost, as well as conversion stories among witnesses to miracles and the endurance of the witnesses in claiming their belief that they'd seen things even when being tortured and killed) is the "taste and see" argument, made to those who are somewhat convinced by the evidentiary histories -- which basically says, hey, spend time learning the scriptures and praying, and see if, underneath your doubts, you really do believe God is good. it's an argument from design, which basically says God created humans to worship him, and to respond to his influence on their lives, and they'll see that if they're faithful.
the oversimplification of that is the Mormon "I know my God is true because I feel it in my heart," to which I say "I feel a lot of things in my heart which I know are wrong." for me -- as a late convert -- if it weren't for all the prophecies and miracles in the Christian scriptures (which, as a classicist, I do actually give credence to), I'd be hard-pressed to not still be a happy little agnostic.
But the question is, if he helps you even if you aren't prayed for, why bother praying?
the initial/general Christian answer is something along the lines of "why bother talking with your wife if she's going to make you dinner anyway?" -- because the talking is an end in itself, and even if she already knows you want chicken tonight, it builds your relationship to talk about it.
the specific/relevant Judeo-Christian answer is that God does prefer to work through our prayers, and you will see the occassional miracle -- personally, if not statistically, significant.
and the scientific answer, as i mentioned, is that most people in the study were being prayed for, even in the not-being-prayed-for group (by family, friends, etc), so this wasn't a prayed/not-prayed study, it was a prayed/prayed-with-extra-prayers study, which showed no marked improvement in the latter group -- so it doesn't say prayer is ineffective, it says that studies where the scientists try to affect God's will by stacking the deck show negative results. which is why i say it proves nothing, except, perhaps, that if there is a God, He/She/It doesn't react to prayer like a mindless force (more words, more results).
i'm not agreeing that prayer doesn't work, i'm just saying that God isn't morally obligated to respond positively to prayer in a statistically significant way, in the way we want, for the purpose of statistics. the study admitted something like 89% of subjects had people praying for them -- so confirming the study would have required God specifically killing off more people in the control group and healing more in the extra-prayer group, just to cause statistical correlation between the number of people being prayed for *by measured praying-people,* and the people not in that group. objectively, the only real difference in the two groups was that they'd been arbitrarily placed in two groups.
i pick at the wording because it assumes these people deserve to be given a few more years to live, and, moreover, that God is obligated to be more merciful on those in the commissioned-prayer subgroup. it assumes that mercy = extra years of life, and the extra years of life = the greatest good.
by his logic, as far as i can tell, other considerations (afterlife, personal growth, God's glory) are "lesser", and reveal selfishness or blameworthy otherworldiness. that's where i disagree with him, not on his conclusions -- given his givens, his conclusions would be correct. so i have to pick at his wording to argue against what i actually disagree with.
anyhoo...why pursue discoveries/art/music/family? because they're good and pleasing, and acts of worship in themselves. things can bring meaning to life without being its true meaning.
i find worldview hubris far more troublesome, historically, than worldview belief -- religious or irreligious. take what you belive with a grain of salt (even believing your belief is the only belief is ok if you're respectful of other opinions) and you'll be a nice, quiet, functioning member of society -- perhaps annoying (door to door proselytes), but benign -- assume you're perfect and you get jihadi, inquisitors, and atheist/communist pograms.
all to say: calling people like me dangerous is fine, but only if i can say the same about you, and then we can shrug and go out for a beer and some poker.
you're probably right, on all counts. but i wasn't saying a deity would actively hide his/her existence, just that he/she/it would be under no obligation to respond in a particular way simply to reveal it. if a god chooses to miraculously heal someone of something, for whatever reason, it should be taken as a miracle. studies like this assume miracles (violations of natural causality) are commonplace enough to be picked up in a small net, and to be statistically significant therein. i don't think many religious people really believe that.
dino bones and mortality -- as far as i'm concerned, they're all part of a world which was created to function as a world. even if you're a 7-day-creationist, you're presented with a world on the 7th day which has things like dirt (made of decomposed organic matter and ground up rock) and full-grown trees (with lots of rings) and full-grown animals (with bellybuttons). so either the world was made to be x billion years old, or x billion years passed during its creation...but either way, there's no "deception" since the account itself said the world mankind first inhabited contained rocks (sedimentary?) and trees (full grown) and animals (full grown). so an honest reading of Christian lit doesn't contradict evolution/big bang stuff, it actually confirms it (the world appears/is old), but it gives a "why" and a bit of "how" to that understanding.
