dam prayer noobs
Guru
Ok yes I know this is long, but this is probably the most important thing I have ever written and sums up all the thinking and research I have done in the past few years on religion and God. I know this is long, but it is the shortest way that I can explain the conclusion and the realization that I have come to. First, please watch these videos because I will refer to them and it will be easier for you to understand the point I am trying to make, but most importantly these are highly interesting videos:
[youtube]jk6ILZAaAMI[/youtube]
here is the link if the above doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6ILZAaAMI
then watch this one:
[youtube]5IaudsdrPjY&feature=related[/youtube]
link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IaudsdrPjY&feature=related
At the end of this episode, God tells Bender that he can only help a little bit. Then Fry accidentally sent a radio transmission to God wishing for Bender back. God got the message and sent Bender back to Earth, where he explained that God doesn't do anything and that only he can help the monks.
So from the first video, you can tell that prayer really has no effect. At the end they explained about the experiment where they had three groups of patients, one was prayed to, one was told nothing, and the other was told no one was going to pray to them, and all had the same survival rate. We can say that if you were in the group that wasn't prayed to and survived, then you survived by random chance, or if you died then you died by random chance. But if you were in the group that was prayed to, then you survived because of God, or died because God thought it was best. The conclusion of the experiment was that all three groups had the same rate of survival. So by mathematical laws, we can safely conclude that
God = random chance
So why do people pray then? Easy. They do it for comfort. The same reason many athletes have pregame rituals that they believe help them focus and play at their top performance. For the same reason, people pray to help them feel more relaxed and able to get through life easier. And then there's us atheists, who take comfort in logic and reasoning.
For instance, pretend a good friend is in the hospital. If you were Christian, you would sit there and pray for the well being of your friend. But if you were atheist, you would sit there and think about how this could have happened to your friend and how you can prevent this from ever happening again. Yet this is a rash generalization, but you can see where I am going with this: reason and action is more effective than prayer. I think this is what the Futurama episode was trying to propose. Since we already know that prayer won't help your friend, but will make you more comfortable, then why pray when you can have that same comfort in logic and reason and help your friend at the same time?
Turns out we are not much different from everyone else as we think. We (atheists) have faith just like Christians, but in logic instead of miracles. We tend to be ritualistic also, but ever so slightly. So we can safely conclude that faith and rituals aren't just part of religion, they are part of the human race as a whole. These two characteristics are built into our genes and without them we would not be human.
Now the only thing that is missing for us atheists is a God. Yes, having a God would contradict the very purpose of atheism, but then again it is the missing piece of the puzzle. What is our God then? What do we have faith in? It would be nothing but random chance. The random chance is why we are on this planet that is in the right place of the solar system that is in the right place in the universe to sustain complex life, the random chance of 1 in 1 trillion as calculated by some theoretical scientists. The random chance that we don't get in a car crash when we go out for a drive. The random chance that I won't get sick with the flu next week. We all hope that these event won't happen, so we engage in our faith in logic and reason to prevent these occurences from happening. We take measures to prevent our cars from crashing, as drink more coffee to stay alert, or get more sleep the day before. We take vitamins and consume a good diet to stay healthy and prevent disease.
All of these actions have the same calming effect of prayer plus they actually do something to help you, and you can increase the random chance of the good things happening and the random chance of the bad things happening simply by doing SOMETHING. That is the main difference between prayer and faith in reason and logic, you are actually doing something and in effect, altering the state of God (random chance), and he is helping you in return.
Religion is necessary for life. All the wars and the torture of past religious wars have scared atheists away from religion, and the God idea has been bluntly rejected by atheists. But we have been rejecting the wrong thing. We have been rejecting the idea of God as a whole, when we should have been rejecting the Christians perception of God, and creating a perception of God ourselves.
So the end result of all this is a combination of religion and science. We are all little pieces of God, and the only way we can get God to help us is by actually taking action and doing something. We need to get over our past and start thinking in the present, we need to compose a new Bible, or book of morals, to replace everything we have had in the past. We cannot keep using an outdated book of morals when we are living in this time period and when we have learned so much more about human nature and the universe in the past 2000 years. We need to create a religion that will help people understand the universe and themselves and help them better their lives. There will be no silly practices like bathing your children in holy water or drinking the blood of Jesus, but there will be practices to help better society and help explore and better understand our universe. This will be a religion unlike any other, fit for the people who live in these strange times and future generations to come, until someone else far down the line will find a better way of doing things.
