Jarhyn
Wizard
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2010
- Messages
- 14,631
- Gender
- Androgyne; they/them
- Basic Beliefs
- Natural Philosophy, Game Theoretic Ethicist
Yeah, when you pray to "let what happens happen" some shit happens and then it's happened and that's what you prayed for, huzzah".Military chaplains pray very carefully. It's educational.Apologies if a proposal for establishing evidence a god's existence along the following lines has already been made and dealt with, but I am not going to read 1035 posts to check.
Around eight years ago I thought of a scenario that might work, at least for an interventionist, personal one. A lot of Christians (and not only Christians, come to think of it) believe in the power and efficacy of prayer. Well, it should be possible to empirically test for the existence of their God. Gather, say, 4,000 people suffering from trachoma and divide them into four groups. One will be treated by doctors, one will be prayed for, one will be prayed for and treated by doctors and one will be utterly ignored. None of the patients will know which group they are in.
The result will be pretty convincing if the prayed for groups fare best by a statistically significant margin. If it doesn't, of course, it proves nothing. Perhaps God was busy having a shit at the time, or maybe he just hates some sinners and gave them trachoma as punishment. Or he might have played his favourite trick: he was testing his followers' faith.
Still, if experiments of the kind I just sketched can be repeated with similarly favourable results for the prayed for groups, it could be said that evidence for a personal, interventionist God has been provided.
Thry do not pray that all deployed units return from battle without harm, because there's little chance they'll beat the spread on that one.
They pray that the men return, if that's God's will, but if it's His choice that a life ends on contested soil, they ask that the fallen serviceman be taken up to Heaven, 'saved' by God.
So there's no way anyone can sit thru the benediction, then get mad at the funeral for a failed prayer.
I think either similar caveats will be added to the experiments' prayers or whining that skeptics wrote the prayers, not believers.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy, of the most masturbatory kind.
I may be a wizard, but I always ascribe all results to medical science.
I know as a fact that the ritual aligns the self to the intention, and aligning intention properly is the key to successful execution.
Or in plain English, the ritual aspects, when applied right, merely act to mnemonically reinforce maintaining treatment properly, and they only work when the person participating understands this. You remember the silly thing you did frequently following doing it, and the why you did that silly thing, and then do the less silly thing that you would have otherwise forgotten about.
Thus healing magic is possible, it's just not what usually happens, because people are fucking idiots and every time someone like me explains it, the worst of the muggles hear "magic healey thing make effect workey, I no need work".
The magic is the cue to do the fucking work.