that's only relevant because the processes of healing and death are part of the religious person's understanding of his/her world -- as far as they're concerned, every person that got better received temporal mercies, and every person who didn't, didn't. so -- yes, any study that reveals that the world, in fact, works the way it seems to work, with some dying and some living, won't affect the religious person's faith in any way, since that's a given in their understanding that the world gets along alright just fine as it is.
so...yes, worldview theories tend to be unfalsifiable. frustrating, yes, but doesn't mean they're foolhardy.
hinduism is explicitly interested in karma/reincarnation in search of nirvana, and islam in heaven (thus the whole "72 virgins" controversy with islamist sects); i know less about buddhism, but believe it has its own vested interest in acheiving tranquility and oneness. Judaism has varied in emphasis over the millenia, and is currently in one of its more worldly incarnations; historical Judaism, has, however, been every bit as apocalyptic and heaven-focused as modern American fundamentalism. but i think we're now firmly off topic.:-)
...if whatever pertinent deity exists, it cares more about its ego than the needs of people who may die...
who *may* die? frankly, i will bet you a great deal of money that *all* people *will* die. yes, our science can buy us longer lives, and, possibly, more pleasant deaths (though wasting away to cancer hardly counts as more pleasant than saber-toothed-tigers to me), but when it comes to "not dying," religion tends to be more concerned with the (permanent) afterlife than the (curiously impermanent) mortal coil -- where the latter comes in, it's more in the terms of living well: feeding the hungry, sheltering the alien, consoling the widow.
The issue is to debunk pseudoscience and other mystic entities.
the real problem with anything like this is that prayer, unlike spells or rituals, is a process by which a person attempts to communicate with another sentient being, who knows all about the situation. So what this study really asks, as interpreted by Christians (or other monotheists) is whether their deity chooses to respond in a way solely calculated to reveal his or herself -- none of the praying people were vested in the lives of those being prayed for (eg, the people themselves or their families), so *if* there was a God listening, he/she/it would have no reason to respond to the prayer other than to confirm his/her/its existence (via "the power of prayer"). of course, if a deity wanted worshippers rather than foul-weather friends, there'd be a vested interest in *not* responding, since few revelatory world faiths reveal gods particularly interested in being mindless prayer-fillers -- the theme of a "jealous God" who would rather have followers/worshippers/lovers (figuratively speaking) than "witch-doctors" who treat their god like a soulless force (like gravity) would suggest the study should, indeed, fail, as confirming it would contradict God's "desires."
all this study does is confirm that either (1) there is no God or (2) God isn't amused by pseudoscientific studies. so the results support both the Atheist and orthodox Christian worldviews, and are only troubling to wishy-washy new agey-types that believe thinking happy thoughts should magically help other people. wee.
Re:Simulations are lacking, here's why
on
Students vs. Hackers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
using the information gleaned here to apply to real-world situations is lacking in one MAJOR area: They neglect the aspect of social hacking.
i think you missed the vignette about the little tidbit obtained before the contest even started: the stat sheet on the systems the defendors had been issued, that the Red Team conned off someone. seems sorta equivalent of pulling a sales receipt out of a dumpster to me...
believe this law siginificantly cuts down on emissions and improves fuel efficency,
yeah...because building a new car for gramma who drives 200 miles per year (to church and back), or sonny who drives 1000 (to school and back) helps the environment.
pollution-mile limits: while equally draconian, might help the environment (such as consumer cars with emissions 50% over the limit can be driven 2000 miles per year, 100%, 1000, etc), but mandatory scrapping...sorta iffy.
Has anyone raised the point that the current NASA director may actually have some very smart advisors? Six months ago NASA was doing the worst possible thing (economically) but the best for short-term job-security: kowtowing to Congress and saying "Oh yes great leaders we will do more with less." Now, someone had the bright idea, and the balls, to stick it to Congress, and announce cancellation after cancellation -- which doesn't mean the programs will actually *be* cancelled. This could all be a massive game of chicken, in which NASA releases press release after press release hitting constituency after constituency until 51% of congress has people set to be directly harmed by the cuts (lost jobs, lost revenue from satellite services, etc), and actually hands over the cash to save the programs. The director will piss off his bosses and may lose his job, but he'll save his organization.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, "spaz" and "watermelon" both qualified in the past 24 hours.
Spaz makes sense, but...watermelon? Is there something I don't know? Is that like fried chicken, or is the throwing the problem? Either way...I defend my right to make political math jokes without having people call me racist...
(1) you put it on a jumbo jet so you can fly to the battlefield and provide cover for your advance units, or to patrol over your allies. (2) you put it on a jumbojet so your bazillion dollar laser isn't limited to line-of-sight shots.