[youtube]jk6ILZAaAMI[/youtube]
here is the link if the above doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6ILZAaAMI
then watch this one:
[youtube]5IaudsdrPjY&feature=related[/youtube]
link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IaudsdrPjY&feature=related
At the end of this episode, God tells Bender that he can only help a little bit. Then Fry accidentally sent a radio transmission to God wishing for Bender back. God got the message and sent Bender back to Earth, where he explained that God doesn't do anything and that only he can help the monks.
So from the first video, you can tell that prayer really has no effect. At the end they explained about the experiment where they had three groups of patients, one was prayed to, one was told nothing, and the other was told no one was going to pray to them, and all had the same survival rate. We can say that if you were in the group that wasn't prayed to and survived, then you survived by random chance, or if you died then you died by random chance. But if you were in the group that was prayed to, then you survived because of God, or died because God thought it was best. The conclusion of the experiment was that all three groups had the same rate of survival. So by mathematical laws, we can safely conclude that
God = random chance
So why do people pray then? Easy. They do it for comfort. The same reason many athletes have pregame rituals that they believe help them focus and play at their top performance. For the same reason, people pray to help them feel more relaxed and able to get through life easier. And then there's us atheists, who take comfort in logic and reasoning.
For instance, pretend a good friend is in the hospital. If you were Christian, you would sit there and pray for the well being of your friend. But if you were atheist, you would sit there and think about how this could have happened to your friend and how you can prevent this from ever happening again. Yet this is a rash generalization, but you can see where I am going with this: reason and action is more effective than prayer. I think this is what the Futurama episode was trying to propose. Since we already know that prayer won't help your friend, but will make you more comfortable, then why pray when you can have that same comfort in logic and reason and help your friend at the same time?
Turns out we are not much different from everyone else as we think. We (atheists) have faith just like Christians, but in logic instead of miracles. We tend to be ritualistic also, but ever so slightly. So we can safely conclude that faith and rituals aren't just part of religion, they are part of the human race as a whole. These two characteristics are built into our genes and without them we would not be human.
Now the only thing that is missing for us atheists is a God. Yes, having a God would contradict the very purpose of atheism, but then again it is the missing piece of the puzzle. What is our God then? What do we have faith in? It would be nothing but random chance. The random chance is why we are on this planet that is in the right place of the solar system that is in the right place in the universe to sustain complex life, the random chance of 1 in 1 trillion as calculated by some theoretical scientists. The random chance that we don't get in a car crash when we go out for a drive. The random chance that I won't get sick with the flu next week. We all hope that these event won't happen, so we engage in our faith in logic and reason to prevent these occurences from happening. We take measures to prevent our cars from crashing, as drink more coffee to stay alert, or get more sleep the day before. We take vitamins and consume a good diet to stay healthy and prevent disease.
All of these actions have the same calming effect of prayer plus they actually do something to help you, and you can increase the random chance of the good things happening and the random chance of the bad things happening simply by doing SOMETHING. That is the main difference between prayer and faith in reason and logic, you are actually doing something and in effect, altering the state of God (random chance), and he is helping you in return.
Religion is necessary for life. All the wars and the torture of past religious wars have scared atheists away from religion, and the God idea has been bluntly rejected by atheists. But we have been rejecting the wrong thing. We have been rejecting the idea of God as a whole, when we should have been rejecting the Christians perception of God, and creating a perception of God ourselves.
So the end result of all this is a combination of religion and science. We are all little pieces of God, and the only way we can get God to help us is by actually taking action and doing something. We need to get over our past and start thinking in the present, we need to compose a new Bible, or book of morals, to replace everything we have had in the past. We cannot keep using an outdated book of morals when we are living in this time period and when we have learned so much more about human nature and the universe in the past 2000 years. We need to create a religion that will help people understand the universe and themselves and help them better their lives. There will be no silly practices like bathing your children in holy water or drinking the blood of Jesus, but there will be practices to help better society and help explore and better understand our universe. This will be a religion unlike any other, fit for the people who live in these strange times and future generations to come, until someone else far down the line will find a better way of doing things.
!