10 do: walk
20 if: motion = yes, say "whew, all is well"
30 else, say "ow"
40 goto 10
50
60 profit!!
that's true! if it weren't for the heroic work of grammaticians, we never would have suppressed vulgar Latin and its barbaric northern offshoot "dialects"!
most of what i've seen directly haven't been walking-on-water miracles; more of people changing in unexpected ways and the like; things which carry a great deal of plausible deniability (it could have just been time, or friends, etc) but which comfort me when i doubt. more dramatic stories tend to come from missionaries i know, who have had very wacky things happen - from tribesmen who had come to kill them in the night being shooed off by people nobody had seen before or since, to a woman who walked right into an African warlord's camp and into his tent, where she opened up a bible and told him (he was not a Christian) that Jesus wanted him to stop slaughtering and raping everyone in the area -- then packed up and left, and lived to tell the tale. is there deniability? of course -- one could have been people from another tribe just passing through, or maybe a hallucination, the other could have just been a weird day where the guards didn't feel like shooting intruders on sight. in the same way, parting the red sea could have been caused by an earthquake or freak windstorm, healings by biochemical processes, and walking on water by illusion. so miracles in themselves are a lousy way to convince doubters -- and debunking miracles a lousy way to make doubters, as the interpretational rubric of the hearer will do far more to their conclusion than the impressiveness of the event. thus the constant tension in Jesus' teaching where people ask him for signs and he basically rolls his eyes and reminds them it's not going to help -- that those who it would help believe already believe, and those who it wouldn't, don't intend to believe in the first place.
and yes, the opposite is equally true: that people overattribute things to miracles, which can largely be attributed to the rules of how the world works. but even then, i'm not sure it's problematic to thank God for his mercy, even if that mercy was simply in the laws of physics not killing you today.
one should also remember, when talking with Christians, that they are living with a scriptural tension between a God who declares he will welcome all who come to him, and wants all to come to him, with a God who makes it clear that he is in charge, and that, while he is in himself loving, he is also just, and we will find some of his choices inexplicable. terribly, terribly frustrating to agnostics, who find it all to be a silly way of excusing God for the ways of the world, but also the logical outworking of any monotheistic system in which the god is an actual creating being, rather than the invented conglomeration of the desires of the religious folk -- which is to say, something inexplicably bigger and more intense than a human. and, of course, there's always the problem of sin, and the idea that this world is cursed -- not to say it isn't a nice place much of the time, and that we can't have a great time here, but that over all of it is the persistence of human evil (which i like to call "the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine") and suffering and death. to one who doesn't buy into the idea that this life is an in-between state built of our own desires (between perfect creation and a return to God's presence), the idea that God is perfectly willing to let human evil work itself out in temporal suffering is abhorrent. even things like car accidents -- they sure seem arbitrary, but remember it's we humans that think we really need to move fast -- if we really wanted to end car accidents tomorrow, we could -- we could just return to carless town living, and reserve speedy vehicles for emergencies. but we don't want that, so we choose speed instead -- and then blame God when someone gets run over.
drawing it all back down again...to me, conversions of nonbelievers to Christ is actually a more important/merciful miracle than walking on water or helping the blind to see and the paralyzed to walk -- since that change, in my worldview, is equally difficult (assuming everybody is as donkeyheaded as me) but effects a much greater change.
again: the study does not even address the question of whether praying is more likely to help you than not praying, as both groups, as the study noted and as i mentioned, had people praying for them (friends and family members not covered by the study). again: all the study showed was that adding the additional prayers of some people the scientists brought in on top of the unmeasured people who were already praying didn't affect the baseline statistics. which is to say: the study doesn't support your conclusion.
that said, if the study was valid, and confirmed or denied my opinions, i still wouldn't be impressed -- prayers for miracles are for miracles, and should be expected to be *statistically* significant.
now, to directly address your question:
the specific/relevant Judeo-Christian answer is that God does prefer to work through our prayers. if God chooses to help those who didn't pray, great. but my premise is the God is a sentient being, not a mindless force, and that he does like it when people do as he asks. supplicatory prayers are also requests, not incantations, which can be confirmed or denied, or answered in ways not requested. and, with a God primarily interested in our eternal selves rather than our current fleeting state, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if mortality rates among praying believers and nonpraying nonbelievers were equivalent, and that prayers for extended life were answered much less frequently than prayers for faith/comfort/charity, etc (or the latter substituted for the former).
but my most direct, simple answer: i pray for help because i believe that's the right thing to do. it's like screaming when drowning in a public pool instead of just splashing and sinking -- the lifeguard will pull you out either way, but the lifeguard prefers it if you make it very clear you want his or her help...and when you're drowning, there is wisdom in doing what the lifeguard prefers. odd analogy; but i'm not much an analogymaker, and it's all that came to me.
all too true, all too true.
yes, you believe partly because the bible says so, in the same way you believe other historical things because of other historical texts. and yes, you analyze sources and make decisions on your own.
as for the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures, your "3" number is actually quite low -- I presume you're referring solely to the first several books, in which theories range from 1 to 5, with lots of questions about textual criticism; the rest was written by dozens of people, 1-3 per book. As for the New Testament, there's much controversy, but it is absolutely known that the entire thing was writting by the 2nd century, as that's when the first manuscripts start appearing, and it's widely theorized (judging by internal and external references) that the whole thing was written between 50 and 150 AD, which is within the lifetime of eyewitnesses and near-secondhand accounts (not generational rumor). and as for the "arbitrary exclusions" -- they're hardly arbitrary; if you read those texts (many of which survive) it's clear that they are describing the events in very different ways -- meaning one or both is wrong. which you believe determines whether you're "orthodox" or "unorthodox", but disagreement in historical texts doesn't mean you can't do history -- it just means there will by myriad opinions.
so why take this deity over the greek gods? well; for me, having done my research and read the texts and read other texts, i find the JudeoChristian accounts more credible than Egyptian/Greek/Roman/etc. and that's my interpretation, based on my research; yours is clearly different, and i don't have the slightest problem with that. of course, my beliefs cause me to want to convince you -- but that's very different from actually disrespecting your opinion, or thinking it's less well-informed and rational than mine.
it...doesn't really, in a specific way, but the Gospels are presented in a direct, evidentiary style -- saying what happened when where in Jesus' life, and why the reader should really believe that this guy he was reading about actually did claim he was God's son, said he would die as a propiatiatory sacrifice (like the sheep and bulls in the Old Testament, but on steroids), and then performed a whole bunch of miracles, died, and was resurrected. Thus the argument goes "things you can confirm > Jesus > God." And those sections are written assuming a rational doubter, who needs lots of historical evidence to believe that anything like that -- and is, in fact, liberally salted with people just like that, who say things like "i can't believe that!"
The Jewish scriptures are similar -- they don't say "believe in God," they say "remember what God has done" -- direct, event-correlated evidence, corresponding to things recorded in the past.
following the rational lines of argument (there are others -- prophecy/fulfillment foremost, as well as conversion stories among witnesses to miracles and the endurance of the witnesses in claiming their belief that they'd seen things even when being tortured and killed) is the "taste and see" argument, made to those who are somewhat convinced by the evidentiary histories -- which basically says, hey, spend time learning the scriptures and praying, and see if, underneath your doubts, you really do believe God is good. it's an argument from design, which basically says God created humans to worship him, and to respond to his influence on their lives, and they'll see that if they're faithful.
the oversimplification of that is the Mormon "I know my God is true because I feel it in my heart," to which I say "I feel a lot of things in my heart which I know are wrong." for me -- as a late convert -- if it weren't for all the prophecies and miracles in the Christian scriptures (which, as a classicist, I do actually give credence to), I'd be hard-pressed to not still be a happy little agnostic.
the specific/relevant Judeo-Christian answer is that God does prefer to work through our prayers, and you will see the occassional miracle -- personally, if not statistically, significant.
and the scientific answer, as i mentioned, is that most people in the study were being prayed for, even in the not-being-prayed-for group (by family, friends, etc), so this wasn't a prayed/not-prayed study, it was a prayed/prayed-with-extra-prayers study, which showed no marked improvement in the latter group -- so it doesn't say prayer is ineffective, it says that studies where the scientists try to affect God's will by stacking the deck show negative results. which is why i say it proves nothing, except, perhaps, that if there is a God, He/She/It doesn't react to prayer like a mindless force (more words, more results).
i'm not agreeing that prayer doesn't work, i'm just saying that God isn't morally obligated to respond positively to prayer in a statistically significant way, in the way we want, for the purpose of statistics. the study admitted something like 89% of subjects had people praying for them -- so confirming the study would have required God specifically killing off more people in the control group and healing more in the extra-prayer group, just to cause statistical correlation between the number of people being prayed for *by measured praying-people,* and the people not in that group. objectively, the only real difference in the two groups was that they'd been arbitrarily placed in two groups.
i pick at the wording because it assumes these people deserve to be given a few more years to live, and, moreover, that God is obligated to be more merciful on those in the commissioned-prayer subgroup. it assumes that mercy = extra years of life, and the extra years of life = the greatest good.
by his logic, as far as i can tell, other considerations (afterlife, personal growth, God's glory) are "lesser", and reveal selfishness or blameworthy otherworldiness. that's where i disagree with him, not on his conclusions -- given his givens, his conclusions would be correct. so i have to pick at his wording to argue against what i actually disagree with.
anyhoo...why pursue discoveries/art/music/family? because they're good and pleasing, and acts of worship in themselves. things can bring meaning to life without being its true meaning.
for yours as well, or just mine?
i find worldview hubris far more troublesome, historically, than worldview belief -- religious or irreligious. take what you belive with a grain of salt (even believing your belief is the only belief is ok if you're respectful of other opinions) and you'll be a nice, quiet, functioning member of society -- perhaps annoying (door to door proselytes), but benign -- assume you're perfect and you get jihadi, inquisitors, and atheist/communist pograms.
all to say: calling people like me dangerous is fine, but only if i can say the same about you, and then we can shrug and go out for a beer and some poker.
you're probably right, on all counts. but i wasn't saying a deity would actively hide his/her existence, just that he/she/it would be under no obligation to respond in a particular way simply to reveal it. if a god chooses to miraculously heal someone of something, for whatever reason, it should be taken as a miracle. studies like this assume miracles (violations of natural causality) are commonplace enough to be picked up in a small net, and to be statistically significant therein. i don't think many religious people really believe that.
dino bones and mortality -- as far as i'm concerned, they're all part of a world which was created to function as a world. even if you're a 7-day-creationist, you're presented with a world on the 7th day which has things like dirt (made of decomposed organic matter and ground up rock) and full-grown trees (with lots of rings) and full-grown animals (with bellybuttons). so either the world was made to be x billion years old, or x billion years passed during its creation...but either way, there's no "deception" since the account itself said the world mankind first inhabited contained rocks (sedimentary?) and trees (full grown) and animals (full grown). so an honest reading of Christian lit doesn't contradict evolution/big bang stuff, it actually confirms it (the world appears/is old), but it gives a "why" and a bit of "how" to that understanding.
that's only relevant because the processes of healing and death are part of the religious person's understanding of his/her world -- as far as they're concerned, every person that got better received temporal mercies, and every person who didn't, didn't. so -- yes, any study that reveals that the world, in fact, works the way it seems to work, with some dying and some living, won't affect the religious person's faith in any way, since that's a given in their understanding that the world gets along alright just fine as it is.
so...yes, worldview theories tend to be unfalsifiable. frustrating, yes, but doesn't mean they're foolhardy.
ahh! thank ye for the correction, fellow browncoat.
hinduism is explicitly interested in karma/reincarnation in search of nirvana, and islam in heaven (thus the whole "72 virgins" controversy with islamist sects); i know less about buddhism, but believe it has its own vested interest in acheiving tranquility and oneness. Judaism has varied in emphasis over the millenia, and is currently in one of its more worldly incarnations; historical Judaism, has, however, been every bit as apocalyptic and heaven-focused as modern American fundamentalism. but i think we're now firmly off topic. :-)
all this study does is confirm that either (1) there is no God or (2) God isn't amused by pseudoscientific studies. so the results support both the Atheist and orthodox Christian worldviews, and are only troubling to wishy-washy new agey-types that believe thinking happy thoughts should magically help other people. wee.
pollution-mile limits: while equally draconian, might help the environment (such as consumer cars with emissions 50% over the limit can be driven 2000 miles per year, 100%, 1000, etc), but mandatory scrapping...sorta iffy.
Actually, to completely fix the problem, we should take off and scramjet 'em from orbit.
http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/flash
phones go down?
Has anyone raised the point that the current NASA director may actually have some very smart advisors? Six months ago NASA was doing the worst possible thing (economically) but the best for short-term job-security: kowtowing to Congress and saying "Oh yes great leaders we will do more with less." Now, someone had the bright idea, and the balls, to stick it to Congress, and announce cancellation after cancellation -- which doesn't mean the programs will actually *be* cancelled. This could all be a massive game of chicken, in which NASA releases press release after press release hitting constituency after constituency until 51% of congress has people set to be directly harmed by the cuts (lost jobs, lost revenue from satellite services, etc), and actually hands over the cash to save the programs. The director will piss off his bosses and may lose his job, but he'll save his organization.